How to Experience God’s Joy
“You’ve been helping me understand that Joy is a choice. I don’t have much control over my circumstances, but I can still choose to be joyful.”
– Jesus Listens, August 3rd
The Sermon on the Mount is a call to a radical transformation of the heart and mind. It invites us to embrace a new way of living that transcends societal norms and expectations, challenging us to live with greater compassion, humility, and love.
There’s a good change that you are somewhat familiar with this message:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. . . .
In the Beatitudes, Jesus shared eight life-changing ways of life. The translation we have says “blessed,” but the word in its original form means happy or joyful.
This is wild. It’s revolutionary. In Jesus’s first recorded moment of public preaching, He told his followers how to be . . . happy? Not holy or reputable (although He would get to that later)—but happy. Oh, the self-made religious talking heads of our day wouldn’t be able to get to their pulpits or YouTube soapboxes fast enough to upload a video and discredit the message and ministry of this new feel-good preacher! Jesus didn’t start His message calling people out or talking about sin; He was giving them keys to joy. Heresy! The question it really suggests for me is this: How important must people’s experiencing the joy of the Lord be if God Himself chose this topic to address first? Not only that, but we cannot forget that the place He chose to hand us the keys to joy, Eremos, was a place of both desolation and strength.
Jesus uses the topography to illustrate the topic and reveal the tension in this truth: the strength God gives through joy can be produced in desolate places. That reveals to us that our joy is not dependent on a structure, a system, or circumstances. It also declares that joy can be found in isolated places. It’s not determined by people, possessions, or popularity. He’s pointing us to a notion that’s hard for us to grasp—that happiness has little to do with what we have or where we are.
I want to point out something I find encouraging. Jesus and the crowds that came to Him didn’t ascend to the pinnacle of this mountain, which could represent the highest heights of success, affluence, or influence. But they weren’t at the very bottom of the mountain in a low place either, which could represent a place of defeat, failure, or insignificance. The place Jesus chose to give a master class on joy was somewhere in the middle, somewhere fairly underwhelming and, well, ordinary. Some would even say it was less of a mountain and more of a hill. No, there was nothing about the situation that was spectacular, but just because it wasn’t spectacular doesn’t mean it was insignificant.
Consider the simplicity of a conversation over a cup of coffee with a friend. You might be discussing everyday things, yet one sentence or piece of advice could have a profound effect on you. Or think about how you show faithfulness at work, completing daily tasks with a good attitude. These actions might seem mundane, but they often lead to personal growth, recognition, and unexpected opportunities. There have been times I’ve been doing something as simple as taking a walk and suddenly experienced a moment when God gave me divine direction for my life. These moments illustrate how the miraculous can happen in the mundane.
We often rob ourselves of life’s most significant moments because we have been convinced that something extraordinary or spectacular must take place for something to be supernatural and significant. Jesus illustrated that it can happen like that, but also that the miracles of life happen in the mundanity of life. In the Beatitudes, Jesus was communicating one of the most important truths we will discover in this life: Joy is generated from within. Our external surroundings do not have the power to bring us joy. Happiness is ignited within our spirits. When Jesus points to joy, He first points us inward, to our spirits (John 15:11; Galatians 5:22).
Just as Jesus gave powerful words to His followers in a desolate place, we can find strength in our empty places too. These experiences can strip away superficial sources of happiness and help us discover a deeper, more resilient joy that is not dependent on what’s happening around but on what God is doing within us. By turning inward and connecting with the Spirit of God, we can ignite a joy that is rooted in our inner strength and faith, providing us with the resilience to navigate life’s toughest challenges.
This is the lesson for us today: The kingdom of God is available to us, here and now, regardless of our status or position or place in society. When you take in that truth and make it real to your heart, you’ve activated the first code to unleash the joy bomb in your own life.
Adapted from Joy Bomb by Tauren Wells. Copyright ©2025 by Tauren Wells. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.zondervan.com.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tauren Wells is a celebrated platinum-selling recording artist, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter with ten GRAMMY® Award nominations, six number ones, eight GMA Dove Awards, a Billboard Music Award nomination, and over 1.2 billion global streams to date (and counting). Some of his hit songs include Hills and Valleys, Known, Joy In The Morning, and Take It All Back. Tauren and his wife, Lorna, serve as co-lead pastors at Church of Whitestone, a fast-growing, multiethnic, multigenerational church in Austin, Texas. Church of Whitestone strives to establish a church family that empowers people in Austin and around the world to discover their God-authored identity through wholehearted relationship with God. Joy Bomb is Tauren’s first book.
