After All I've Been Though I Still Have Joy

I am talking about our national fascination with sex and the fact that some people are preoccupied with the cheap, fleeting, loveless encounters that are so much a mark of our present culture. It is why commercials for such products as Viagra, Levitra and Cialis are as popular and as frequent as they are; for some people it is all about pleasure.

Never mind the fact that our country is overrun with teenage pregnancy, unwanted births, a staggering use of abortion as a means of birth control and once-solid marriages that are destabilized by extra-marital affairs. There is a high price to be paid for our fascination with the pursuit of pleasure, and our society is paying that price right now. This, too, is part of what The Rolling Stones meant when they said, "I tried—and I tried—and I tried—and I tried, and I can't get no satisfaction." We try the pursuit of happiness, thrills and pleasure, but something is always missing.

Many search for satisfaction attempting to combine all three devices—happiness, thrills, pleasure when they turn to illegal drugs and other things that can help them get high. Americans are the most chemically dependent people on earth—we take more prescription drugs than any other nation, though that simply could be a sign of an advanced medical system. Good medicine does not explain why we are also the world's largest consumers of illegal drugs or the fact that one out of every six Americans is an alcoholic.

Here is the truth about all of our pursuits for satisfaction, be it in the form of happiness, thrills or various pleasures: At best, all those things can do is bring us a little bit of peace for a short period of time!

There is a reason none of these things can bring us any lasting satisfaction. It is because all of these things that fuel our futile pursuit of satisfaction are things that work from the outside in. All of these things are behaviors or experiences that must be drawn from the world around us and then brought into our lives. As a result, whenever the world around us shifts or changes in even the most negligible way, we are made to realize over and over again that satisfaction—that sense of being completely content—once again has eluded us. The works of the flesh or the acts of the sinful nature are forever unsatisfying because in order for any of them to work there is something outside ourselves that must occur.

Thankfully, that is not the case with the fruits of the spirit as found in Galatians 5:22-23. Satisfaction is found in such things as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control. These qualities work from the inside out. These are the spiritual formation issues that take root inside the followers of Jesus Christ that sustain them even when the conditions around them are being turned upside down. In this season of Advent, let me make the case that I would rather have the joy of the Lord than the satisfactions of the world any day of the week. Here are the reasons why: