One of my resolutions for the year is to grow in the Christian virtue of joy.  To that end, I recently read John Piper’s book When I Don’t Desire God: How To Fight For Joy.  It doesn’t take too long before you come to this statement:

Pursuing joy in God was a non-negotiable way of honoring God.

Seeking and finding joy in God honors him, it acknowledges God as the glorious being that he is.  The alternative is sobering: failing to seek and find joy in God dishonors God – it treats him as unglorious, ho-hum, run-of-the-mill.  Pursuing joy in other things before God dishonors him because it treats those things as more glorious than God.  As Piper writes later:

Preferring anything above Christ is the very essence of sin.

Preferring something before Christ is to give it a status above God; indeed to make it our god.  It then is a violation of the First Commandment – “You shall have no other gods before me.”  Which is to say that it is idolatry.  So joy is a serious affair – the failure to rejoice in the Lord dishonors him, is the essence of sin, and is nothing short of idolatry.  So here is the question: how do you pursue joy?  Piper seeks to answer that question in his book, but I’d love to get some other perspectives.