WEEK ONE: JOY TO THE WORLD
“It’s the most wonderful time of the year!” and “’Tis the season to be jolly!” Of course, there is a lot to enjoy and celebrate at this time of year, but these phrases can almost make us feel like we’re doing something wrong if we don’t feel jolly and wonderful during the Christmas season. Sometimes these song lyrics can make us feel pressured into feeling happy and light even if we don’t genuinely feel it because, well, it’s Christmas!
It can sometimes feel this way when we think of the word “joy” as well. When we hear a song like “Joy to the World,” we know that the real reason for this holiday is to celebrate the arrival of Jesus—but it can be easy to get distracted with everything else going on as we prepare for our festivities. The composer of this famous Christmas song (Isaac Watts) wrote the hymn based on a psalm of David, and we know that these psalms rarely shy away from all of the complex emotions that we connect to when we read them. David shows us several times in his psalms that it’s okay to be discouraged, sad, angry, frustrated, confused, lonely… but almost all of these same psalms end with praise to God. Because David understood that joy is not an emotion that can be easily influenced by what’s going on around us; it’s an internal foundational truth that we know deep within our souls when we have a solid relationship with God and remember what he has done.
When Isaac Watts talked about his interest in David and the psalms while writing his music, he said, “I have rather expressed myself as I may suppose David would have done if he lived in the days of Christianity.” I think that’s an interesting thought—imagine how David would respond to the miracle of the arrival of the long-awaited Messiah and how he would rejoice and worship Jesus, the eternal King! Along the same line of thinking, Watts cleverly wrote the melody for the first line of the song (“Joy to the world, the Lord is come”) to be a full major scale descending from the top note down to the bottom note, almost like coming down a staircase (many believe this is to symbolize Jesus leaving heaven to meet us where we are)!
Now, when I hear the lyrics and melody of “Joy to the World,” I think about all of those people in the Old Testament who patiently and faithfully waited for the Messiah, praising God even without seeing it happen in their lifetime. We get to live in the salvation of Jesus! No matter what is going on in your heart and mind this holiday season, allow the deep, true joy of knowing Jesus to rise above the rest—and join with heaven and nature in singing praise to the King of Kings!