What comes to mind when you hear the word “joy”? I think most people immediately think of something that may be better defined as happy. I have seen people struggle over the years to understand and differentiate between joy and happiness. However, they are different.

Google dictionary states it like this:

               Joy: intense and especially ecstatic or exultant happiness, or an instance of such feeling

Happiness: any state of being, having considerable permanence, in which pleasure decidedly predominates over pain

I would argue, google does not have it quite right. The Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance offers this:

               Joy: G5479 chara – cheerfulness, calm delight

               Happy: G3107 makarois – extremely blest, fortunate, well off

Something I learned recently, I don’t think I had ever considered before, makes so much sense to me when I consider its biblical and spiritual implications. Happiness or the state of being happy is an individual experience and more often than not feels fleeting, as if we cannot secure it for too long. However, I would put forth, joy is a shared experience, one that is accompanied with a peace that inhabits our soul. I believe this is why we cannot maintain God’s joy without Him. Verses like the following really speak differently to me now.

Nehemiah 8:10 “…for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

Romans 5:11 “…but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have no received atonement.”

Luke 10:17 “and the seventy returned again with joy…”

Matthew 25:21 & 23 “enter into the joy of your Lord”

If you can, try to bring to remembrance a time you felt happy and then a time you felt joy. We might look to times alone of rest and relaxation. I would say that’s happiness. What about those times when you were with someone, sharing an experience? A marriage, birth of a child, a prayer meeting, a church rally, a ‘pillow talk’ (as a good friend calls it) night that led to unstoppable laughter?

Joy: a shared experience, a lasting peaceful feeling.

Happiness: an individual experience, fleeting, with an expected end.