![]() ![]() Christians should be joyful happiness should characterize our everyday lives. We cannot drain joy of emotion and still call it “joy.” When God’s Spirit gives us joy, then we are happy people. If a person is joyful, then he or she is happy. But there is no such distinction made in Scripture, and forcing a distinction between two words that are so obviously close in meaning is unnecessary. 4) Happiness is worldly, but joy is divine. 3) Happiness depends on circumstances or other people, but joy is a gift from God. 2) Happiness is fleeting, but joy is everlasting. The teaching usually makes the following points: 1) Happiness is a feeling, but joy is not. It is common today to hear believers speak of a difference between joy and happiness. ![]() ![]() Unless we are willing to say that gladness and happiness are completely different things, then we must say that joy and happiness are linked. And Proverbs 23:25 says, “Let your father and your mother be glad, / And let her rejoice who gave birth to you.” Being glad is the same thing as rejoicing in this verse. ![]() Jeremiah 31:13 says, “I will turn their mourning into gladness / I will give them comfort and joy instead of sorrow.” Here, in the parallelism of Hebrew poetry, the words gladness and joy are used synonymously. Both involve the emotions, both are pleasurable feelings, and both are mentioned in Scripture in passages that equate the two.Ī dictionary definition of happiness is “a state of well-being a pleasurable or satisfying experience.” A definition of the word rejoice, related to the word joy, is “to feel great delight to be glad.” Depending on the translation, the Bible uses the words happy and happiness about 30 times, while joy and rejoice appear over 300 times. There is no explicit difference between happiness and joy. ![]()
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