People today are consumed by the passionate pursuit of happiness. Self-help books, motivational speakers, and advice columnists claim to offer the key to happiness, but for many people the door remains locked.
Unable to control their circumstances, they find themselves instead controlled by their circumstances.
When their job, relationship, or house (or, in the case of Christians, church) fails to make them happy, they dump it and look for a new one. But on the merry-go-round of life, they can never quite seem to reach the brass ring.
Having fruitlessly pursued happiness through pleasure and self-gratification, they arrive at the jaded view of life expressed by the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 1:2:“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.”
But if happiness, the fleeting feeling of exhilaration, is elusive, joy is not. Biblical joy, the settled conviction that God sovereignly controls the events of life for believers’ good and His glory, is available to all who obey Him.
In fact, God commands believers to rejoice (2:18; 3:1; 4:4; cf. 2 Cor. 13:11; 1 Thess. 5:16). That divine joy is the theme of Philippians; the Greek word for joy, in both its noun and verb forms, appears more than a dozen times in its four chapters (1:4,18,25;2:2,17,18,28,29;3:1;4:1,4,10).
The circumstances of both the writer and the recipients of this brief epistle were not those that would be expected to produce joy and happiness.
When the apostle Paul wrote this letter to his beloved Philippian congregation, he was a prisoner in Rome. Little in his tumultuous life since his dramatic conversion on the Damascus Road three decades earlier would have been expected to produce joy.
He had faced fierce and unrelenting opposition, both from Gentiles and from his unbelieving Jewish countrymen (cf. 2 Cor. 11:23–30).
