Did you know that JOY TO THE WORLD is NOT a Christmas song?
It often surprises people when they learn that “Joy to the World” is not actually a Christmas hymn. Isaac Watts wasn’t thinking about shepherds or a stable when he wrote it. He was thinking about the second coming, about the day when Christ returns and the whole creation finally sighs in relief, when love wins the final victory, and all the people of the world break into joyful songs of worship. When we belt it out in December, we aren’t singing about the baby in Bethlehem, we are singing about the future God has promised, the future Jesus will bring.
Yet, this song of future joy has its place here at the start of the Christian calendar. Joy entered the world in Bethlehem. Joy took on skin and bone and was laid in a manger. Joy learned to walk dusty roads and sit at crowded tables and call ordinary people by name.
The angels said their news would bring “great joy for all people,” and they meant it.
Christ’s birth is God stepping close enough for us to know that joy is not just an idea.
Joy is a Person.
So the way we tend to think about this song connects us to the joy of those holy events over 2000 years ago; but there is joy ahead of us too. Scripture gives us glimpses of a world mended by God’s own hands, a creation healed, a humanity restored, a Kingdom where peace and justice are simply how things work. That future will be overflowing with joy.
But even now we get to taste it. We get to live with the steady joy of knowing how the story ends.
Christ has come. Christ is with us. Christ will come again.
That promise alone can carry a weary heart. This holy mystery is the source of our Joy.
Joy is not a holiday mood. Joy is one of the seven marks of the Kingdom of God. If the Kingdom is the state of affairs when God is King, then joy is the fruit of living under that reign. It does not rise and fall with our circumstances. It grows out of our relationship with Jesus. It grows out of knowing that God is at work even when we cannot see it, that love gets the last word, that resurrection is always God’s final move.
So as Advent unfolds, may you lean into the joy that Christ brings. The joy of His birth, the joy of His presence, the joy of His promised return. May that joy take root in you. May it free you. May it shape the way you walk through this world. Because the Kingdom is breaking in, and in that Kingdom, joy is everywhere.