and if you want to know about Joy man this is it you’ll find Joy everywhere in this book let me just tell you that if you want really to have joy cultivated in your life you got to share your life with others that’s really true you’re not going to be happy by yourself the God didn’t attended you to be happy by yourself he created the church so that we could be together how many of you know how hard it would be to live the Christian Life today if we didn’t have each other if we didn’t have the church look at all the screwy mess we’re in

right now in this country look at all the crazy that’s going on you know the only kind of Sanity you ever feel is when you come to church on Sunday then you have to go back into that mixed up world you got to have other people in your life William Barkley said the Christian is the man of Joy the Christian is the Laughing Cavalier of Christ a gloomy Christian is a contradiction in terms and nothing in all religious history has done Christianity more harm than its black clothes and its long faces if there’s a country on this Earth where people

should be filled with joy one would certainly think it would be the United States of America but most current polls show that only about 35% of Americans are very happy depression affects more than 19% of American adults anxiety disorders affect 40 million or 18% of the population in 2016 a federal data analysis found that suicide rates in America had surged to their highest level in 30 years rising in that period by 64% among women and 43% among men and a worldwide study of 990,000 people showed that the 10 richest

countries in the world also had the highest rates of depression what this tells us is that joy and happiness may not be necessarily dependent on your circumstances and those who have the most reason to be joyful often turn out to be the most often depressed so let me begin this discussion about Joy with two profound statements that comes to us straight from the Bible these may surprise you they kind of surprise me even though I’ve studied this over the years one of the first things you need to understand about joy