The Forgotten Truth: Jesus Is Full of Happiness

The Glad Heart of Jesus

In the first-ever gospel message of the newborn church, the apostle Peter preached that Psalm 16 is about Christ: “David says concerning him, ‘I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken; therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced. . . . For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption. . . . You will make me full of gladness with your presence” (Acts 2:25-28, emphasis added). This effusive statement, attributed to the Messiah, is a triple affirmation of His happiness!

The passage Peter ascribed to Jesus includes Psalm 16:11: “In your presence, there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” The New Life Version says, “Being with You is to be full of joy. In Your right hand there is happiness forever.”

I’m convinced we should view this first apostolic sermon as a model for sharing the gospel today. Peter, full of the Holy Spirit, preached a prototype gospel message, asserting three times the happiness of the one who is at the center of the gospel—Jesus. Yet how many people, unbelievers and believers alike, have ever heard a modern gospel message that makes this point? Peter preached that Jesus was “full of gladness”; why shouldn’t we?

What if we regularly declared the happiness of our Savior? Imagine the response if we emphasized that what Jesus did on that terrible cross was for the sake of never-ending happiness—ours and His (see Hebrews 12:2). We would be proclaiming a part of the gospel that’s not only exceedingly attractive but also entirely true.

I share more about the happiness of the triune God in this video:

Here is the transcript from the video:

Is it important that we think of God as being a happy God? Well, it’s important because scripture makes clear he is a happy God. Now that’s a new thought to many people. I think if you ask yourself and ask the average Christian, “Do you think God’s happy or unhappy?” well, I think along so well. I mean, the Bible makes really clear that he’s very unhappy with sin, right? Okay, so he’s unhappy with sin and the world is full of sin, so God must be full of unhappiness?

We need to rethink this. First, because scripture actually calls him the happy God, says that he is delighted, that he is pleased. God looked at everything he had created—Genesis 1:31—and he said, “Behold, it’s very good.” What I’ve created is very… he was happy with his creation.

But what happened is this: sin came into the world. But we think of sin as the norm because it’s all we’ve ever known. We’ve always lived in a sinful world. But remember, God existed before, you know, infinite ages before sin ever came into existence in the fall of Satan, the demons, and later in Adam and Eve and the human race.

God lived in absolute happiness and relational harmony—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Sin comes into the world, and then God promises that forever we, his children, will live in a world where he’s going to wipe away the tears from every eye. Revelation 21:4 says it will be absolute beauty and perfection and wonder and utter happiness and joy forever. So that sin is temporary.

So God pre-existed sin, and of course he will live forever after, and we will live forever in his presence without it and without being tainted by it and hurt by it. So sin is, in the history of the universe, the exception, not the rule. It feels like the rule, and for now, in a sense, it is—evil and suffering in the world. But that’s where we can begin to get a glimpse of the fact of what it means that God is happy.

He’s always been happy. He always will be happy. And even now he is by nature happy. He’s selectively unhappy with sin, but happiness—he is the river of delights from which happiness flows.