Finding the True Meaning of Christmas with Charlie Brown: Living Joy

For Your Heart Today
Joy, in Scripture, is never abstract or detached from real life. It is not an emotion we are asked to manufacture, nor a spiritual concept we are expected to perform. Joy is personal because joy is found in a Person.

Advent reminds us that Jesus Himself is our joy. Not just the giver of joy, but the source of it. When joy feels fragile, when life feels cut back or uncertain, Scripture does not point us inward to try harder; it points us toward Christ. The One upon whom the Spirit rests. The One who delights in the Lord. The One who embodies joy even in a broken world.

Today’s invitation is not to chase joy, but to draw near to Jesus to trust that where He is present, joy can grow. Even quietly. Even slowly. Even now.

3 Takeaways on Joy
1. Joy is rooted, not rushed.
Isaiah reminds us that what looks cut down is not finished. God works from living roots, often long before we see visible growth.
2. Joy flows from delight in God.
Joy is not forced optimism or emotional override. It rises from intimacy—delighting in God and aligning our lives with His presence.
3. Joy is sustained through practice and community.
Joy grows as we cultivate posture, perspective, and practice—and sometimes, it is held for us by others until we are ready to receive it again.

Breath Prayer
Inhale: Jesus, You are my joy.
Exhale: I rest in Your delight.

Full Manuscript — Estimated Reading Time: 14–16 minutes

Living Joy

When I was a little girl, O Tannenbaum was one of those Christmas songs I didn’t sing very often. It wasn’t about the birth of Jesus or tell the Christmas story, and quite honestly, the melody just didn’t resonate with me all that much. At least, not until I heard this jazzy upbeat version from A Charlie Brown Christmas. Even so, I still wasn’t entirely sure what it had to do with Christmas.

Then last year’s Christmas series, you may recall, was Christmas Around the World, and I learned something I hadn’t known before. O Tannenbaum wasn’t originally written as a Christmas song at all. It was a song about an evergreen tree — admired not for decorated beauty, but for being faithful. While everything else grows bare in winter, the evergreen stays green. Steady. Alive. No matter what the winter conditions around it.

It stands firm, strong, and ever green.

Now that resonated.

So, we began worship this morning with that song — and it was beautiful. “How lovely are your branches,” the lyrics say.

Now, when we think of Christmas trees, we usually picture something full and symmetrical, carefully chosen and brightly lit. We know what a “beautiful” tree is supposed to look like.

And then there’s this little tree here on the stage. Our Charlie Brown tree.

It doesn’t quite match the song. It doesn’t meet the expectation. It doesn’t look like what we normally associate with beauty, celebration, or joy.

And yet, here it is — quietly holding space with us as we worship.

That tension — between what we expect and what we see — mirrors something many of us experience when it comes to joy.

Joy is one of those things almost everyone talks about, whether they’re people of faith or not. Across cultures and generations, people have tried to describe joy, encourage it, and hold onto it. You can find joy quotes everywhere — on coffee mugs, greeting cards, social media posts, and inspirational screensavers.

Someone once said, “Joy is not in things; it is in us.”

Another wrote, “The joy we feel has little to do with the circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the focus of our lives.”

And Henri Nouwen reminds us, “Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.”

Some of these sayings are light and encouraging. Others are thoughtful and profound. And yet, if we’re honest, many of us have had moments when we read a quote about joy and thought, That sounds beautiful… but it doesn’t quite match where I am right now.

Most of us understand that joy and happiness are not the same thing. We’ve heard it said many times: happiness comes and goes based on circumstances, happenings, while joy runs deeper, regardless of what is happening.

A lot like that evergreen.

And yet, it’s not just that we want to be happy — we want to experience that deeper joy.

We know in our heads that joy is grounded in more than circumstances or feelings, but we are also emotional beings, and joy also has a felt quality to it. We want joy that not only sustains us spiritually, but that we can actually sense and live from — especially when life feels heavy.

That disconnect is often what makes joy feel fragile. Not because joy isn’t real or God is absent. But because our inner world and our outer world don’t always line up neatly.

And joy can appear distant and out of reach.

That’s the kind of joy I want to talk about today.

Not joy in its fullness or celebration. We know how to live into that joy. But joy when it feels harder to hold onto — when there’s a quiet gap between what we believe and what we experience inside.

And that brings us back to this little tree.

Because sometimes joy is present, but not obvious. Sometimes it is hidden or appears small and doesn’t look the way we are expecting.

And it’s right there — in that place of fragile joy — that Scripture meets us today.

Isaiah 11:1-4a
 
Unpacking the Text

These words from the prophet Isaiah are known as a messianic prophecy. He is talking about the coming of Jesus. He is speaking these words seven to eight centuries before Jesus’ birth to a people who were watching empires rise, leadership fail, and a future they trusted beginning to feel fragile.

Their world felt unstable, and God felt distant. What once felt secure no longer did. Happiness would have been hard to hold onto in a season like that—and joy, if present at all, would have felt fragile and elusive.

And it is in this setting and context that Isaiah offers an image: a stump.

In the chapters leading up to this moment, Isaiah uses prophetic imagery of trees being cut down to speak of what will happen to oppressive powers—nations and rulers that God will bring low in His justice.

But when Isaiah speaks of the stump of David’s family line, the image shifts. This stump does not represent Israel’s oppressors. It represents Israel’s own story—specifically the royal line of David.

King David’s line mattered deeply to Israel. It carried the promise of God’s covenant—the assurance that God would establish a kingdom marked by justice, faithfulness, and blessing. The monarchy was meant to be a sign of God’s ongoing presence and purpose among His people.

And yet now, in their present reality, that line looked diminished. Broken. Done.

What once seemed strong and enduring now looked fragile and uncertain. The future they had believed in felt cut down. The promise they trusted appeared lifeless.

The metaphorical stump names the experience of standing in a place where both their present reality and their future felt dead.

And it is precisely in this moment that Isaiah speaks hope: “Out of the stump of David’s family will grow a shoot—yes, a new Branch bearing fruit from the old root.”

What looked like an ending was not the end. Although the metaphorical tree of Israel had been cut back, the root was still alive. God had not forgotten His promise. God was already at work—not yet in ways that could be clearly seen, but in ways that were faithful and true beneath the surface.

A Poinsettia Story and Joy

You know, every year we decorate the sanctuary with poinsettias. My husband loves them and often gives them as gifts during the season. But I’ve always treated poinsettias like a holiday plant—something beautiful for a moment, but not something meant to last. And truth be told, I’ve never been very good at keeping them alive.

But my sister kept her poinsettia from last Christmas. And when we were together at Thanksgiving, she showed us this full, healthy, leafy green plant. I never would have recognized it as that poinsettia. I was impressed and surprised. I didn’t really know what made poinsettias turn red in the first place, and I didn’t know if it would happen again.

Now, many of you probably know how this story unfolds already, but I was curious—full of wonder and expectant.

Then just the other day, with joy you could sense even through a text, my sister sent me a picture—just one red leaf. Something new was happening and had begun.

That first red leaf didn’t bring joy because the plant was finished or in full bloom. The joy was because it stirred expectancy—a promise of what was still to come. There was joy in the potential, hope, and trust that something good was unfolding in the now and not yet.

For a weary Israel, in a season when the future felt dark and uncertain, the prophecy of a new branch from the stump of David’s line was a word of hope—but more than hope alone. These were also words of joy: the joy of potential and promise, the quiet confidence that God was doing something new and could be trusted to be faithful.

The Shoot, Delight and Joy

Next, Isaiah expands the image of the shoot to the identity of the One who will come. He describes a ruler upon whom the Spirit of the Lord will rest—the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. The Messiah, Jesus would come.

And then Isaiah names a quality of being that’s important to notice. It’s like a hidden gem, a gold nugget of truth.

In verse 3, we read, “He will delight in obeying the Lord.”

Now, Isaiah does not use the word joy, nor is he describing an emotion. Instead, he tells us something more intrinsic, subtle, and revealing. The phrase in Hebrew literally means to breathe in, to take pleasure in, to savor.

When Isaiah says the coming King will delight in obeying the Lord, he’s in essence showing us where joy is housed and lived in the Kingdom of God—the way the King experiences it.
It’s in delight. Delight in God. Delight in walking with God. Delight in living in alignment with God’s will.

In other words, joy rises from intimacy with God and expresses itself through faithfulness to God’s ways.

For the original hearers, this was a promise of hope, peace, and joy. Isaiah was pointing forward to a future King from David’s line, one unlike the kings they had known—a King shaped by the Spirit, grounded in delight in the Lord.

A King who would not only embody hope as our Living Hope, or peace as our Prince of Peace, but also the embodiment of joy for a broken world.

The fulfillment of the promise would take time. There would still be waiting. There would still be long seasons when the stump looked unchanged. And yet Isaiah invites the people—and us—to trust that God is faithful, and that joy can be nurtured even in the waiting, because God is at work.

Living into Joy — Posture, Perspective, and Practice

So the question for us, thousands of years later, becomes: what does living joy look like today?

The Messiah came. Jesus was born. His Spirit is here. And now we are waiting for Him to come again to complete the promise of His Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

In the meantime, the world is still broken. Joy can still feel fragile. And the future is still unfolding.

So how do we live into joy?

Well, I want to offer three orientations for living joy.

Posture

The first orientation is a posture for joy. Joy is a choice, yes, but not the kind of choice that asks us to override our emotions or use positive thinking to navigate to joy. Living joy is about the intentional choice of where we begin.

Throughout this Advent season, we’ve returned to the same starting place—Jesus Himself. Hope begins when we bring our longings to our Living Hope. Peace begins when we speak honestly to the Prince of Peace. And joy begins when our posture faces the One who is the center of our joy.

This posture of drawing near to God honestly and authentically has shaped so much of our life together as a church. Scripture consistently calls us back to the same starting place—not performance, not perfection, but presence. Bringing our whole selves to Jesus, just as we are.

Isaiah describes a coming King whose life is centered in God—one upon whom the Spirit rests, one who delights in obeying the Lord. That delight is not rooted in circumstance; it flows from intimacy with the Father. From a posture—a life oriented toward God.

I’m reminded of the Scripture that says, “The joy of the Lord is your strength,” because joy anchored in God sustains us when everything else feels uncertain. Joy is not something we manufacture; it is something we nurture and strengthen by choosing to remain close to God.

Joy grows as we choose that posture—when we choose to stay connected to the source of joy Himself.

Perspective

From posture follows perspective. I’m not talking about denying reality, but a different way of seeing reality.

In the first scenes of A Charlie Brown Christmas, Charlie Brown is unsettled. He can’t quite name what’s wrong, but he knows something is missing. He’s surrounded by the sights and sounds of the season, and yet he feels disconnected, discouraged, and restless. Joy feels out of reach.

But something happens after Linus speaks.

Nothing around him has changed. The holiday expectations are still there. The decorations are still excessive.

And yet something has shifted in him. He walks differently. There’s a lightness now—even a skip in his step. Happiness is there, yes. But there is also something deeper. A peace and settled joy.

What changed wasn’t his circumstances. But in remembering Linus’ words, what changed was his perspective.

There’s that moment when commercialism still irritates him—when he passes Snoopy’s over-the-top doghouse. But instead of letting that moment unravel him, Charlie Brown makes a choice. He says, “I’m not going to let this commercial dog ruin my Christmas.”

In that moment, Charlie Brown is grounded in what Christmas is all about—and who Christmas is all about. And that conviction shapes how he moves forward. It creates space for joy to rise from something deeper than what’s happening around him.

That’s what Isaiah was inviting the people of Israel to embrace—a perspective of joy grounded in hope, anchored in God’s promise, regardless of the circumstances surrounding them.

Joy grows when we live from that place—a posture turned toward God and a perspective that says, “I may not see it. I may not like what’s happening. But God is at work. All is well. And the joy of the Lord is mine.”

Practice

So there’s posture, and perspective, and lastly, there’s practice.

We live into joy through intentional choices—small choices, daily choices—practices that till the soil of our hearts and make room for joy to be nurtured and grow, especially when it feels fragile.

Practicing joy may look like gratitude—pausing long enough to notice where God met you today, even in small ways.

Practicing joy may look like noticing—paying attention to beauty we might otherwise miss: a red leaf, a warm conversation, a kind gesture, a moment of rest.

Practicing joy may look like choosing blessing over criticism, presence over withdrawal, hope over resignation and giving up.

With a posture turned toward Jesus, and a perspective that God is at work, these practices don’t create joy—they make space for it. They help us stay attentive to what God is already doing beneath the surface and allow His Spirit to fan delight.

But here’s an important truth: we can practice joy individually, but sometimes we need one another for joy to find its footing and be sustained.

We can engage in practices so joy can be nurtured in us, but often it is strengthened through sharing life together.

If you recall the movie, Charlie Brown puts an ornament on the tree and the branch falls over, He is discouraged and walks away in despair. While he is gone, the children come and Linus remarks that he never thought it was a bad little tree, it just needed some love. We see the children taking the ornaments off of Snoopy’s house and they decorate the tree. The tree is transformed, and joy abounds as the children stand back and behold its beauty.

We don’t see Charlie Brown’s joy fully return in that moment. We see the tree held and cared for. And we see the children, in community, joy together. And we know the rest of the story. Charlie Brown returns and he can’t believe his eyes!

Joy didn’t disappear. It was held—by others—until Charlie Brown could receive it again.

Sometimes God strengthens joy through others—through presence, through care, through someone else holding joy with us when ours feels fragile.

And sometimes God invites us to be that presence for someone else.

Conclusion and a Joy Prayer

I don’t know what joy looks like for you right now.

But I do know this—when we align our posture to face Jesus, when our perspective is shaped by trust that God is at work, and when we practice joy in small, faithful ways, we are aligning our lives around Jesus.

Joy is not just something we feel. It is a way of life—lived in relationship with God.

So wherever you are right now in your heart’s desire for joy, there is an invitation for you: to receive joy and to share joy. Because, regardless of what may be going on around us, the joy of the Lord is our strength.

And Jesus is the center of our joy.

Lord, make us instruments of Your joy.
Where heaviness rests, let Your delight rise within us.
Where beginnings seem small, open our eyes to the shoots You are growing.
Where lives feel cut down, remind us the roots are still alive.
Center us in the joy of Christ, and let that joy flow outward from our lives to bless the world.
May our hearts lean toward You in delight,
our eyes see what You are nurturing,
and our hands practice joy with tenderness and grace.
In this season of Advent, let joy be born in us again.
Amen.