Imagine an eight-year-old boy playing with a toy truck and then it breaks. He is disconsolate and cries out to his parents to fix it. Yet as he's crying, his father says to him, "A distant relative you've never met has just died and left you one hundred million dollars." What will the child's reaction be? He will just cry louder until his truck is fixed. He does not have enough cognitive capacity to realize his true condition and be consoled.

In the same way, Christians lack the spiritual capacity to realize all we have in Jesus. This is the reason Paul prays that God would give Christians the spiritual ability to grasp the height, depth, breadth, and length of Christ's salvation (Eph. 3:16-19; Eph. 1:17-18). In general, our lack of joy is as Shakespeare wrote: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves" (Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2). We are like the eight-year-old boy who rests his happiness in his "stars"—his circumstances—rather than recognizing what we have in Christ.