Relationship between suffering and joy

From Oswald Chambers:

We are super-victors with a joy that comes from experiencing the very things which look as if they are going to overwhelm us. 

Huge waves that would frighten an ordinary swimmer produce a tremendous thrill for the surfer who has ridden them. Let’s apply that to our own circumstances. The things we try to avoid and fight against— tribulation, suffering, and persecution— are the very things that produce abundant joy in us. “We are more than conquerors through Him” “in all these things”; not in spite of them, but in the midst of them. A saint doesn’t know the joy of the Lord in spite of tribulation, but because of it. Paul said, “I am exceedingly joyful in all our tribulation.”

For a long time I always thought that the idea of joy in suffering, as noted in such verses as Romans 5:3 (Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings...") that the relationship between suffering and joy was that the Christian has the ability to still experience joy even in the midst of great suffering, even the kind that can produce death.

I'm not sure that is the correct interpretation however. As Chambers writes, it is not that when we experience suffering, joy tags along with it, and it is not even that when we experience suffering that joy is possible in the midst of it. Rather, the saint doesn't know joy of the Lord in spite of tribulation, but because of it. The Christian's suffering actually produces the joy, in the sense that if the suffering never occurred, neither would the special kind of joy that arises out of it.

A Christian's suffering produces joy.