"Your Joy No Man Taketh from You"

“And your joy no man taketh from you.” — John wi. 22.

THAT our happiness is largely in the power of other people than ourselves is a conviction which we reach very early in our lives. Our joys seem to stand with open gates, so that almost any intruder may come in. The child whose life has not yet separated itself from the parent life, and still shares its fortunes; the merchant whose ship sails or founders with the great business fleet; the thinker who cannot escape the intellectual tendencies and imperfections of his times; the public man whose good name is in the keeping of the fickle populace — all of these arc illustrations of the way in which the satisfaction and the peace of life are always open to invasion. No man can shut his gates and say, “I will find my happiness only

1 Preached in Christ Church, Marylebone, London, Sunday morning, 15th July 1883.

in myself, and what I find no man shall take away from me.” If any man says that he dooms himself to the most meagre life, and even in that he fails; even the poor fields which he can plant with his own seed he cannot keep completely to himself. It seems as if all our social arrangements and relationships were not more fitted to make us furnishers of joy to one another than they are to give to every man the chance to put his hand, if he wills, into the midst of some other man’s lot, and to pluck away its happiness. Husband and wife, father and child, teacher and scholar, master and servant — how they all hold each other’s pleasures at their will!

This is one view of life which is perpetually presenting itself. It stands up face to face with that other thought which all self-reliant and strong men try to keep hold of — the thought of self-sufficiency. To be independent of our fellow-men, to have the sources of all happiness in our own lives, to let the world swing and surge around us like the ocean around a steadfast rock — this is the other thought which no man can wholly cast away. It never finds its realisation; it always meets the interference of our brethren. Practically, almost all men’s lives vacillate between the two. One moment we are all our own, keeping our own reserves, deciding our own destinies. The next

U moment we are all our neighbour’s. He decides whether we are to be sad or happy, good or bad.

It is in the midst of a bewilderment like this that Christ comes in with the words which I have made my text this morning. As He sat with His disciples at the farewell supper, He looked around on them, and said, “I will see you again and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.” In these words He declared that there was a joy which no man could disturb. There is a limit to our power over one another; there is a chamber of our inner selves where we may turn the key and no one can come in. I want to study that limit with you; I want to see whether we can discover where it runs and how it can be recognised. Where is it that, behind all the regions in which we are what other men make us, we can, we must be ourselves?

And first, the very fact that there is such a limit interests us. We can sec how good it is for a man’s life that, while there should be great regions of his happiness which arc involved with what other men arc and do, there should be also other regions which no man but himself can touch. The complctcst house for a man to live in is one whose outer rooms are hospitably open to whoever comes with any claim to hospitality, but which has inner chambers where only the master of the house and those who make up his household have a right to enter. The best stock of ideas which any man can keep is that which, while it is in the main harmonious with the thoughts of other men who live in the same time, and subject to their influence, yet has at its heart convictions which are the man’s own, and which no other can invade. Now, is it not the same with regard to the happiness of life? There wpuld be something almost terrible if each of us held his power of happiness untouched, untouchable by any other man. Think how much of the finest and richest of our intercourse with one another, how much of the most delicate consideration, how much of the purest motive for self-sacrifice and patience, would be lost if we had no power of invading and interfering with each other’s joy. It would be almost a world of chartered selfishness. Why should I think of any one except myself if, no matter what I do, I cannot hurt that happiness which my brother carries shut away in the safe precincts of his own life? No. It is the pledge of our best intercourse with one another, the assurance of our sacredest relationships, that we have vast power to make one another unhappy. The necessary condition of that privilege which the father has of filling his child’s life with sunshine is the other power, which just as certainly belongs to him, of darkening it with a heavy

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cloud. What would you care for any man’s sympathy or approbation if all the while you knew that that same man’s sneer or coldness would not give you even a twinge of pain? So necessary is it to our best life with one another that we should have power over one another’s joy.

And yet we can see just as clearly how dreadful it would be if this power reached in to the deepest happinesses of which we are capable. All of us practically insist that there shall be some enjoyments with which no man shall interfere. With my ordinary acquaintances almost any man’s slander ma)- put me for the time out of conceit, but my friendship with my tried and trusted friend there is no slander that can ruffle a moment. My light prejudices and tastes any zephyr may disturb, but upon my deep and satisfied convictions of what is true a tempest may blow in all its fury and the)- will not shake. Every deep and true man, every man with a genuine personal character, has some source of pleasun hidden away that no man’s foot can find it, no human malice can poison it. He himself must change before he can lose that enjoyment

Now hear what Jesus says to His disciples — “Your heart shall rejoice and your joy no man taketh from you.” It was a special joy, the inmost, the most secret and sacred of all joys which their Master promised. Not for those disciples more than for other men was nature to be changed, or their relations with their fellow-men to be robbed of the power of painfulness. Still, if you stabbed them they would bleed, if you burnt them they would smart. Still, if men taunted them they would quiver with the blow, if men were ungrateful to them their hearts sank in disappointment. Still, just as before Christ gave them His promise, their reverence was shocked, their love was wounded, their trust was betrayed, their motives were misjudged by fellow-men. But behind all this His words revealed to them a self out of men’s power, something which no fellow-man could touch. As I think about their after lives, I can see them perpetually retreating into that, I can see them letting other joys go and not hating the hands which robbed them of them in the consciousness of this inmost joy, which no intrusion could invade. As I watch the growing life of the disciples, I see them coming to the best picture of what a human life ought to be, open and sensitive and sympathetic, and yet all the while self- respectful and independent; feeling other men and yet living their own life; as responsive as the ocean’s surface to the winds of the living humanity which blew across them, and yet keeping, like the ocean, a calm and hidden

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depth which no storm upon the surface could disturb.

And Jesus tells His disciples just what the power of this secret joy is to be. It is to be His presence with them: “I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.” Even-thing is based upon the association which they are to have with Christ their Master. There is nothing at all of self-sufficiency in what is promised. It is not that these men are to develop some interior strength, or to drift into some region of calm indifference where the influences of their fellow-men shall not touch them any longer. It is that they are to come to a new life with Him. The new joy which is to enter into them, which they arc to enter into, is to be distinctly a joy of relationship and not of self-containment, a joy which is to escape the invasion of the men who disturb all other joys by being held in the hand of a stronger being out of which no earthly power shall be able to pluck it away.

And how natural this is! how it agrees with all that we know of the perpetual necessities of human nature! Only the association of some higher and stronger person can even really save one from the absorption and contamination of some lower persons who arc swamping and ruining his life. Suppose you have a boy who is being overwhelmed and lost by and through his faculties of companionship. Have you not learned, all of you who are considerate and thoughtful parents, that it is through these same faculties of companionship that he must be saved. When I talk about his being lost and saved I mean what these words literally signify, and not what usage has attached to them as a sort of secondary meaning. A boy is lost when he ceases to be a positive and individual existence, when he becomes a mere puppet or echo or image of the lives around him. A boy is saved when his life is plucked out of the sea of imitation and promiscuous subserviency, and made a real thing, with its own consciousness, its own intentions, its own meaning, its own character. Suppose, in this sense, your boy’s life is being lost, how will you save it? Can there be any power like that of a stronger person, a large, rich, simple nature, who, entering into close companionship with this flickering life, shall steady it, reveal it to itself, call out its best activities, and open for it a positive career. It must be a person who makes high demands, who declares duties, and who clothes those duties with the imperiousness of love. It will not be simply by forbidding your boy to have connection with those poor companions who are dissipating him; it will not be by shutting him in upon himself that you will save him. A stronger person must be his saviour; a life that shall control and lift his life must make him be himself. Now this is just what Jesus did for those disciples. He never once said to them, “Be yourselves.” He said, “Be mine.” And it was when He gave them His things to do, when He said to them, “Go preach,” “Go heal,” “Go build the Church,” that through these channels of obedience He poured His life into their life, and gave to them a fresh and joyous being, far in behind the power of any man to touch or blight.

Some men who talk about the influence of Jesus seem to make it a mere sentimental thing. They dwell upon the love which He poured out upon His friends. They show us love glowing in the hearts and shining from the faces of those disciples in return. Other men talk about the mastery of Christ. He gave His servants things to do. He said, “Take up this cross,” “Behold tin’s task which waits for you.” He shaped their lives into new habits. It was not either of these alone. Until we grasp them both into one thought we have not understood His power. He loved them and made them love Him, but it was through the obedience which lie demanded of them that His love became a transforming power. That was 1 (is company with them, the fulness, the completeness of the idea of companionship. And He is just the same to us. To us too He brings love awakening love, and authority demanding obedience. “Lo, I am with you alway,” He declares. And souls to-day, many and many of your souls, my friends, have found the rich fulfilment of His promise. Sometimes it comes to us with a strange surprise. When we are living on as if we lived alone, when we are sitting working silently in some still room which we think is empty but for our own presence, when we are busy in some work which seems as if it were our work, to be done as we should please; slowly, sweetly, surely we become aware of a richer presence which is truly with us, of a love which enfolds us, and an authority which controls us. We are not alone. The work is not our work but His. The strength to do it with is not to be called up out of the depths of ourselves, but taken down from the heights of Him. The room is full, the world is full of Jesus. He is doing what he said he would do. He is with us as He said He would be; and as we answer love with love and authority with obedience, we find that we are indeed lifted into a sober and serious happiness which nothing can invade, a joy which no man can take from us.

Let us try to bear this in mind as we pass on now to speak of some of the interferences with the pleasures of life which come from our fellow-men, and of the way in which the soul’s life with Christ puts those same pleasures out of the reach of any fellow-man’s intrusion. Take first, if you please, the pleasure of energetic action. It is a joy which makes life bright to the best men; a joy so bright that never to have felt it, not to feel it always beating like the blood through all one’s veins, must surely be a very desolate and dull existence. There are men who make their life out of idleness, out of having the world do for them what they need, and in such strange shapes are some men made, that no doubt there is for some men some sort of joy in that. But to be at work, to do things for the world, to turn the currents of the things about us by our will, to make our existence a positive element, even though it be no bigger than a grain of sand, in this great system where we live, that is a new joy of which the idle man knows no more than the mole knows of the sunshine, or the serpent of the eagle’s triumphant flight into the upper air. The man who knows indeed what it is to act, to work, cries out, “This, this alone is to live!” Oh, the poor creatures whom their father’s money or their own sluggish wills have robbed of the great human delight of action, the men to whom “things provided come without the sweet sense of providing.” But what then? What are the interferences which this joy meets? Are they not these? I speak only of those which come from fellow-men, not of those which are the result of the hard nature of the material of the earth we have to work on. Are they not these? Some opposition to our action by the action of some other active man; or the contemptuous discovery and announcement of the incompleteness of the thing we do; or the ingratitude and irresponsiveness of the men whom we want our act to benefit. Opposition, criticism, and ingratitude, these are the ways in which other men meet an active man, and take the joy of his activity away from him, and make his work a drudgery. Here is a man in public life. The happiness of dealing with the state’s affairs, of throwing his will and labour into the country’s destinies, is what his soul is full of; he has dreamed of it while he was a boy, and now that he is a man all his manhood triumphs in it. Toil counts for nothing, fatigue and sleeplessness he never reckons as he pursues the joy of public life, of action on the destinies of men. But by and by what is it that has taken away his joy? Is it not these things which I described? Other men have stepped across his path, and thrown their will and energy into the face of his, and

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hindered him from doing what he meant to do. Other men have looked through what he has done and told the world and told him, what his heart knew only too well before, how far what he has done is from what it ought to be. Other men for whom he laboured have turned their backs on him and gone away, giving him curses instead of thanks. Opposition, criticism, and ingratitude, through these three gates other men’s lives have crept in on him, and stolen away the joy of his life. Still he may work on from habit or from duty, but the joy of working is departed; it is a dreary drudgery; it is an hourly weariness. Oh, what hosts of active men there are who in their middle life still go on working, but with the spring all gone! The joy of work some man, some contact with the life of men, has taken from them.

Could that have been helped? Is there any help for that in all the world? If not, if all my joy in action is at the mercy of my fellow-men, it is a dreadful world to live and work in. I may keep on working in spite of them; they may not be able to prevent me from that; but if they can take the joy out of my work, it is a dreadful world. But now suppose that Christ had been with that man whom I described — Christ in His love and His authority — Christ the Friend and the Master. I mean it really. Suppose — for, oh, it is at least supposable — that behind every other motive, shining through every other motive which made the man work, there had been this, the love of Christ. Whoever else he worked for secondarily, he worked for Jesus first of all. Would that have made no difference? Like an electric atmosphere poured around the shrine in which a jewel rests, so that no hand can be thrust through to steal the jewel; so round the work, full of its joy, is poured the love of Christ, out of which no man can snatch it. Suppose that some strong opponent keeps him from doing what he wants to do, — there is still the assurance that his doing that is but a part of a vaster accomplishment, the will of his great Master, which he knows must come in its completeness whether this special act of his attain success or not.

Suppose that men taunt him with his action’s incompleteness. If he is really serving Christ, it is not as a whole but as a part, it is as incomplete that he has counted his act of any value. The incompleteness of his action is absorbed and contained in the larger completeness of his Master. He need not be complete in Himself, held as his life is in the perfection of his Lord.

And yet again, suppose that men turn from Him with ingratitude. What then? If he has really been at work not for them ultimately, but

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for Christ, then their falling away may only leave the air more clear for him to hear that ‘’ Well done,” which is the only praise he really values. Opposition and hindrance cannot pluck away his joy, for it is not his success but Christ’s that he is seeking. Criticism cannot mar his happiness, for he has pretended to nothing, — all he has tried to do is to serve Christ. Ingratitude cannot make him wretched, for he appeals to Christ’s truer judgment. To every consecrated labourer who works for Christ there is a joy in working which no man can take away from him.

Turn now and see how all this is true of Christian thought and the struggle after truth as well as Christian action. Thought and the struggle after truth are the best joys of the best men. To follow out the lines of speculation and of revelation until they lead us near the heart of things, which yet we know that we can never perfectly reach; to make some few steps forward on the journey which stretches out before us, endlessly tempting and interesting, into eternity; to add each day some new stone to the structure whose lines already as they leave the earth prophesy an infinite height for the far topstonc, — he has not lived who has not felt this pleasure. He is not really living, however full he may be of warmth of feeling and of energy in action, who does not in some degree know what it is to crave ideas and knowledge, to seek for truth, and to delight in finding it.

Forgive me if I turn aside one moment from my course to say that the religious temper, while, in one action of it, it has always been the great inspirer of intellectual life, has always shown another tendency, to depreciate and deaden mental action, to be content with glowing feeling and with faithful action, as if they made up the whole life of the religious man. Against that tendency every man who is religious ought to be upon his guard. It would be a dreadful thing, it would almost prove that any form of religion was not divine — at least it would show that it had lost much of the beauty of its divine creation — if it did not recognise that man’s best happiness demands the exercise of his mental powers, and so did not invite these powers to free and eager use.

But yet it seems to me that every thinking man discovers that the joy of thought, as delicate as it is fine and pure, is one that lies peculiarly within the power of our fellow-men. And why? It is not that our fellow-men may contradict and even contemptuously abuse some opinion which we hold as true. If we do really hold it perfectly as true, that is a little thing; it does not hurt us; it does not disturb the quiet happy confidence with which we rest our faith upon the well-proved certainty. But the trouble is that the more one thinks and studies, the more he becomes aware how infinite is truth. The truth which he has learned on any subject, he becomes aware, is not the whole. There is another side. There is a strange bewildering way in which just the opposite of the truth which he has learned is true. Every time, then, that any reasoner impugns our truth it starts up all this consciousness. We see how little of absolute impregnable certainty we have really reached. We see how far we are, even upon the subject which we know best, from having reached the end of things and laid our faith securely beside the ever green and solid shore to which the tides are struggling. Upon the subject which we know best we are still out at sea. Every- time a fellow-man’s finger touches our faith, it makes it rock, and compels us to feel that, however well anchored it is, so that it will not drift, it is very far from being morticed and bolted into the solid ground. This is the reason why so many people, when their faith is once attained, keep it not merely as a very precious but as a very frail and brittle thing. They will not talk with any one about it. They will not read anything upon the other side. They will keep out of the way of anything which for one moment can remind them that their faith is not complete, that they have not yet understood and settled everything concerning man and God. They stand guard over their peace in believing, not merely with an instinctive knowledge that the infidels and sceptics are trying to take it away from them, but with an instinctive fear lest they shall succeed in their attempt.

We know this is not good; and yet we very often do not see how it is to be escaped. The real escape, I think, lies here. The Christian faith is not primarily a belief in Christian truth, but a belief in Christ. All truth which we believe, we believe in and because of Him. We know that though we have truly taken Him for our Master, He is very far yet from having told us all that He has to tell. That knowledge does not decrease our satisfaction in believing Him; it increases it; for it binds us to Him not merely by what He has already taught us, but by the far greater truth which He is keeping for us, which He will give us in His good time, and which it is a pleasure to wait for now, as it will be a pleasure to take it when the time shall come. Now, let a believer have this consciousness about his faith; and then, as he stands all radiantly exultant or peacefully blessed in the truth he holds, let the unbeliever come up to him, to pluck away his

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joy. The well-worn taunt is brought out to be used once more: “How poor your knowledge is! Answer me this, and this, and this, and this. What pleasure can a true man find in such a vague, limited, unscientific faith as yours?” And then the tormentor stands and looks to see the faithful face grow pale, and the light die out of the believing eye. “Now certainly I have taken his joy from him,” he thinks. Why is he disappointed? Why should he not be, when what his sceptical brother has been saying to the believer is only what the believer has all along been saying to himself? His favourite word for years has been, “Now I know in part. Only then shall I know as I am known.” “We know not yet what we shall be. We only know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him.” So he has always told to himself and others the story of his faith and hope. A knowledge consciously imperfect held in the embrace of a perfect nature perfectly trusted — that has always been the condition of his life which he has recognised. which he has loved to state. Why, then, should he be surprised or lose his peace and satisfaction when another hand points out to him what he has known and gloried in so long? The happiness docs not fade out of his face. In the embrace and containment of his faith ill Christianity within his faith in Christ he has a joy which no man taketh from him.

Always it is the surrounding of the doctrinal faith by the personal faith that keeps the joy of the doctrinal faith safe from attack or theft. You may prove to me that this or that doctrine which I have held for true is not true, you may show me that my creed as a whole is very far from perfect, — my faith, my religion is not lost by such discoveries any more than my love for my friend, which is the delight and inspiration of my life, is turned to hate or indifference when I come to see that there are rooms in his house or regions in his character which I never have entered, or whose furnishings I have misunderstood or misremembered. Of knowledge and faith it is supremely true, as Jesus promised, that when He comes to a thinker and believer, that thinker’s and believer’s joy is full, and it is a joy which no man can take away from him.

I have but a few moments left to follow our subject — Christ’s promise — into one more region, the region of character, the central, inmost region of all life. Can a man have such joy in his own character, in being the thing he is, that no other man can take his joy away from him? Just as soon as we ask ourselves that question, how our imperfections and sins start up before us!

3oS “YOUR JOY NO MA N TA KE TH FROM YO U.” [ x i v.

When have I ever stood so pure and clear and irreproachable, with such a blameless front, that the least child, lifting his baby finger and pointing at me as I stood, could not stir my sluggish conscience and make my soul ashamed? What idlest chatterer cannot pluck away our self-satisfaction, and steal the last trace of joy in our own characters? And yet, with all this true, it is not all the truth. There are two different conceptions of character, one of which looks at it in itself; the other looks at it as it is involved with the powers which are at work upon it to make it what it is capable of being. To the first conception, any given character may seem contemptible and mean; to the other, the same character may seem beautiful and glorious. A block of marble or wood lying alone upon a hill-top may be ugly and uninteresting. The same block of wood or marble brought into a sculptor’s workshop, though his hands may not have touched it yet, or may have only rudely blocked out his design, may be a thing to reverence, may stir our imagination and our love. And if we may go farther, and attribute to the stone or marble block a thought about itself, a conception of its own value, can we not think that as it lies upon the hill-top it may be ready to accept everybody’s disestccm, to believe what everybody says about its worthlessness; but when it comes into the sculptor’s hands, it may gain such new sense of its capacity under that wise and loving power that no man’s sneer can cloud the pleasure that it feels in the new revelation and hope of its true self which, under those hands, have come to it? Now read the parable. I am a poor, weak, wicked man; I know it; I do not need that you should tell me of it; but when you do tell me, I bow my head and know that you are right. Any small joy in myself which I have been able to conceive, your well-deserved scorn can steal from me in an instant. But now suppose that Christ takes me into His hands. He chooses me. With that indubitable certainty with which the soul accepts His will, I know that He has chosen me that He may make out of me what He sees that I may be. I am a poor dull block still, but I am His. Here in His workshop, here in His church I lie, and His great hands have just begun to shape His purpose in me. I can feel it there, as the dull stone feels the first blocking of the statue. Is not the whole thing changed? Now there is a joy in character which is not present consciousness but certain prophecy, which is not self-conceit but trust in the creative hands whose power I feel upon me. Now there is joy as deep in me as is the yet un wrought design of the dear Lord to whom mv soul is given. Now the happiness of the heaven, wherein alone the full result of His great work in me shall appear, is present already in the power of His love. Now let the shrewd critic come and find his fault with me; now let him point out all the stains and flaws which his keen eyes can see. I am not scornful of his criticism. I welcome it, for it will help me. But it no longer makes me wretched. I am in Christ. Oh, the great meaning of these words! In hope of what He shall make of me, of what He is making of me, my joy abides. It is His intention, not my present condition, upon which I rest, and so I am not wretched. So men cannot steal my joy from me, because they cannot separate me from Christ. So He fulfils His promise: “I will see you, and your joy shall be full, and your joy no man taketh from you.”

In one word, then, here lies the limit of the power of our brethren over our lives. All that comes from ourselves, and has its home in our circumstances, they may easily invade. All that comes from Christ, and is in His purpose for our characters, they cannot touch.

This was the safety of the joy of Jesus. It all came from God, and so no maliciousness or carelessness of men could spoil it.

Oh, my dear friends, it is very easy to let men take from us all that they can take, if only we have in us that of which it is utterly beyond their power to rob us. Let them take our time, our comfort, our peace, even our good name, if only we keep our trust in Christ, and our certainty of everlasting growth in holiness by Him. That no man can take away, because God gave it to us in His Son. That may He give in great assurance to us all.