The Art of Rejoicing

“Rejoice in the Lord alway” (Phil. iv. 4).

And this counsel is given by an old man who is now the prisoner of Imperial Rome. It is not the enervating speech of the lotus land; it is a bracing exhortation ringing through the stifling air of difficulty and strife. Age is not frequently associated with such sunny exuberance of spirit. Its song is apt to “crack,” its lights burn dim, its disposition becomes despondent. Age is so prone to become reminiscent, and memory is a fertile breeding-ground of dark and tearful regrets. Age fondly dwells on “radiant morns” which have “passed away”; it turns its eyes away from the east whence new mornings break. And so the psalm changes into a threnody, and minor tunes pervade the evening hymn. But here is an old

man in whose vespers the minor note finds no place. Hard circumstances have not made him hard. Apparent failure has not soured him into a cynic. He retains his fine, appreciative sense of life’s essential sweetness. He has not become moodily reminiscent of past glories and of vanished feasts. He feels the days before him. The pains of to-day are only the birth-pangs of a better to-morrow. The immediate difficulty is only a prickly burr which contains most toothsome fruit. Circumstances may impose restraints, they cannot create an orphanage. Rome may separate the Apostle from his fellows, she is powerless to separate him from his Lord. Imprisonment still provides a room for two, and by no earthly conspiracy can he be bereft of his great Companion. The Lord is with him, and so the prison is ablaze with light. Old age glows with sunny optimism. The psalm of adoration rises night and day. And the captive sends forth to his fellow-believers the invigorating counsel, “Rejoice in the Lord alway.”

Now if this counsel proclaims an attainable ideal it is very clear that Christian joy is a mood independent of our immediate circumstances. If it were dependent on our surroundings, then, indeed, it would be as uncertain as an unprotected candle burning in a gusty night. One moment the candle burns clear and steady, the next moment the blaze leaps to the very edge of the wick, and affords little or no light. But Christian joy has no relationship to the transient setting of the life, and therefore it is not the victim of the passing day. At one time my conditions arrange themselves like a sunny day in June; a little later they rearrange themselves like a gloomy day in November. One day I am at a wedding; the next day I stand by an open grave. One day, in my ministry, I win ten converts for the Lord; and then, for a long stretch of days, I never win one. Yes, the days are as changeable as the weather, and yet the Christian joy can be persistent. Where lies the secret of its gracious persistency?

Here is the secret. “Lo! I am with you all the days.” In all the changing days, “He changeth not, neither is weary.” He is no fair weather Companion, leaving me when the year grows dark and cold. He does not choose my days of prosperous festival, but is not to be found in my days of impoverishment and defeat. He does not show himself only when I wear a garland, and hide himself when I wear a crown of thorns. He is with me “all the days” — the prosperous days and the days of adversity; days when the funeral bell is tolling, and days when the wedding peal is ringing. “All the days.” The day of life — the day of death — the day of judgment!

Here, I say, is the secret of perennial joy. The all-vital relationship is not between me and fickle circumstance, but between me and an unchanging Friend. If I draw my water from the wells of circumstance my resources are exposed to the peril of drought and convulsions. If I draw from the wells of salvation, the rich and bountiful supply shall be found “springing up into eternal life.” “Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be shaken in the heart of the seas.... The Lord of hosts is with us.”

Now the Apostle Paul had become an expert in “the practice of the presence of God.” He had so exercised his spiritual senses that his discernment had become delicately sensitive and acute. He had attained to a fine “feeling” for God. Until now the Lord’s presence was as evident in the prison as in the temple, as evident when he stood before Festus and Agrippa as when he met with the little company of praying women by the riverside at Philippi. He “felt” his Lord everywhere, and therefore he could “rejoice in the Lord alway.” To realise the Lord is to “enter into the joy of the Lord,” and “the joy of the Lord” becomes our strength.

In all his thinkings Paul’s first thought was ever the Lord. All his purposes began in the Lord, and in the Lord they ended. He did not call in the Lord just when things had gone amiss, when he had lost himself in trespassing over a forbidden moor. To the Apostle the Lord was his Alpha. He consulted Him at the beginnings of things. He was also his Omega; in Him everything found its culmination. And there is no law in life more sure than this, that if the mind be thus centred and fixed upon the Lord, the Lord will be ever more and more clearly manifested, and the heart will be possessed by a quiet, sunny assurance which no circumstances can despoil, and which will remain bright and increasing “even unto the end of the world.”