The Joy of Service
Take joy home,
And make a place in thy heart for her;
And give her time to grow, and cherish her;
Then will she come and sing to thee
When thou art working in the furrow; ay,
It is a comely fashion to be glad;
Joy is the grace we say to God.
Jean Ingelow.
There are many sources of joy. All men are in quest of happiness, and upon a thousand paths the shoeprints of the seekers are found. There is nothing available in all the world, nothing which holds the slightest promise or hope of happiness, that has not been tried by some one eager to find the magic secret.
We are accustomed to say that the only true, deep, unfailing joy is that which we may find in God. The Bible has many promises of happiness, but they all point to spiritual and eternal sources. We read of the joy of the Lord, of rejoicing in God; Christ promises his own joy to his followers. Joy, therefore, is the inheritance of the Christian, — he has a right to claim it. Yet not all Christians are happy. Many whose faith in Christ is unmistakable have joy only in the quiet lulls of life. They are easily disturbed. The song of to-day is choked with tears to-morrow. It is worth our while to try to find the secret of true and abiding Christian joy. We often hear it said that trust in God yields joy, or that a blameless life produces happiness. There is one kind of living, however, which more than any other contains the master secret of joy. It is a life of service. It begins in consecration to Christ: we must, first of all, be his servants. It includes trust, — reposing upon God. But there can be no continued quiet confidence if there be no activity in Christian life. Still water stagnates.
Even trust without action soon loses its restfulness.
Work itself is always a helper of happiness. Indolence is never truly happy. The happiest man is the busy man. Even physical health depends largely upon regular occupation. No man, able for duty, who is not busy, can be truly or deeply happy. The idle man may be living a life of pleasure, but it is not a life of real happiness. Work is a condition of joy. It is a blessing that most people, when sorrow comes, dare not pause to indulge their grief. Their duties are waiting for them, waiting so clamorously that they cannot linger even for the tender sentiment of sorrow. There is scarcely time to wait for the funeral to be over, after a bereavement, before imperative tasks must receive attention. It is well that it is so. The necessary activity keeps the heart from breaking, and preserves the life from the morbidity which so often sorrow produces when the hands lie folded.
Work is therefore a secret of happiness. It saves the heart from being overcharged.
The emotions which otherwise would lie pent up, to the hurt of the life, find vent and are wrought out in activities which bless others, while they produce health and wholesomeness in him who performs them. No worse mistake can be made by one in grief than to drop life’s duties and tasks out of the hands, and cut one’s self off from the common duties and ministries of life. God’s comfort is not found in this way. Joy comes not back to him who nourishes his sorrow in idle brooding; it is found only in the earnest and faithful doing of every duty. Work has saved many a life from despair in time of great grief.
But there is something higher and diviner yet than even work alone. Work may be selfish. It may be solely for the advancement of one’s own interests, without any thought of another’s benefit or comfort. Even then there is blessing in it; for it fills the hands and occupies the thoughts — there is good in occupation itself. But if we add to work the element of serving, with love and thought of others, we have one of the noblest of all the secrets of joy.
Serving comes from loving; it is love’s expression. Serving that is not inspired by love yields no joy. Love that does not serve is not love at all. The measure of self-denial that one is ready to suffer is the measure of the love that is in one’s heart. Love that will not sacrifice is only a sentiment, a fair blossom from which no fruit comes. Love is ready always for serving.
Wherever we see life in its best forms and developments, it has in it the element of service. In every glimpse of heavenly life shown to us in the Bible, we find service as the highest expression of the life’s spirit. The angels who appear, coming and going between heaven and earth, are always engaged in service for some of God’s children. Their mission is described in one sentence: “Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?” They come to earth expressly to serve. We know that the angels possess the secret of joy; they are represented as praising God continually. It is the joy of service that fills their hearts. Never a thought of self poisons their pure gladness.
The greatest and highest of all beings is God himself. His is the life which had no beginning, and shall have no ending. All other life — all angel life, all human life — flows from the one great fountain. Yet God lives not for himself. God is love, and the very essence of love is always service. He is ever giving out blessing and good to men. Every revealing of God shows him to us as a God who serves his creatures. He thinks ever of their good. He works continually in providence, in most thoughtful, gentle serving. The highest reach of the divine serving was in the incarnation, when God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.
Then, in the story of the life of Christ, where we have the revealing of the divine character in all its beauty, we find the most wonderful serving. Never did any other man live for his friends as Jesus lived for his. He kept nothing back from them. On the last night of his life, as if to express his love in a way that never could be forgotten, we see him clad as a servant, washing his disciples’ feet. No picture of Jesus in all the Gospels is truer to the very heart of his life than this. He came not to be ministered unto, but to minister. He took on him the form of a servant, to show the divine spirit. A little later he actually gave his life in his matchless service of love. Thus this divinest of all ideals of life is seen serving even unto the uttermost..
We know that in this serving, Jesus found deep and holy joy. It used to be taught that he was a sad man. There was a tradition that he never smiled. But this conception of Jesus could not have been true. He was indeed a man of sorrows, but there was in his heart a deep joy which even his sorrows could not quench. He spoke distinctly and repeatedly of his joy and of his peace. One of the New Testament writers tells us that it was for the joy set before him that he endured the cross, despising the shame.
We can readily think of many sources in the joy of Christ. His fellowship with his Father was never broken, nor even most faintly shadowed for a moment. He was sinless; there was never in his heart the least trace of that sorrow which mars the sweetest human joy, the consciousness of having done evil. His perfect faith made all spiritual things eternal realities to him, more real than the rocks and hills and trees and paths of earth. He never groped in the darkness of doubt and fear, as at times the holiest saints on earth must do when faith’s vision grows dim. He saw the ultimate meaning of all sorrow, and looked to the end and final harvest of all sacrifice and loss. He was never discouraged; he knew that his work would not fail. He had full confidence in the future of his ministry, and in the ultimate triumph of his kingdom.
Yet it is evident that the richest of all the sources of the joy of Christ was in his love and service. It was the joy of doing good, of giving comfort, of saving the lost, that meant the most to him. The travail of his soul was forgotten in the knowledge that a world would be redeemed by his blood.
This joy of service Christ bequeathed also to his followers, — “that my joy may be in you.” There are other sources, too, of Christian joy, — forgiveness, childship in God’s family, hope, divine fellowship; but the joy that comes from serving is the purest and fullest of all. We have a hint of this in the Master’s word,” It is more blessed to give than to receive.,, This is a much deeper saying than we usually think it to be. There is much giving to us that is very wonderful. There are many and great spiritual blessings which come to us as gifts. Salvation is all of grace; we earn nothing that we receive. We have the gift of pardon, of life, of the Holy Spirit, of the inheritance in glory; but it is more blessed for us to give than to receive even these divine gifts. The richest, truest, deepest, realest blessing that can come to any heart is the blessing of giving, of do* ing, of suffering, of sacrificing for others, of serving them in love.
The joy of service is therefore the sweetest, holiest joy possible. After the best happiness that can come through all other pure sources, human or divine, the joy that means the most to the heart and life is that which is found in loving and serving others in the name of Christ.
Without this element no other joy is complete. God’s best gifts to us would not make us deeply and securely happy, if we only received and enjoyed them, and did not become servants of others with them. Even communion with God would fail to bring us true and abiding blessing, if we went not out from the holy presence on ministries of love to those who need. No blessing we keep for ourselves alone can give us deep and holy gladness. No vision of angels, no theophany, can produce such thrills of rapture in the heart as are enjoyed in some lowly service of love.
There is a beautiful legend which tells that one shepherd was kept at home, watching a fevered guest, the night the angels came to Bethlehem with the announcement of the birth of Jesus, and sang their songs of joy. The other shepherds saw the heavenly host, heard their song, and beheld the glory. Returning home, their hearts were wondrously elated. But all the night Shemuel sat alone by the restless sufferer, and waited. His fellow-shepherds pitied his deprivation, — that he missed the vision and the glory which they had seen. But in his lowly serving Shemuel had blessing and reward of his own. He missed, indeed, the splendor of that night in the fields, and in his serving he gave his own life; but his eyes saw then a more wondrous glory than that which his fellow-shepherds had seen.
“Shemuel, by the fever-bed,
Touched by beckoning hands that led,
Died and saw the Uncreated;
All his fellows lived, and waited.”
He had waited by the bed of sickness while they saw the glory; now they waited amid earth’s dull scenes, while he witnessed the glory of the Eternal. So it is always in life in this world. Those who sit by fever-beds, and minister to human need in its countless forms, seem to miss much that is very beautiful. Their holy ministry keeps them away from places of honor, even from scenes of spiritual ecstasy. While at their common tasks they see not the angel hosts nor hear the music. Absorption in the duties of human love in the home, or among the poor, causes men and women to miss much that the world esteems. But meanwhile there is a higher reward, not only in store at the end, but even now, for those who serve. They enter more fully and deeply into the joy of the Lord; and then, in heaven, they will be received into holier fellowship, closer to Christ.
After all, only that life is worth living which has in it the spirit and quality of service and sacrifice. Dora Greenwell says, “I have often felt a significance in the fact that nothing belonging to Christ’s kingdom tells much upon the world which has not in it the element of sacrifice, and of Christlike willingness to participate in pain. A righteous man may effect much good through beneficent deeds and wise and kind plans for the benefit of others; but it is to the man for whom some, peradventure, would even dare to die, the man who himself, if need were, would die for men, that the hearts of men cleave.”
It is only life itself that is worth giving to others. That which we do for others or give to them, and which costs us nothing, has small blessing or help in it for them. A man may speak to us eloquently; but if it is only words that he speaks, we are no richer for listening to them. Only when we serve in love, giving out life itself in our ministry, do we either find deep joy for our own heart, or make others truly happier or more blessed.