Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: March 20th

CHRISTIAN GLADNESS

With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation. - Isaiah 12:3

There are better things than joy. Indeed, there are few things of smaller account than it, if taken by itself. A life framed on purpose to secure it is contemptible and barren of nobility or beauty. It is certain to be a failure, as it deserves to be. To pursue it is to lose it. The only way to get it is to follow steadily the path of duty, without thinking of joy, and then, like sleep, it comes most surely unsought, and we "being in the way," the angel of God, bright-haired Joy, is sure to meet us.

The best in a man recoils from any system which makes much of joy as a motive to action, and Christian teachers have sometimes done unwitting harm by preaching a kind of gospel which has come to little more than this: Be Christians that you may be happy. No doubt the natural result of every right and pure course of life is to bring a real joy; and lightness of heart follows goodness as certainly as fragrance is breathed from the opened flowers. With every pure action pure joy is bound up. Men have staggered at the inequalities of outward fortune, and been driven by them to doubt whether there were any God. But it would be a far more overwhelming difficulty if there were no connection between goodness and happiness; if a man could love and serve God, and not find joy in proportion to his love and service; if a pure and sober-suited Joy were not one of the "virgins following" Religion, the Queen, it would be doubly hard to believe in God.

So, though it is by no means the highest reason for being a Christian, nor the loftiest view to take of the effects of Christianity, it would be folly to refuse to recognize the fact that a true Christian life is a joyful life, or to neglect to use it as a real, though subsidiary, motive to such a life. It is quite possible to be beset all about with cares and troubles and sorrows, and yet to feel, in spite of loss and disappointment and loneliness, a pure foundation of joys Divine and celestial gladness welling up in our inmost hearts, sweet amidst bitter waters. There may be life beneath the snow; there may be fire burning, like the old Greek fire, below the water; we may pour oil on the stormiest waves, and it will find its way to the surface and do something to smooth the billows; whilst " in heaviness through manifold temptations" we may yet have a "joy that is unspeakable and full of glory." For I suppose that a man has this power, that if he have two objects of contemplation, to one or other of which he may turn his mind, he can choose which of the two he will turn to. Like a railway signalman, you may either flash the light through the pure white glass; or the darkly coloured one. You may either choose to look at everything through the medium of the sorrows that belong to time or through the medium of the joys that flow from eternity. The question is, which of the two do we choose shall be uppermost in our hearts and give the color to our experience.