We do not often realise how glad God is when we are glad, and how
worthy an object of much that He does is simply the prosperity and the
blessedness of human hearts. The poorest creature that lives has a
right to ask from God the satisfaction of its instincts, and every man
has a claim on God--because he is God's creature--to make him glad.
God honours all cheques legitimately drawn on Him, and answers all
claims, and regards Himself as occupied in a manner entirely congruous
with His magnificence and His infinitude, when He stoops to put some
kind of vibrating gladness into the wings of a gnat that dances for an
hour in the sunshine, and into the heart of a man that lives his time
for only a very little longer.
God is the Joy-maker. There are far more magnificent and sublime
thoughts about Him than that; but I do not know that there is any that
ought to come nearer to our hearts, and to silence more of our
grumblings and of our distrust, than the belief that the gladness of
His children is an end contemplated by Him in all that He does.
Whether we think it of small importance or no, He does not think it
so, that all mankind should rejoice in Himself. And this is a
marvellous revelation to break out of the very heart of that
comparatively hard system of ancient Judaism. 'The Lord hath made them
joyful.'
Turning away from the immediate connection of these words, let me
remind you of the great outlines of the divine provision for
gladdening men's hearts. I was going to say that God had only one way
of making us glad; and perhaps that is in the deepest sense true. That
way is by putting Himself into us. He gives us Himself to make us
glad; for nothing else will do it--or, at least, though there may be
many subordinate sources of joy, if there be in the innermost shrine
of our spirits an empty place, where the Shekinah ought to shine, no
other joys will suffice to settle and to rejoice the soul. The secret
of all true human well-being is close communion with God; and when He
looks at the poorest of us, desiring to make us blessed, He can but
say, 'I will give Myself to that poor man; to that ignorant creature;
to that wayward and prodigal child; to that harlot in her corruption;
to that worldling in his narrow godlessness; I will give Myself, if
they will have Me.' And thus, and only thus, does He make us truly,
perfectly, and for ever glad.
Besides that, or rather as a sequel and consequence of that, there
come such other God-given blessings as these to which my text refers.
What were the outward reasons for the restored exiles' gladness? 'The
Lord had made them joyful, and turned the heart of the king ... unto
them to strengthen their hands in the work of the house of God, the
God of Israel.'
So, then, He pours into men's lives by His providences the secondary
and lower gifts which men, according to changing circumstances, need;
and He also satisfies the permanent physical necessities of all orders
of beings to whom He has given life. He gives Himself for the spirit;
He gives whatever is contributory to any kind of gladness; and if we
are wise we shall trace all to Him. He is the Joy-giver; and that man
has not yet understood either the sanctity of life or the full
sweetness of its sweetest things unless he sees, written over every
one of them, the name of God, their giver. Your common mercies are His
love tokens, and they all come to us, just as the gifts of parents to
their children do, with this on the fly-leaf, 'With a father's love.'
Whatever comes to God's child with that inscription, surely it ought
to kindle a thrill of gladness. That 'the king of Assyria's heart is
turned'; shall we thank the king of Assyria? Yes and No! For it was
God who 'turned' it. Oh! to carry the quiet confidence of that thought
into all our daily life, and see His name written upon everything that
contributes to make us blessed. God is the true Source and Maker of
every joy.
And by the side of that we must put this other thought--there are
sources of joy with which He has nothing to do. There are people who
are joyful--and there are some of them listening now--not because God
made them joyful, but because 'the world, the devil, and the flesh'
have given them ghastly caricatures of the true gladness. And these
rival sources of blessedness, the existence of which my text suggests,
are the enemies of all that is good and noble in us and in our joys.
God made these men joyful, and so their gladness was wholesome.
II. Note the consequent obligation and wisdom of taking our God-given
joys.
'They kept the feast with joy, for the Lord had made them joyful.'
Then it is our obligation to accept and use what it is His blessedness
to give. Be sure you take Him. When He is waiting to pour all His love
into your heart, and all His sweetness into your sensitive spirit, to
calm your anxieties, to deepen your blessedness, to strengthen
everything that is good in you, to be to you a stay in the midst of
crumbling prosperity, and a Light in the midst of gathering darkness,
be sure that you take the joy that waits your acceptance. Do not let
it be said that, when the Lord Christ has come down from heaven, and
lived upon earth, and gone back to heaven, and sent His Spirit to
dwell in you, you lock the door against the entrance of the
joy-bringing Messenger, and are sad and restless and discontented
because you have shut out the God who desires to abide in your hearts.
'They kept the feast with joy, because the Lord had made them joyful.'
Oh! how many Christian men and women there are, who in the midst of
the abundant and wonderful provision for continual cheerfulness and
buoyancy of spirit given to them in the promises of the Gospel, in the
gifts of Christ, in the indwelling of the Divine Spirit, do yet go
through life creeping and sad, burdened and anxious, perplexed and at
their wits' end, just because they will not have the God who yearns to
come to them, or at least will not have Him in anything like the
fullness and the completeness in which He desires to bestow Himself.
If God gives, surely we are bound to receive. It is an obligation upon
Christian men and women, which they do not sufficiently realise, to be
glad, and it is a commandment needing to be reiterated. 'Rejoice in
the Lord always; and again I say, rejoice.' Would that Christian
experience in this generation was more alive to the obligation and the
blessedness of perpetual joy arising from perpetual communion with
Him.
Further, another obligation is to recognise Him in all common mercies,
because He is at the back of them all. Let them always proclaim Him to
us. Oh! if we did not go through the world blinded to the real Power
that underlies all its motions, we should feel that everything was
vocal to us of the loving-kindness of our Father in heaven. Link Him,
dear friend! with everything that makes your heart glad; with
everything pleasant that comes to you. There is nothing good or sweet
but it flows from Him. There is no common delight of flesh or sense,
of sight or taste or smell, no little enjoyment that makes the moment
pass more brightly, no drop of oil that eases the friction of the
wheels of life, but it may be elevated into greatness and nobleness,
and will then first be understood in its true significance, if it is
connected with Him. God does not desire to be put away high up on a
pedestal above our lives, as if He regulated the great things and the
trifles regulated themselves; but He seeks to come, as air into the
lungs, into every particle of the mass of life, and to fill it all
with His own purifying presence.
Recognise Him in common joys. If, when we sit down to partake of them,
we would say to ourselves, 'The Lord has made us joyful,' all our home
delights, all our social pleasures, all our intellectual and all our
sensuous ones--rest and food and drink and all other goods for the
body--they would all be felt to be great, as they indeed are. Enjoyed
in Him, the smallest is great; without Him, the greatest is small.
'The Lord made them joyful'; and what is large enough for Him to give
ought not to be too small for us to receive with recognition of His
hand.
Another piece of wholesome counsel in this matter is--Be sure that you
use the joys which God does give. Many good people seem to think that
it is somehow devout and becoming to pitch most of their songs in a
minor key, and to be habitually talking about trials and
disappointments, and 'a desert land,' and 'Brief life is here our
portion,' and so on, and so on. There are two ways in which you can
look at the world and at everything that befalls you. There is enough
in everybody's life to make him sad if he sulkily selects these things
to dwell upon. There is enough in everybody's life to make him
continually glad if he wisely picks out these to think about. It
depends altogether on the angle at which you look at your life what
you see in it. For instance, you know how children do when they get a
bit of a willow wand into their possession. They cut off rings of
bark, and get the switch alternately white and black, white and black,
and so on right away to the tip. Whether will you look at the white
rings or the black ones? They are both there. But if you rightly look
at the black you will find out that there is white below it, and it
only needs a very little stripping off of a film to make it into white
too. Or, to put it into simpler words, no Christian man has the right
to regard anything that God's Providence brings to him as such
unmingled evil that it ought to make him sad. We are bound to 'rejoice
in the Lord always.'
I know how hard it is, but sure am I that it is possible for a man, if
he keeps near Jesus Christ, to reproduce Paul's paradox of being
'sorrowful yet always rejoicing,' and even in the midst of darkness
and losses and sorrows and blighted hopes and disappointed aims to
rejoice in the Lord, and to 'keep the feast with gladness, because the
Lord has made him joyful.' Nor do we discharge our duty, unless side
by side with the sorrow which is legitimate, which is blessed,
strengthening, purifying, calming, moderating, there is also 'joy
unspeakable and full of glory.'
Again, be sure that you limit your delights to God-made joys. Too many
of us have what parts of our nature recognise as satisfaction, and are
glad to have, apart from Him. There is nothing sadder than the joys
that come into a life, and do not come from God. Oh! let us see to it
that we do not fill our cisterns with poisonous sewage when God is
waiting to fill them with the pure 'river of the water of life.' Do
not let us draw our blessedness from the world and its evils. Does my
joy help me to come near to God? Does it interfere with my communion
with Him? Does it aid me in the consecration of myself? Does my
conscience go with it when my conscience is most awake? Do I recognise
Him as the Giver of the thing that is so blessed? If we can say Yes!
to these questions, we can venture to believe that our blessedness
comes from God, and leads to God, however homely, however sensuous and
material may be its immediate occasion. But if not, then the less we
have to do with such sham gladness the better. 'Even in laughter the
heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.' The
alternative presented for the choice of each of us is whether we will
have surface joy and a centre of dark discontent, or surface sorrow
and a centre of calm blessedness. The film of stagnant water on a pond
full of rottenness simulates the glories of the rainbow, in which pure
sunshine falls upon the pure drops, but it is only painted corruption
after all, a sign of rotting; and if a man puts his lips to it it will
kill him. Such is the joy which is apart from God. It is the
'crackling of thorns under a pot'--the more fiercely they burn the
sooner they are ashes. And, on the other hand, 'these things have I
spoken unto you that My joy might remain in you, and that your joy
might be full.'
It is not 'for seven days' that we 'keep the feast' if God has 'made
us joyful,' but for all the rest of the days of time, and for the
endless years of the calm gladnesses of the heavens.