Our Lord's wonderful words suggest that they who accept His sayings,
that they who have His word abiding in them, have in a very deep sense
His joy implanted in their hearts, to brighten and elevate their joys
as the sunshine flashes into silver the ripples of the lake. What then
were the sources of the calm joys of 'the Man of Sorrows'? Surely His
was the perfect instance of 'rejoicing in the Lord always'--an
unbroken communion with the Father. The consciousness that the divine
pleasure ever rested on Him, and that all His thoughts, emotions,
purposes, and acts were in perfect harmony with the perfect will of
the perfect God, filled His humanity up to the very brim with gladness
which the world could not take away, and which remains for us for ever
as a type to which all our gladness must be conformed if it is to be
worthy of Him and of us. As one of the Psalmists says, God is to be
'the gladness of our joy.' It is in Him, gazed upon by the faith and
love of an obedient spirit, sought after by aspiration and possessed
inwardly in peaceful communion, confirmed by union with Him in the
acts of daily obedience, that the true joy of every human life is to
be realised. They who have drunk of this deep fountain of gladness
will not express their joy in boisterous laughter, which is the
hollower the louder it is, and the less lasting the more noisy, but
will manifest itself 'in the depth and not the tumult of the soul.'
Nor must we forget that 'My joy' co-existed with a profound experience
of sorrow to which no human sorrow was ever like. Let us not forget
that, while His joy filled His soul to the brim, He was 'acquainted
with grief'; and let us not wonder if the strange surface
contradiction is repeated in ourselves. It is more Christlike to have
inexpressibly deep joy with surface sorrow, than to have a shallow
laughter masking a hurtful sorrow.
We have to set the sources of earthly gladness side by side with those
of Christ's joy to be aware of a contrast. His sprang from within, the
world's is drawn from without. His came from union with the Father,
the world's largely depends on ignoring God. His needed no supplies
from the gratifications ministered by sense, and so independent of the
presence or absence of such; the world's need the constant
contributions of outward good, and when these are cut off they droop
and die. He who depends on outward circumstances for his joy is the
slave of externals and the sport of time and chance.