Can two conflicting emotions live in a man's heart at once? Rather, we
might ask, are there ever emotions in a man's heart that are not hemmed
in by conflicting ones? Is there ever such a thing in the world's
experience as a pure joy, or as a confidence which has no trace of fear
in it? Are there any pictures without shadows? They are only daubs if
they are. Instead of wondering at this co-existence of joy and sorrow,
we must recognise that it is in full accord with all our experience,
which never brings a joy, but, like the old story of the magic palace,
there is one window unlighted, and which never brings a sorrow so black
and over-arching so completely the whole sky, but that somewhere, if the
eye would look for it, there is a bit of blue. The possibility of the
paradox is in accordance with all human experience.
But then, you say, 'my feelings of joy or sorrow are very largely a
matter of temperament, and still more largely a matter of responding to
the facts round about me. And I cannot pump up emotions to order; and if
I could they would be factitious, artificial, insincere, and do me more
harm than good.' Perfectly true. There are a great many ugly names for
manufactured emotions, and none of them a bit too ugly. Peter does not
wish you to try to get up feeling to order. It is the bane of some type
of Christianity that that is done. You cannot thus manufacture emotion.
No; but I will tell you what you can do. You can determine what you will
think about most, and what you will look at most, and if you settle
that, that will settle what you feel. And so, though it is by a
roundabout way, we can regulate our emotions. A man travelling in a
railway train can choose which side of the carriage he will look out
at, either the one where the sunshine is falling full on the front of
each grass-blade and tree, or the side where it is the shadowed side of
each that is turned to him. If he will look out of the one window, he
will see everything verdant and bright, and if he will look out at the
other, there will be a certain sobriety and dulness over the landscape.
You can settle which window you are going to look out at. If the
one--'in which ye greatly rejoice.' If the other--'ye are in heaviness
through manifold temptations.' You have seen patterns wrought in black
and white, you may focus your eye so as to get white on a black ground,
or black on a white ground, just as you like. You can do that with your
life, and either fix upon the temptations and the heaviness as the main
thing, or you can fix upon the new life, and the new wealth, and the new
hope, and the new security as the main things. If you do the one, down
you will go into the depths of gloom, and if you do the other, up you
will spring into the ethereal heights of sober and Christian gladness.
So then, brethren, this possibility depends on these things, the choice
of our main object of contemplation, and that breaks up into two
thoughts about which I wish to say a word. The reason why so many
Christian people have only religion enough to make them gloomy, or to
weight them with a sense of burdens and unfulfilled aspirations and
broken resolutions, and have not enough to make them glad, is mainly
because they do not think enough about the four things in which they
might 'greatly rejoice.' I believe that most of us would be altogether
different people, as professing Christians, if we honestly tried to keep
the mightiest things uppermost, and to fill heart and mind far more than
we do with the contemplation of these great facts and truths which,
when once they are beheld and cleaved to, are certain to minister
gladness to men's souls. These great truths which you and I say we
believe, and which we profess to live by, will only work their effect
upon us, so long as they are present to our minds and hearts. You can no
more expect Christian verities to keep you from falling, or to
strengthen you in weakness, or to gladden you in sorrow, if you are not
thinking about them, than you can expect the most succulent or most
nutritive food to nourish you if you do not eat it. As long as Christ
and His grace are present in our hearts and minds by thought, so long,
and not one moment longer, do they minister to us the joy of the Lord.
You switch off from the main current, and out go all the lights, and
when you switch off from Christ out goes the gladness.
Then another thing I would point out is that the possibility of this
co-existence of joy and of heaviness depends further on our taking the
right point of view from which to look at the sources of the heaviness.
Notice how beautifully, although entirely incidentally, and without
calling attention to it, Peter here minimises the 'manifold temptations'
which he does expect, however minimised, will make men heavy. He calls
them 'temptations.' Now that is rather an unfortunate word, because it
suggests the idea of something that desires to drag a man into sin. But
suppose, instead of 'temptations,' with its unfortunate associations,
you were to substitute a word that means the same thing, and is free
from that association--viz.,'trial,'--you would get the right point of
view. As long as I look at my sorrows mainly in regard to their power to
sadden me, I have not got to the right point of view for them. They
_are_ meant to sadden me, they are meant to pain, they are meant to
bring the tears, they are meant to weight the heart and press down the
spirits, but what for? To test what I am made of, and by testing to
bring out and strengthen what is good, and to cast out and destroy what
is evil. We shall never understand, even so much as it is possible for
us to understand, and that is not very much, of the mystery of pain
until we come to recognise that its main purpose is to help in making
character. And when you think of your sorrows, disappointments, losses,
when you think of your pains and sickness, and all the ills that flesh
is heir to, principally as being 'trials,' in the deep sense of that
word--viz., a means of testing you, and thereby helping you, bettering
you, and building up character--then it is more possible to blend the
sorrow that they produce with the joy to which they may lead. The
Apostle adds the other thought of the transitoriness of sorrow, and yet
further, the other of its necessity for the growth of humanity. So they
are not only to be felt, not only to be wept over, not only to make us
sad, but they are to be accepted, and used as means by which we may be
perfected. And when once you get occupied in trying to get all the good
that is in it out of a grief, you will be astonished to find how the
bitterness that was in it was diminished.
We may have the oil on the water, calming, though not ending, its
agitation. We may carry our own atmosphere with us, and like the diver
that goes down into depths of the sea, and cannot be reached by the
hungry water around his crystal bell, and has communication with the
upper air, where the light of the sun is, so you and I, down at the
slimy bottom, and with the waste of water all around us, which if it
could get at us would choke us, may walk at liberty, in peace and
gladness. And so, 'though the labour of the olive shall fail and the fig
tree not blossom, though the flocks be cut off from the folds and the
herd from the stalls,' we may joy in the Lord, and 'rejoice in the God
of our salvation.'