Peter takes it for granted that all these brethren to whom he is writing
have experience of this deep and ennobled joy. He does not say, 'You
ought to rejoice,' but he says, 'You do rejoice.' And yet a verse or two
before he said, 'Ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations.' So,
then, he was not blinking the hard, painful facts of anybody's troubled
life. He was not away upon the heights serenely contemptuous of the grim
possibilities that lurk down in the dark valleys. He took in all the
burdens and the pains and the anxieties and the harassments, and the
losses, and the bleeding hearts and the cares that can burden any of us.
And he said, in spite of them all, 'Ye rejoice.'
Do you? I am afraid there is no more irrefragable proof of the unreality
of an enormous proportion of the Christian profession of this day than
the joyless lives--in so far as their religion contributes to their
joy--of hosts of us. We have religion enough to make us miserable, we
have religion enough to make us uncomfortable about doing things that we
would like to do. We are always haunted by the feeling that we are
falling so far below our professions, and we are either miserable when
we bethink ourselves, or, more frequently, indifferent, accordingly. And
the whole reason of such experience lies here, we have not an adequately
strong and continued trust in Jesus Christ working righteousness in our
lives, nobleness in our characters, and so lifting us above the regions
where mists and malaria lie. Let us get high enough up, and we shall
find clear sky.
You call yourselves Christians. Does your religion bring any gladness
to you? Does it burn brightest in the dark, like the pillar of cloud
before the Israelites? 'Greek fire' burned below the water, and so was
in high repute. Our gladness is a poor affair if it is at the mercy of
temperaments or of circumstances. Jesus Christ comes to cure
temperaments, and to enable us to resist circumstances. So I venture to
say that, whatever may be our condition in regard to externals, or
whatever may be our tendencies of disposition, we are bound, as a piece
of Christian duty, to try to cultivate this joyful spirit, and to do it
in the only right way, by cultivating the increase of our faith in Jesus
Christ. 'Rejoice in the Lord always'; the man who said that was a
prisoner, with death looking into his eyeballs. As he said it, he felt
that his friends in Philippi might think the exhortation overstrained,
and so he repeated it, to show that he recognised the apparent
impossibility of obeying it, and yet deliberately enjoined it; 'and
again I say, rejoice.'