These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain,' (or might be') in you, and that your joy might be full.'
My joy might be in you'--a strange time to talk of His joy.' In half an hour he would be in Gethsemane, and we know what happened there. Was Christ a joyful man? He was a Man of sorrows,' but one of the old Psalms says, Thou hast loved righteousness … therefore God hath anointed Thee with the oil of gladness above Thy fellows.' The deep truth that lies there is the same that He here claims as being fulfilled in His own experience, that absolute surrender and submission in love to the beloved commands of a loving Father made Him--in spite of sorrows, in spite of the baptism with which He was baptized, in spite of all the burden and the weight of our sins--the most joyful of men.
This joy He offers to us, a joy coming from perfect obedience, a joy coming from a surrender of self at the bidding of love, to a love that to us seems absolutely good and sweet. There is no joy that humanity is capable of to compare for a moment with that bright, warm, continuous sunshine which floods the soul, that is freed from all the clouds and mists of self and the darkness of sin. Self-sacrifice at the bidding of Jesus Christ is the recipe for the highest, the most exquisite, the most godlike gladnesses of which the human heart is capable. Our joy will remain if His joy is ours. Then our joy will be, up to the measure of its capacity, ennobled, and filled, and progressive, advancing ever towards a fuller possession of His joy, and a deeper calm of that pure and perennial rapture, which makes the settled and celestial bliss of those who have' entered into the joy of their Lord.'
Brother! there is only one gladness that is worth calling so--and that is, that which comes to us, when we give ourselves utterly away to Jesus Christ, and let Him do with us as He will. It is better to have a joy that is central and perennial--though there may be, as there will be, a surface of sorrow and care--than to have the converse, a surface of joy, and a black, unsympathetic kernel of aching unrest and sadness. In one or other of these two states we all live. Either we have to say, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing,' or we have to feel that even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.' Let us choose for ourselves, and let us choose aright, the gladness which coils round the heart, and endures for ever, and is found in submission to Jesus Christ, rather than the superficial, fleeting joys which are rooted on earth and perish with time.
