S. THE JOY WITH GOD.

THE JOY WITH GOD.

Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost. Luke 15:16. The law that "a man is known by the company he keeps" works upward as well as downward. We are too apt to give it mostly a downward operation. If a man seeks the society of ruffians and thieves, we are ready enough to think that he himself is coarse and dishonest; but if a man tries to live in the company of good and reputable people, we are not so ready to believe that he too is pure and trustworthy. We wonder whether it is not for the purpose of making himself seem respectable and shielding himself under the shadow of their goodness; we wonder whether he may not be an impostor or a toady. It is part of our suspicious and despondent disposition to attribute a strength to wickedness which we will not allow to goodness; but really goodness is the stronger power, and more natures in the world to-day are being made noble and pure by keeping company with nobleness and purity, than are being made base by the contagion of baseness. Think of the children with their fathers and their mothers, think of the unselfish and exalting friendships, think of the ’generous ambitions which every great good man inspires, and, disposed as you may be to think ill of human life, you must own that it is so.

It is of this companionship with the good, with the best, that I am to preach to you to-day. The good shepherd bringing home his sheep says, "Rejoice with me, for I have found it." We think about the shepherd and about the sheep, but all the while, surrounding the familiar parable, there is a dim and shadowy company of whom we do not often think. They are the shepherd’s friends. He claims their friendly sympathy; and so they represent to us the people everywhere who are known to be good by their society with goodness, who are both shown to be noble and pure, and also are made to be nobler and purer by their power to rejoice with the noblest and purest natures in their success. To "rejoice with" a fellow-man implies a very intimate association with him. You may work with a man, sell goods at the same counter, or dig dirt in the same ditch, and that is mere companionship of habits. You may think with a man, have the same conception of what your work is, and how it ought to be done; that is companionship of mind. But there comes a deeper kind of company when you come to share your fellow-worker’s joy, when you are glad with an echo of his gladness and feel enthusiasm answering to his; then there is real companionship of nature. "Idem velle et idem nolle," to love and hate alike, — that has always been the expression of the closest union. For a man’s joy in what he has to do is the heart and soul of his relation to it; or rather it is the relation of his heart and soul to it. Faithfulness to one’s work may be only an outside bondage, but joy in it is a relationship of heart to heart, — of the heart of the man to the heart of his task. He, then, who enters into a worker’s joy enters into fellowship with the worker’s heart, and must come close to him.

It follows from all this that there can be no sign of sharing a great man’s greatness like the power to rejoice with him in the success of his great works; and it is a kind of partnership with him which is open to any fellow-man who, however inferior to him in powers, however incapable of doing the great thing himself, is in such sympathy with the great man’s fundamental desires that he is capable of being glad because his friend is glad. Here is where little men and great men may freely come together. You and I perhaps know nothing about natural science, but we hear that some great scientific discovery has been made, and instantly we think how glad the man must be who made it; and in our rejoicing with him we are brought at once into an association with this new discovery which would otherwise have been entirely indifferent to us. We perhaps know nothing about art, but we see the artist’s eye kindle as his inner vision of beauty takes color on canvas, or takes shape in stone; and being glad that he is glad, we pass over through his human sympathy and have some part in that artistic triumph with which we could have established no direct connection. And even when the work is not the man’s own but merely one which he is capable of appreciating as you are not, still your joy in his joy may be the means of introducing you to regions from which you would otherwise be entirely excluded. It may be that some great advance of Christianity is noted, — perhaps some advance of Christian thought in which man’s reverent study has reached a little deeper into the mystery of God, perhaps an advance of Christian activity by which the Gospel has filled some new darkness of heathenism with its light. You are glad, but you are not Christian enough to be very glad; but close at your side there stands a man who is Christian through and through. You can feel his soul leap and dilate. He looks round to you for sympathy in his delight, and you catch the kindling of his eye. Do you not know the process? At first you are only glad that he is glad; but it cannot stop there. When you have gone as far as that, his gladness takes you into its power. Through him you pass over to his interest. You see that it must be a great joy which could make such a man so happy, and by and by you are glad with an echo of his gladness. You are triumphant over the same success of Christianity in which he so heartily rejoices.

Herein lies the interpreting power of great enthusiastic men. They bring out the value of things so that other men can see them. They stand with their need of human sympathy and look from the things which they love and admire to their fellow-men and cry to them, "Rejoice with us!" and it is in the effort to answer their demand for sympathy that the loveliness and admirableness of the thing they praise becomes apparent to the eyes of common men. This is what happens when you walk through a great picture gallery with a true artist. At first you are surprised, perhaps you are disgusted at yourself. You find yourself praising the pictures that he praises and having no eyes for anything which he passes by with indifference. You say, "I have no mind of my own. I am his mere echo. I do not really like these things, I am only trying to like them because he does." But very possibly you are wrong. It is very likely that your artist companion is revealing to you what you are perfectly capable of appreciating, although you are not capable of discovering it. The revelation comes not through any formal lecture that he gives, but through the subtler and finer medium of sympathy with his delight. That it is real appreciation and not mere imitation you will feel sure when by and by you go back alone to the picture and find that still, though he is no longer with you, the charm which you felt in it through him remains. He has not blinded but enlightened your perceptions; and, much as they may afterward develop their individuality and show how different they are from his, still they will always owe to him the debt for their first enlightenment, as the flower comes to shine in the sunlight with a color that is all its own, but yet would never have shone at all if the sunlight had not first shone upon it.

I suppose that almost all one’s patriotism gets more of its life in this way than we know. It is the great patriots that interpret the value of their country to the common citizen. The man absorbed in his own small affairs, or so restricted in his power of thought that he would never have taken in the national idea for himself abstractly, sees how Washington and Webster and Lincoln loved the land; and through their love for it, its worthiness of his own love becomes made known to him. Still his love for his country, when it is awakened, is his own, and may impel him to serve her in most peculiar personal ways, very different from theirs, but none the less it is true that but for the interpretation of these great men’s honor for her, he would have honored his country less or not at all. Can we not see how necessary it is that all of us should live with men who are greater than ourselves, and try to share their joys? We cannot afford to shut ourselves up to the value of those things whose value we ourselves are able to discover. Live with enthusiastic, noble men and you will find the world opening its inspiring delights to you on every side. If charity to you is dull and stupid, if you cannot conceive what pleasure it can give to help the poor, go and put your life as close as possible to the most enthusiastic helper of the poor that you can find. Stand where, when he has made a poor man’s lot the brighter and looks round for someone with whom to share his pleasure, his kindling eye shall fall on you. That is the truest way, — to put yourself at least close to the gate which leads to the delight in charity, even though it be only close to it on the outside. When he turns round and says to you, "Rejoice with me, for I have made an unhappy man happy," then it may be that the door will open and you too can go in yourself to the delightful service of your fellowmen! But now it is time to turn more directly to our text. In the parable of Jesus it is the shepherd returning from his search with the rescued sheep upon his shoulders who calls out to his friends, "Rejoice with me!" The Shepherd of the parable we know is Christ Himself, and Christ is the manifestation of God in the world. In this familiar picture, then, we have the voice of God calling on all His children to rejoice in the good work which He is able to do for any one of His children. Let me point out to you a few of the ideas which that picture suggests. Do we not feel at once how this agrees with all that we know about the will and ways of God? Nothing that we have seen of Him ever gives us the idea of a great Lord standing outside of His estate and helping, however kindly, each one of His subjects by himself, without reference to the rest. God uses man to save his fellow-man. He brings in all the machinery of social life and folds it around the special soul which He wants to rescue, and bids it help, and delight in helping, the unfortunate and lost. This is the very commonplace of our observation of God’s ways. He works through human means, we say. And at the root of this disposition to rescue man by man — to work by human means — I am sure that there lies the fact of a very close and vital and essential union between God and man; that old truth to which we are forever coming back. When God calls in the aid of man for fellowman, or when God summons man to rejoice in fellowman’s salvation, it is not a baffled workman calling for help to do work which he cannot do himself, nor is it a conqueror commanding the crowd to shout his praises. It is something wholly different from either. It is the father of a family gathering around himself the other children and telling them of the need or of the rescue of one child whose interests are theirs as well as his, in saving whom they and he are really one.

You have a friend who has fallen into some wretched vice. As clearly as if God’s voice spoke to you out of the sky you hear the divine summons to go and rescue that poor soul. You go, and by and by that soul is brought back into purity and honesty again; and then there comes into your heart that old familiar consciousness which has been in such multitudes of hearts, that it is not really you but God who has saved him. It is God using you. Behind your power you feel a stronger power. Above your joy you are aware of another joy as much more joyous as the perception of the wretchedness of the vice from which the rescued soul has escaped is more intense. That joy and your joy are not two but one. Your joy rests upon and is fed out of that joy as the sunlight rests upon and is fed out of the sun. Never are your soul and God’s soul so near together as in that common joy; never are you more perfectly and consciously his child than when, in a delight which cannot be divided and portioned into shares between you, but is blended and mingled as one single emotion, you rejoice together over the finding of the sheep which was lost.

Another thought which is suggested by the picture is the need of God for human sympathy. In many forms that idea is seen floating through the Bible. It is not easy to grasp. When we try to define it and realize it in detail it often eludes us and bewilders us, sometimes it almost shocks us; but we feel its fascination, and we know that there is truth in it. God’s need of human sympathy! At first it seems as if there were some weakening in our conception of God in such a thought as that. That God should care what we poor mortals think about His ways, that it should make any difference to Him whether we see the beauty of His character and love, — that seems to weaken Him. Why should He not go on His way, content with His own perfection, regardless of what we or any other creatures in His universe may think of what He does? That, we say, is our idea of the greatest greatness. But is it? It is our first idea, no doubt. Our earliest thought of greatness is entire self-containment; but by and by that thought becomes crude and vulgar in comparison with another loftier and finer thought which comes up to take its place. By and by always the greatest men are seen fulfilling their greatness by an earnest and loving demand that lesser natures should complete their happiness by sharing it. The savior of his country wins not less but more respect, does not detract from but increase his dignity, when a new lustre kindles in his eye at the sight of men, women, and little children who come crowding round him with shouts of triumph over the liberty and peace which he has won for them. The same is true of God. It is the passage from the low and crude into the loftier and finer thought of God when we conceive of Him as caring for His children’s thought of Him.

It is the sign of how fine and high and true the Bible thought of God is that the pages of the Old and New Testaments are full of this idea. It comes to its completest utterance in Christ, in the sublime sensitiveness of the character of Him who, while He never swerved an inch out of His path to win a man’s applause or to escape a sneer, yet lets us freely see through His transparent story how the face grows sad when the half-hearted disciples turn their back on Him and go away, and how it brightens when Peter calls Him the world’s Saviour, or when even in the agony of death a fellow-sufferer cries out to Him for mercy and owns Him as the King of Paradise. Surely it sets some of our false ideas of greatness right, and lets us see that the truest dignity is to be attained not in separation from our brethren but in closest sympathy with them, even in urgent need of them, when we hear Christ, full of the manifested power and mercy of God, appealing to men to rejoice with Him in the fulfillment of His glorious work.

Again the summons of God for men to join Him in His joy appears to open a new region of motive, which, if it really becomes influential with any of us, must become very strong indeed in inciting us to noble work. Who does not know how we need every motive which we can have to keep us faithful to the good works which we know ought to be done, but from which our hands so often drop discouraged? The pleasure of the task itself; the harm and misery which will result if someone does not do it; the gratitude of those for whom it is directly undertaken; the sympathy and honor of our fellow-men, — I am sure that there are many of you who hear me who have often and often summoned all of these motives and bidden them inspire your hesitating will to do some half-attractive, half-repugnant duty of righteousness or charity. Perhaps some of you now, with such a duty just before you, are calling almost desperately for these powerful champions to come and strengthen your weakness, lest you fail. And yet, with all the strength that comes from them, how weak you are! Can you imagine another motive which, without interfering with or crowding out any of these, might possibly come in and multiply their strength with all the intenseness of your love for God? What if you could know that if you did that duty bravely and faithfully God would be glad; what if you could know that if you thought out your hard problem honestly, or overcame your lust manfully, God would send down His message to you, " I am rejoicing with you, oh, my child; come and rejoice with me that you have conquered! Would not that make you stronger? Would it not be as if at last the captain had joined his hesitating and imperiled army when such a motive as that came in, shining and confident, among the half-dismayed and frightened motives which had been trying to rally and lead on your life. But a man may be sure of that, a man must be sure of that, if he is genuinely certain that there is a God at all. From the shop-boy tempted to steal, up to the leader of some goodly cause tempted to lower his standard in discouragement, there is no human being set to do duty who may not, if he will, throw behind his own weakness this great strength. "If I can only persevere, if I only can be faithful, I may rejoice with God! If I fail and give up, the door closes upon that inmost chamber of the soul’s company with God in which it shares His joy. "There are souls as incapable of feeling the power of that motive as a deaf man is of responding to the trumpet; but to any soul which can feel it and answer to it there comes strength which almost insures success.

All these are ways in which it helps a man when he hears God calling upon him to rejoice with Him in His salvation of the world. But I think on the whole that there is no help coming to us out of such a summons which helps us more than that which corresponds to the enlightenment that I tried to describe at the beginning of my sermon as coming from man to man when such an invitation passes from one to the other. When God bids us rejoice with Him in the salvation of a soul, it is a revelation to us of what a precious thing a soul must be. I pictured the artist going through a gallery and bidding you rejoice with him in some great picture, and I bade you remember how in the light of his summons you saw the picture’s greatness. I pictured the patriot interpreting the value of their country to the great host of his duller fellow-citizens. Now think what an illumination must come to a man who is working sluggishly for some good cause when the fact of God’s love for what he works for gets into his heart. You are working along in our sluggish missionary way, doing with weary punctiliousness your yearly task for the conversion of the world, contributing when Epiphany comes round a little piece of money of such a size that if every man in the church contributed as much once every year the Gospel would be preached to all the world in about a hundred thousand years. As you are lounging so over your task, you hear of some heathen tribe which has cast away its idols and accepted Christ. You know what that means for them. You know it means a new, clean life, family purity, education, liberty, the lifting of all life into self-respect, and the quickening of the vision and the hope of souls which used to lie in darkness and the shadow of death. You read the news, and you think it is a good thing, and then you are just about to turn back to your business when out of heaven there comes down a voice to you, crying, "Rejoice with me! Rejoice with me! "It is the voice of God! The God of the spirits of all flesh. Behold, to Him this bit of tidings from the southern seas seems to be full of glory. Can you hear His summons and not see anew how glorious the tidings are?

Some friend here by your side attains to a new life, casts off the sloth or vice which has been crushing him into a brute and begins to live for God. He begins to know his own soul. He grows ashamed of sin. He sees visions of purity and spiritual growth before him which make time and eternity glow with hope. He sets himself down to the long, hard, patient, glowing struggle of duty. He takes his stand on Christ’s side. He breaks his old comradeship and calls all good men his brethren; and you, a good man, a Christian man, say, "I am glad of it. My friend always was kindly and honest, now he is all right. He has joined the church. He is where he ought to be. " And then, perhaps, you set yourself to wondering what sort of a church it is that he has joined, and noticing whether he bows in the creed or not, and asking whether he is going to be a high churchman or a low churchman! And just then comes the song of the Shepherd, bringing home His treasure, "Rejoice with Me, for I have found My sheep which was lost." That is what this man’s conversion means for Jesus Christ. It is a lost soul rescued into the family of God, and the heart of the family is richer for the return of this lost fragment. Is there no revelation there for you which makes the whole transaction seem a different thing? Is not your brother’s soul more precious when you see how Christ cares for it? Do you not want to help your Lord in the completion of that soul’s salvation, even as the undershepherds might have run to meet the rescuer whose voice they heard, and taken his burden off his shoulders, and tended the rescued sheep, and fed it until it was strong again, — as they might have done all this when they read the value of the sheep in what their Lord was ready to do to save it?

You hear of the partial success of some good cause. You know the cause is good, but men despise it; they call it fanatical, quixotic, or something else as foolish. Someday it wins a success, and you are glad, but you keep your gladness to yourself. You hear men in the streets sneering at this unpopular thing which is presumptuously daring to be successful without their support, and you are slavish and cowardly and hold your peace. What a rebuke and what a freedom comes when out of heaven you hear the voice of Christ triumphant ever this, over which the streets and the clubs are so contemptuous, and calling to you, "Rejoice with me, for another of my good causes has succeeded. " This is the way in which causes often get possession of the world. The men who are most in sympathy with God become aware that God rejoices in the cause’s success; so they have its desert interpreted to them till they too desire it earnestly; and then in their turn they interpret to their fellow-men what God has first interpreted to them, till ultimately the fire which starts from the central heart of all runs through the world, and the blindest are enlightened to discern, and the most timid become bold enough to praise, the movement which at first had no friend but God.

I know that when I speak thus I am drawing out into distinct definition what, as it works in the human soul, is only vaguely realized. It is not analyzed as I have tried to analyze it. It lies in the memory as a half-conscious experience. But yet I think that as I close I may appeal to your experiences and ask you to bear witness to what I have been saying. If ever, as you worked conscientiously but feebly at some good work, you have been conscious, however dimly, that you were not working alone but that your work was dear in some way to the Heart on which all our life rests; if ever, trying to help your brethren, you have known as a richer motive than your love for them the love of God to whom their souls were dear; if ever duty, struck for an instant by the certainty that it was God’s wish, has blazed into sudden beauty as a diamond blazes when it is smitten by the sun, — in any of those experiences you have known what it was to hear God call to you, "Come, rejoice with Me! "

It must be a noble, happy life which lives in such experiences all the time. It must be a life calm, exalted, active, independent; and yet see how simple are the conditions of such a life! It is simply a life whose ears are open, through constant sympathy with God, to hear what God loves and desires, and whose heart has so accepted Him as its Master that His desires become its desires through its admiring love. They are sublime conditions, but they are wonderfully simple. They are the conditions which any soul must reach which has been really brought back out of its sins and forgiven and reconciled to God by Jesus Christ. Into that life, by what way He chooses, may He bring us all!