Nehemiah 8:10

I. The text teaches that there is a time to be cast down with godly sorrow and there is a time to be uplifted with holy joy; and the second of these is always the fruit of the first. No heart was really ever moved with godly sorrow that did not, in God's good time, come to holy joy, and no heart ever came to holy joy that had not first been moved to godly sorrow.

II. Consider how we may get this joy of the Lord for ourselves, and what good it would do for us if we got it. (1) Its coming may be hastened in our hearts by looking more to Jesus and less to ourselves. (2) You may deepen this joy or hasten its coming by more thanksgiving in your approaches to the throne of grace. No believer is strong for God who has not learnt to rejoice in God.

III. The joy of the Lord is our strength when following after holiness. It is the want of this which makes many of us so slow in our progress in spiritual things. Let us ask God for more joy—joy to give us strength to do and to suffer for Him, strength to follow after and be made like Him, strength to trust Him at all times and look to Him in all circumstances, as Nehemiah did.

Bishop Maclagan, Penny Pulpit, No. 597.

I. Joy in the Lord is the natural result of Christian faith. There is a natural adaptation or provision in the Gospel, both in what it brings to us and in what it takes away from us, to make a calm, and settled, and deep gladness the prevalent temper of the Christian heart. I am not forgetting that, on the other side, it is equally true that the Christian faith has as marked and almost as strong an adaptation to produce a solemn sorrow—solemn, manly, noble, and strong. These two things are not contradictory; these two states of mind, both of them the natural operations of any deep faith, of any deep religious feeling, may coexist and blend into one another, so as that the gladness is sobered, and chastened, and made manly and noble, and that the sorrow is like some thunder-cloud, all streaked with bars of sunshine, that go into its deepest depths. The joy lives in the midst of sorrow; the sorrow springs from the same root as the gladness. And yet the sorrow is surface and the joy is central; yet the sorrow springs from circumstance, and the gladness from the essence of the thing; and therefore the sorrow is transitory and the gladness is perennial.

II. The "joy of the Lord" (rejoicing in God, that is to say) is a matter of Christian duty. It is a commandment here, and it is a command in the New Testament as well. The joy of the Lord is a duty (1) because the natural adaptation of the Gospel is to produce it; (2) because you can control your emotions; and (3) because you can wisely and rightly apprehend the prevalent cast of the Gospel as an outward system which you profess to believe and, if you do it, it will be joy, and not sorrow, which will mainly mark your Christian experience. There are two things which have a great deal more to do with the absence of gladness from the Christian life than disposition and temperament. The one is an actual deficiency in the depth and reality of our faith, and the other is a misapprehension of the position which we have a right to take and are bound to take.

III. Rejoicing in the Lord is a source of strength. All gladness, all cheerfulness, has something to do with our efficiency; for it is the prerogative of man that this force comes from his mind, not from his body. For strength there must be hope; for strength there must be joy. If the arm is to smite with vigour, it must smite at the bidding of a calm and light heart. The Christian work is of such a sort as that the most dangerous opponent to it is simple despondency and simple sorrow. "The joy of the Lord is strength."

A. Maclaren, Sermons Preached in Union Chapel, Manchester, p. 151.

Notice:—

I. The essential joyousness of God. This is seen in three illustrations—(1) in nature; (2) in the Christian revelation; (3) in the spiritual life.

II. The blessedness of apprehending the essential joyousness of God. Joy is the tonic of the mind. (1) The joy of others may be our strength. (2) The name of the Lord is, above all, the strong tower into which the righteous runneth and is safe. There is an infinite geniality in God. To contemplate the joyousness of God is to have our trust in Him made as tender as it is firm; it inspires us with the perfect love which "casteth out fear," the love which is, and ever must be, the true fortitude of the soul.

A. Mackennal, Life of Christian Consecration, p. 146 (see also Christian World Pulpit, vol. viii., p. 314).

I. There are some precepts introduced into the Bible which would seem superfluous. One of these is St. Paul's command to rejoice evermore. There is a seeming incongruity in the command to rejoice thus introduced among such profound spiritual actions as "Pray without ceasing," etc. Paul wished to counteract the tendency to a life of dreamy, speculative idleness; he sought to teach that God had not only spoken from eternity chaste cheerfulness for men's hearts, but He urged them on with a Diviner knowledge to make them glad in the possession of His secret.

II. The proper tone of the Christian mind is not sadness and severity, but brightness and cheerfulness, and this not for the Christian's pleasure only, but as his strength in the day of trial. It is the looking away from self into the mysteries of God which ministers to the "joy of the Lord." The more we grasp with our whole heart the objective truths of the Gospel, the more bright will glow our hearts, the more filled will be our souls with a Divine joy.

III. Look at this gladness, not as a mere source of pleasure, but as a source of spiritual strength. (1) There are certain temptations to which a joyous temperament is at once a bar. For example, hardness in judging others, malice, pride, can scarcely coexist with brightness and cheerfulness of heart. (2) The power of exertion revives after sorrow from the habit of looking at the brighter side. (3) Gladness in God is essentially strength against unbelief. Teach a man to find happiness in his Sundays, a gladness in the going up to the house of the Lord, knitting the pleasures of his life with the mysteries of his faith, and the wave of unbelief will only break itself upon him.

Bishop Woodford, Christian World Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 248.

The crowning revelation of Old Testament times is given to that reformer who, coming up from the land of exile to re-create and renew the people of the Lord, cheers and inspirits them with the assurance that God overflows with delight in His chosen, works out their salvation in a festal mood, and commissions them to minister to each other's necessities with ungrudging bounty and a deathless hope; for, says he, "the joy of the Lord is your strength."

I. God's joy a stronghold! Assuredly and unspeakably. (1) When once there is breathed into us, so as to fill and uplift us above the low zones of our world-life, this sense of the eternal Father delighting in the sons of men and in the mercy He gives them, forthwith the world of nature is a new creation, instinct with a new significance, and potent with an evangelical energy. (2) Nor is this less true of the bitter and painful experiences that make so large and obtrusive a portion of our earthly life; for they, too, are a part of the Divine order and plan of a loving and rejoicing Father, who finds His own joy diminished by our needless pain, and is seeking by all means to make us partakers of His holiness, so that we may be sharers of His happiness. (3) The joy of the Lord is a stronghold into which we may run and be safe from the fear of death.

II. The joy of the Lord is the source of our active, self-forgetting generosity. Whatever God is for us and to us, it is that we may be the same for and to others. The exhaustless fountain of the Divine gladness fills our cisterns till they overflow for the refreshing of a thirsty world. Joy in the Lord is strength, positive, actual power, for ministry.

J. Clifford, Daily Strength for Daily Living, p. 401.

I. The source of Christian joy is God. God is absolutely happy in Himself, and happy in relation to His creatures. (1) We can tell something of a man's character and disposition by his works. God's works are full of gladness. There is joy in the streams, the woods, the meadows, the cornfields. (2) As in nature, so in grace. The note to which all the music of the Gospel is attuned is "glad tidings of great joy." (3) God makes us joyful by removing from us the sources and elements of our misery. He bestows salvation, and gives His Spirit, and "the fruit of the Spirit is joy."

II. This joy is the secret of Christian strength. The joy of the Lord is our strength (1) for service; (2) against temptation; (3) for endurance.

III. The joy of the Lord therefore becomes a Christian law of life. To neglect our joys is to leave our work undone.

J. W. Burn, Contemporary Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 163.

References: Nehemiah 8:10.—S. Cox, Congregationalist, vol. i., p. 710; J. H. Evans, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. x., p. 77; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. xi., p. 83; H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1521; Homiletic Magazine, vol. xiii., p. 146; Preacher's Monthly, vol. vi., p. 153; Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Genesis to Proverbs, p. 112.