7. We profit from the Word when we diligently preserve the balance between sorrow and joy. If the Christian faith has a marked adaptation to produce joy, it has an almost equal design and tendency to produce sorrow - a sorrow that is solemn, manly, noble. "As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing" (2 Corinthians 6:10) is the rule of the Christian's life. If faith casts its light upon our condition, our nature, our sins, sadness must be one of the effects. There is nothing more contemptible in itself, and there is no surer mark of a superficial character and trivial round of occupation, than unshaded gladness, that rests on no deep foundations of quiet, patient grief - grief because I know what I am and what I ought to be; grief because I look out on the world and see hell's fire burning at the back of mirth and laughter, and know what it is that men are hurrying to.
He who is anointed with the oil of gladness above His fellows (Psalm 45:7) was also "the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." And both of these characters are (in measure) repeated in the operations of His Gospel upon every heat that really receives it. And if, on the one hand, by the fears it removes from us and the hopes it breathes into us, and the fellowship into which it introduces us, we are anointed with the oil of gladness; on the other hand, by the sense of our own vileness which it teaches us, by the conflict between the flesh and the Spirit, there is infused a sadness which finds expression in "O wretched man that I am!" (Romans 7:24). These two are not contradictory but complementary. The Lamb must be eaten with "bitter herbs" (Exodus 12:8).
~A. W. Pink~
(continued with # 27 - "The Scriptures and Love")
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