One of my favourite hymns is, ‘Rejoice! The Lord is King!’ by Charles Wesley. It is a powerful hymn, rejoicing that Christ Jesus reigns from heaven, that His kingdom cannot fail, that He is victor over all His foes and over all our sins, and that He has victory over death. The hymn celebrates Jesus’ reign as Lord and what that means. It celebrates Jesus’ victory over what is wrong in our lives—our sins—and in our world. The hymn is triumphant, and our response to Jesus’ triumph is to rejoice. It commands us to rejoice, and we are eager to do so: we sing, ‘Jesus, the Saviour reigns, The God of truth and love.’ The hymn rightly puts Christ Jesus at the centre of it all: we rejoice not because of our emotions, our situations, our own happiness for any reason; we rejoice because of Him.
The theme of joy
rings throughout the seasons of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. John the Baptist leaped for joy in Elizabeth’s
womb when he came into the presence of Jesus in Mary’s womb (Luke 1.44). Mary says, ‘My spirit rejoices in God my
Savior,... for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his
name’ (Luke 1.47, 49). The angel tells
the shepherds good news of great joy that Jesus the Savior, Messiah, and Lord
was born (Luke 2.10-11). Joseph and Mary
rejoice at the birth of their firstborn child.
The magi ‘rejoiced exceedingly with great joy’, Matthew tells us, when
they found Jesus the newborn king (Matthew 2.10).
In our lives, we
can be joyful about many things, such as that some plan worked out as we had
hoped, that we solved a problem, that we found someone to marry. We can be joyful in our situation in life:
our job, where we live, our families and friends. Yet the joy we now celebrate as believers in
Jesus Christ goes much deeper. It is the
joy of salvation. It is a joy we might
have even if our plan did not work out, even if we failed to solve a problem,
even if we are faced with hardship, even if our jobs are not all that
wonderful, even if our families and friends disappoint us. Like underground streams in the desert, the
theme of joy runs deeper in our lives than all such circumstances.[1]
The word ‘joy’ and words related appear 374 times in the English
Standard Version translation of the Bible.[2] Rejoicing runs through the entire Bible. The theme of joy and rejoicing is already part
of the worship of Israel in the Old Testament.
For instance, Psalm 35.9 says, ‘Then my soul will rejoice in the LORD,
exulting in his salvation.’ Psalm 64.10
says, ‘Let the righteous rejoice in the LORD and take refuge in him!’ The reason for joy is that our joy is in God;
we rejoice in the Lord God, who is forever the same, our Rock and our Salvation. Psalm 30 has those lovely words, ‘Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy
comes with the morning’ (v. 5b). The
last two verses of Ps. 30 are:
You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;
you
have loosed my sackcloth
and
clothed me with gladness,
12 that my glory may sing
your praise and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever!’
Note that to
rejoice is to testify to others of the God who turns our mourning into
dancing. In testifying of God’s goodness
we witness to others.
The joy that the Israelites had came because they knew that
God was their Saviour. This is the link
between the faith of Israel in the Old Testament and the faith of Christians in
the New Testament: our joy in God our Saviour.
While the word ‘joy’ is not mentioned, the theme of joy is present in
Exodus 15, when God delivers Israel from the pursuing Egyptian armies on
horseback. Safe on the other side of the
waters, the Israelites sing and the women dance because God has saved their
lives. They sing,
I will sing to the
LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
the horse and his rider he has thrown into the
sea.
2 The LORD is my strength and my song,
and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him,
my father’s God, and I will exalt him’ (Exodus
15.1-2).
Exulting in God, they sing,
‘Who is like
you, O LORD, among the gods?
Who is like you, majestic in holiness,
awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?’ (15.11).
God’s salvation was not just a salvation from enemies or
sickness or some unpleasant circumstances.
It was also a salvation from sin and death.
What was amazingly true for the Israelites escaping their
attackers was true at a much more fundamental level when God brought us all
salvation through Jesus Christ. If the
Israelites ended their song of rejoicing with the words, ‘The Lord will reign
forever and ever’ (Exodus 15.18), all people of the earth can sing about God’s
salvation through Jesus Christ the King.
In the words of Charles Wesley’s song, ‘Rejoice! The Lord is King!’ and ‘Jesus the Saviour
reigns’ and ‘His kingdom cannot fail’ and ‘Rejoice in glorious hope’—the first
lines of each stanza.
The Christian faith is one of exceeding joy. Indeed,
we Christians are exhorted to rejoice and sing praises. As Paul says, ‘Rejoice in the
Lord always; again I will say, rejoice’ (Philippians 4.4). When Paul lists the fruit that grows in our
lives from being filled with the Spirit of God, he includes ‘joy’ in the list: ‘love,
joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control’
(Galatians 5.22-23).
All of us, it is
true, know deep sadness, even depression.
Some of us live lives of pain or of regret or of grief or of guilt. Or life might simply be hard and
troublesome. Did Jesus not say to His
disciples in the upper room just before they were to be devastated by Jesus’
crucifixion, ‘In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have
overcome the world’? (John 16.33). Those
words, ‘take heart’, could be translated, ‘take courage’. How can we take courage in the face of
unbearable sorrow, in times of persecution, suffering, or when we experience
pain, surgeries, and news that our loved one’s sickness has no cure, or when we
face broken relationships, loss of love, loneliness, depression, and death
itself? Our courage is not in
circumstances. It is not in finding some
escape for a little while. The ground
for our courage is in Jesus, who has overcome the world. What does that mean, ‘I have overcome the
world’? Jesus is king because He has
overcome all our enemies, including and especially the enemies of sin and death. His death on the cross was for our sins; His
resurrection from the dead was His conquering death for us all. In Him we find abundant life. He has overcome that world of tribulation that
we all know so well. He has turned our mourning
into dancing. As Paul says,
What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against
us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all,
how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? 33 Who
shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. 34 Who
is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was
raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. 35 Who
shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or
persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36 As it
is written,
“For
your sake we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through
him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor
angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor
height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate
us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
No wonder Paul
could exhort Christians to rejoice! Such
joy is based on the certainty of the salvation that Jesus has already won for
us, no matter what we face.
We may
experience betrayal, be unfriended on Facebook, teased and bullied at school by
the cool kids. We may experience
brokenness, divorce, the shocking and sudden death of a child. We may have a
lingering illness and a body full of pain. The joys of life might dissolve as such
circumstances shrink our courage to nothing, and, in the smallness of a life
unable to experience anything beyond sadness and depression, we may lose all
faith, all hope, all joy. Feeling unloved,
we may enter into a space of darkest darkness.
For many of us, the circumstances of life take us down such a path, if
only for a while; and for others of us, we even lose our way and there remain.
I am not going
to say that such circumstances are overblown or not real. I will not tell you that you should deny the
pain you feel. It is real. What I can tell you is that there are streams
in the desert. Jesus said, ‘In the world
you will have tribulation. But take heart; [He has] overcome the world.’ What I can say to you is that Jesus is your
Savior as He is mine. Lean into Him,
rest in Him. He has already overcome the
world with all its troubles. In Him,
find new hope, new life, and joy.
We read toward
the end of the book of Hebrews that God has said, “‘I will never leave you nor
forsake you.” So we can confidently say,
“The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?”’ (Hebrews
13.5-6). You may be familiar with Robert
Lowry’s hymn, ‘How Can I Keep From Singing?’
The first stanza and refrain say:
My life flows on
in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation,
I catch the sweet, though far-off hymn
That hails a new creation.
Refrain:
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that Rock I’m clinging;
Since Christ is Lord of heav’n and earth,
How can I keep from singing?
If you are
facing some terrible storm in your life, you may or may not find some
circumstance on the horizon to give you hope for the day. Your ship may sink, frankly. Yet ‘while to that Rock I’m clinging...How
can I keep from singing?’ What an image!—a
shipwrecked sailor clinging to a rock.
And over the stormy waves and blowing winds we hear his voice—singing!
Or, to change
the image, remember that below the desert sands run deep streams of living
water. Christ is our salvation, our hope. Turn to Him.
Find Him among Christians of similar faith, in a community of hope. Find in Him that deeper joy beyond life’s
struggles. For Christ has died, Christ
is risen, Christ will come again. ‘Rejoice
in the Lord always! I will say it again,
‘Rejoice’.
A thousand years
ago, a Christian by the name of Bernard of Clairvaux wrote a hymn, the first
stanza of which says,
Jesus, Thou joy
of loving hearts,
Thou fount of life, Thou light of men,
from the best bliss that earth imparts,
we turn unfilled to Thee again.[3]
Bernard’s father
was a knight and friend of the Duke of Burgundy. He knew ‘the best bliss that earth imparts’—or
what it might impart back in the 12th century. Yet he knew better that the good life that
earth might offer left him unfulfilled.
Only by turning to Christ our Lord, could Bernard sing of the deeper and
unshaken joy that fills our hearts, ‘Jesus, Thou joy of loving hearts, Thou
fount of life’.
[1] Cf. Isaiah 35. God’s
redemption breaks forth like streams in the desert.
[2] ‘Joy’ appears 171 times, ‘rejoice’ 154 times, and other forms
another 49 times.
[3] ‘Jesus, Thou Joy of Loving Hearts!; Online: Jesu, Thou joy
of loving hearts! | Hymnary.org (accessed 12 January, 2025).
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