IT is the expectation of our hearts to find sympathy from our friend in the hour of our sorrow. Perhaps because of our natural selfishness, we do riot so readily carry our joys as we do our sorrows to our friend. A little child, in its simplicity, runs with its pleasures and its pains to its parent, and will give its smiles even to a stranger; and oftentimes the smile of a child has awakened in the stubborn soul of a man memories of the past, which have saved him from deeper ruin.
In spiritual things there is surely a loss among God's people who fail to enter into the joys of the Lord in what He is doing on earth. Did we think of His joys as well as carry to Him our sorrows, we should be brighter and more Christ-like Christians.
" Rejoice with Me " are beautiful words, occurring as they do in that marvelous group of parables (Luke 15) which unfold to us the joy of God—the Son, the Holy Ghost, and the Father—over the lost sinner when found and brought home.
“Rejoice with me” says the shepherd to his friends and neighbors; “Rejoice with me" says the woman to her friend’s and neighbors; and the father, too, thus addresses the selfish elder brother, “It was meet that we should make merry and be glad."
Most high privilege is it on earth to be made the receptacle of the sorrows and the joys of a fellow man, to bear the burden together with the afflicted heart, to share the pleasure with the gladdened spirit. But consider, fellow Christian, the privilege of being called to rejoice with the Lord in His joys over a sinner being brought, by His grace, to the place where His love would have the sinner be.
There is essentially in the gospel a depth of gladness in the sense of divine grace, which fills the heart that realizes the grace; and where a Christian has settled down into a gloomy state of soul, we generally find he has drawn himself into his shell and has forgotten these gracious words of the Lord, “Rejoice with Me."