Disciplining for Rejoicing

Disciplining for Rejoicing

 

“There I will go to the altar of God, to God–the source of all my joy” (Psalm 43:4 NLT).

 

Our souls are of such a divine origin that no other joy but God can ever satisfy them. God made the soul for this high destiny, and His object, therefore, in all the discipline and training of life, is to bring us to the place where we will find our joy in Him alone. For this purpose He is obliged often to stain our pleasant pictures and thwart and disappoint our brightest anticipations. He detaches us from all else that He may attach us to himself, not from an arbitrary will, but because He knows that only so can we be really happy. I do not mean by this that it will be necessary for all one’s friends to die or for all one’s money to be lost; but I do mean that the soul will find itself, either from inward or outward causes, desolate and bereft and empty of all comfort, except in God. We must come to the end of everything that is not God in order to find our joy in God alone.

 

For every soul there must come a time to say, “Lo, this is [my] God; [I] have waited for him, . . . [I] will be glad and rejoice in his salvation” (Isa. 25:9). Through all the experiences of life this is what we are waiting for, and all our training and discipline is to lead us to this. I say “waiting for,” not in the sense of any delay on God’s part, but because of the delay on our own part. God is always seeking to make himself our “exceeding joy” (Ps. 43:4), but until we have been detached from all earthly joys and are ready to find our joy in Him alone, we must still wait for Him. We think that the delay is altogether on His part, but in reality it is He who waits for us.