^ Have you ever spoken to any one who had passed out of storm and turbulence into the possession of Christ's peace ? Ask them what it means, and they will tell you that when Christ givea His peace, He takes the threat out of yesterday, the despondency out of to-day, and the fear out of to-morrow. When God is shut out of the secret place, His voice rings through it like the weird tolling of a funeral bell. But when God comes in and brings His peace, the threatening bell is silenced. As for to-morrow, for him who is perfectly joined to the Lord, anxiety and fear are lost in perfect trust, and perfect trust is the mother of perfect peace.^
Oh, this is peace ! I have no need Of friend to talk, of book to read : A dear Companion here abides; Close to my thrilling heart He hides; The holy silence is His voice: I lie and listen and rejoice.^
2. There will be peace in the community where righteousness prevails. Wherever there is any hesitation about lines of action, peace must step in and decide. Not self-assertion, not consistency, not stickling for rights, not punctiliousness about details, but peace must carry the day. " Peace I leave with you," said Christ, ^ J. H. Jowett. * John Townsend Trowbridge.
ROMANS — 29
450 A DEFINITION OF THE KINGDOM
and already the small band of believers is torn into factions quarrelling bitterly over questions of meat and drink.
^ The herald angels sang " on earth peace." Nineteen centuries have passed, and Christianity is still a revolutionary and disturbing element wherever it comes, and the promise seems to linger, and the great words that declared " Unto us a child is born . . . and his name shall be . . . The Prince of Peace," seem as far away from fulfilment as ever they were. Yes, because He is first of all King of Eighteousness, and must destroy the evil that is in the world before He can manifest Himself as King of Peace, His kingdom of Peace will be set up through confusion and destruction, overturning and overturning until the world has learned to know and love His name. First, King of Eighteousness — that, at all hazards ; that, though conflict may dog His steps and warfare ever wait upon Him — first, King of Eighteousness, and after that, King of Peace. So the sum of the whole thing is, peace is sure ; peace with God ; peace in my own tranquil and righteous heart; peace for a world from out of which sin shall be scom-ged ; peace is sure because righteousness is ours since it is Christ's.^
iii. Joy in the Holy Ghost.
1. When our life is righted with God in its most secret depths, when there comes into its secret place an unbroken peace, there also springs in the life a deep and quiet joy. " The kingdom of God is joy." Is righteousness the pole-star of our lives ? Is peace the music of our hearts ? If so, then to us, as to the shepherds of old, the message of the Epiphany is addressed, " Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy." If so, then on us, as true and faithful citizens, loyal to the laws and customs of the Kingdom, our Sovereign will confer His crowning privilege, " joy in the Holy Ghost." Not joy as men count joy ; no earthly passion and no transitory excitement; but the abiding inward satisfaction of a conscious harmony with the will of God.
2. Joy comes after peace. Eighteousness is the root ; peace the stem ; joy the blossom. The disappointment so often experienced in the search for happiness is traceable to the non- observance of this order. Joy is put before righteousness and peace.
' A. Maclareu.
ROMANS XIV. 17 451
Who are thy playmates, boy ?
"My favourite is Joy,
Who brings with him his sister Peace, to stay
The livelong day.
I love them both; but he
Is most to me."
And where thy playmates now,
O man of sober brow ?
"Alas! dear Joy, the merriest, is dead.
But I have wed
Peace; and our babe, a boy,
New-born, is Joy." ^
3. Joy grows out of peace. In growing calm we become more easily gladdened, more alive to gladdening influences. Why is it that we are so much more pleased to-day than we were yesterday ; why has the same scene so much more in it to set us singing, except that we are more at ease to-day than we were yesterday? "Wordsworth's inborn religious placidity," writes one, "had matured in him a quite unusual sensibility to the sights and sounds of the natural world, to the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and its echo, the pliant harebell swinging in the breeze, the sweetness of a common dawn, the dance
Of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees."
Mental placidity gives sensibility to many joys of life which in its absence would not thrill or touch us at all, opens our ears to the music of the spheres, and causes the spirit of delight to come to us often on very tiny wings.
If sin be in the heart, The fairest sky is foul, and sad the summer weather, The eye no longer sees the lambs at play together. The dull ear cannot hear the birds that sing so sweetly. And all the joy of God's good earth is gone completely,