Horatius Bonar, the great Scottish preacher and hymnodist has some encouraging words for the Believer’s fight for joy. We are not called to glumness, but joy. However, we are not called to levity, but joy. Gloom and levity happen to be the cliffs on either side of the narrow way of joy. Enjoy these precious words of encouragement:
I do not mean, as I have said before, that the saint is ever to be gloomy. No. Gloom and melancholy are not our portion. “The lines have fallen unto us in pleasant places.” They are not the inmates of a soul that has tasted the joy of pardon and is walking in light, as a happy child with a loving father. But true joy is a serious thing. Its fountains are deep. It is the waking up of the heart’s deep springs. Mirth and levity are not joy. They are too shallow to deserve the name. Like the sun-flash on a stagnant pool, they are a mere surface gleam of light. There is nothing in them of the calm radiance illuminating the ocean depths many a fathom down, as if the waters themselves were a mass of solid sunshine, and remaining amid the heaving of the billows, unbroken and unobscured. In coming to Him, who is the fountain of all gladness, the saint of God bids farewell to gloom. Tribulation he may have- no, must have- but not gloom. That has left him forever since the day he knew the Savior, and opened his ears to the joyful sound. Peace is now his heritage.
But still it is not levity that is his portion. It is joy.
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