Rejoice by Clara Edna Rosecrans

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 5, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 43.

Rejoice

By Clara Edna Rosecrans

By Clara Edna Rosecrans

OPENING my Morning Watch calendar to see what the portion of daily food was, I read this admonition: “Rejoice.”

Now, I had been “laid up” for more than a week with one of my periodical lame spells. I was confined to my room, unable part of the time even to wait on myself. My nerves were a perfect jangle of contending forces, which made it hard even to be patient. But to rejoice — why, that seemed impossible! Yet there it was, clear and plain — “Rejoice.”

Now I have known times when it was not only a duty to rejoice, but also a pleasure and a privilege. When some great and unexpected blessing has come to me — when some soul, dearer to me than my heart’s blood, for whom I have prayed perhaps for years, has at last turned to the Lord and yielded all into the keeping of his Father and mine — then — ah, then I could and did rejoice. When some great and overpowering fear — something before which my soul has trembled and been afraid — has been removed, and the angels have stood between me and terrible danger, moral and physical — then I have rejoiced. Some great agony of temptation has been mine, when in wrestling with Satan my soul has drunk deep with its Lord in the wilderness — only my spirit has well-nigh yielded. Then the angels came, and happiness filled my heart. Then could I sing with Miriam, as with the shaken timbrel she led the women in that inspired song of holy triumph, “Sing to the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously.” But surely I was not expected to rejoice to-day.

Then my eye went still farther and took in another word — “alway”! The two words formed the first clause in this wonderful verse — “Rejoice . . . always”! Ah, then it was just now — right here in my present environment — right here when the pain was sometimes almost unendurable — that I was to rejoice.

But over what was I to rejoice?

Down through the ages came the words, ringing clear and plain, pulsing with deep, tender meaning — the warmth and fervor of the heart of him who wrote them — “That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death.”

Ah, here was something of which to get hold! Here was something real and tangible, about which to rejoice — “the power of His resurrection”! It requires almighty power to raise the dead. No man or set of men can do it; and yet Paul speaks as if he were certain of this power. He says, “I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.” And if he died, there must have been a quickening again from the dead — “that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest.” Then if we feel the power of His resurrection day by day, is not this something about which to rejoice?

“The fellowship of His sufferings”! We count it a blessed privilege to be admitted to the confidence of our friends — to share their sorrows and bear their burdens; and here is a grander and holier privilege than was ever before accorded to humanity — that of uniting with divinity in the work of redemption.

As we labor together with Him in bringing souls into the truth, as our very souls go out in an agony of entreaty for the lost, we enter upon and grasp something of His sufferings; and as we by participation enter more and more into the fellowship of His sufferings, so shall we become partakers of His joy; for it is a law of our being that pain and sorrow must precede joy. Unless we have drunk of His cup of anguish, unless we have sacrificed worldly comfort and ease, and given as He gave — soul, body, spirit — for others, we can not know the

blessedness of heaven here and hereafter. For by this wonderful and mysterious union of God and man — this bitter sorrow and infinite joy commingled — is formed Christ within, “the hope of glory.”

We must love even as He loved, must give even as He gave — the heart’s blood, drop by drop, if we be called upon to make the sacrifice — or we can not be as He was in the world. It is only in this way that we can be made conformable to His death — holding ourselves ready not only to give up life for His sake, but to die that slower, more painful death, the death to self; to give up, one by one, the yearnings and desires of our natures — the love of home and friends, the desire for companionship and social pleasure — and take instead isolation, labor, care, ofttimes want and bitter heart travail.

Ah, friends, this is a test that must come to us all at some time in our life journey; and whether we meet it bravely, heroically, will make all the difference in the world to you and me. Jesus said, “I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!” And yet while He longed for its consummation — for the joys of home and the Father’s love — yet over and over we hear Him saying, “Mine hour is not yet come.” Lovingly, prayerfully, patiently, He went down into the dark shadows of Gethsemane. Patiently He emerged again from its death-like gloom, to climb the steeps of Calvary; and with that triumphant cry, “It is finished,” was rounded out and completed a life wholly yielded, beautiful in its self-renunciation. And through it all there was joy and perfect peace. Even when the mob was hooting around Him and the dreadful cry of “Crucify Him” struck terror into the hearts of His followers, there was peace, and He could stand and answer nothing at all.

And down through the long centuries since then, this same mighty power, carrying the weak, human body above and out of itself, has caused the soul to triumph over the most cruel torture that wicked men or demons could invent, and made the heart strong to meet death without flinching — even to “rejoice” amid the flames.

This — ah, this is being made conformable to His death; and we know that if we are “planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection.”

So, dear friends, let us suffer on just a little longer; and let us be cheerful, joyful, our faces reflecting the light from the city of many mansions just ahead; for even now we can see its battlements, rising tier on tier, until they reach the sunlit sky — this, the home of eternal peace.

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“It is right to be content with what we have, but not with what we are.”

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