Christian pleasure isn’t shallow or sentimental. It’s rooted within the actuality of salvation and sustained even by struggling. On this excerpt from Alistair’s sermon “How Nice a Salvation!,” we hear how Peter encourages believers to rejoice within the midst of trials, realizing that their religion is being refined and their future is completely safe.
The enjoyment that’s recounted for us right here is an “inexpressible” pleasure, and it’s “crammed with glory.” It’s not solely pleasure then, however it’s pleasure even now—pleasure that’s completely different from happiness, pleasure which will maintain us in occasions of struggling and disappointment and trials.
Certainly all of us, if we had ten minutes of one another’s time, would inform of how we have now been tremendously helped by residing by an expertise with somebody who in probably the most devastating circumstances has, in a means that’s totally lifelike and smart, expressed a deep-seated conviction that they’re being held and saved by God and that there’s even pleasure within the midst of all of this.
Years in the past, in talking at a convention outdoors of San Francisco, I should have mentioned one thing alongside these strains, as a result of afterwards, a woman got here to me to inform me a narrative which was so stirring to me that I wrote it down, and that’s why I’ve nonetheless remembered it. It went alongside these strains: She got here to me, and she or he mentioned, “A pal of mine was struggling by mind most cancers and its remedies. His relationship with Jesus was such and his response to his trials had been such that the nurse that was on obligation wrote as a important remark in his chart, ‘Mr. X seems to be inappropriately joyful.’” In different phrases, she might discover no primary premise as to why there needs to be a radiance about this man. This can be a religious geography I can observe from a distance. I haven’t been in that place. However once I see it, I lengthy for it—that I would know this, that I would perceive this, that I would dwell within the mild of this.
