den you in sorrow, if you are not
thinking about them, than you can expect the most succulent or most
nutritive food to nourish you if you do not eat it. As long as Christ
and His grace are present in our hearts and minds by thought, so long,
and not one moment longer, do they minister to us the joy of the Lord.
You switch off from the main current, and out go all the lights, and
when you switch off from Christ out goes the gladness.

Then another thing I would point out is that the possibility of this
co-existence of joy and of heaviness depends further on our taking the
right point of view from which to look at the sources of the heaviness.
Notice how beautifully, although entirely incidentally, and without
calling attention to it, Peter here minimises the 'manifold temptations'
which he does expect, however minimised, will make men heavy. He calls
them 'temptations.' Now that is rather an unfortunate word, because it
suggests the idea of something that desires to drag a man into sin. But
suppose, instead of 'temptations,' with its unfortunate associations,
you were to substitute a word that means the same thing, and is free
from that association--viz.,'trial,'--you would get the right point of
view. As long as I look at my sorrows mainly in regard to their power to
sadden me, I have not got to the right point of view for them. They
_are_ meant to sadden me, they are meant to pain, they are meant to
bring the tears, they are meant to weight the heart and press down the
spirits, but what for? To test what I am made of, and by testing to
bring out and strengthen what is good, and to cast out and destroy what
is evil. We shall never understand, even so much as it is possible for
us to understand, and that is not very much, of the mystery of pain
until we come to recognise that its main purpose is to help in making
character. And when you think of your sorrows, disappointments, losses,
when you think of your pains and sickness, and all the ills that flesh
is heir to, principally as being 'trials,' in the deep sense of that
word--viz., a means of testing you, and thereby helping you, bettering
you, and building up character--then it is more possible to blend the
sorrow that they produce with the joy to which they may lead. The
Apostle adds the other thought of the transitoriness of sorrow, and yet
further, the other of its necessity for the growth of humanity. So they
are not only to be felt, not only to be wept over, not o