Rejoice in the Lord always!
1. Rejoice in the Lord.
“Surely all redeemed men and women will want to rejoice in the Lord. Our sins have been forgiven! We have been declared righteous because another has borne our guilt. We have received the gift of the Spirit, the down payment of the promised inheritance that will be ours when Jesus comes again. We are children of the living God. Our lives may be fraught with difficulty, but eternity awaits us, secured by the Son of God. We shall see Christ face to face and spend eternity in the purest worship and in consummated holiness. If we fail to respond with joy and gratitude when we are reminded of these things, it is either because we have not properly grasped the depth of the abyss of our own sinful natures and of the curse from which we have been freed by Jesus or because we have not adequately surveyed the splendor of the heights to which we have been raised.” —Don Carson
2. Rejoice always.
“Every single thing that happens to us expresses God’s love to us and comes to us for the furthering of God’s purpose for us. Thus, so far as we are concerned, God is love to us—holy, omnipotent love—at every moment and in every event of every day’s life. Even when we cannot see the why and the wherefore of God’s dealings, we know that there is love in and behind them, and so we can rejoice always, even when, humanly speaking, things are going wrong. We know that the true story of our life, when known, will prove to be, as the hymn says, ‘mercy from first to last’—and we are content.”—J.I. Packer