The FIVE PROPERTIES Of a Joyful Message Found In The Gospel 1/2

Five ingredients are desirable in a message, yea, must all conspire to fill up the joyfulness thereof into a redundancy.

           First Property.  A message to be joyful must be good.  None rejoice to hear evil news.  Joy is the dila­tion of the heart, whereby it goes forth to meet and welcome in what it desires; and this must needs be some good.  Ill news is sure to find the heart shut against it, and to come before it is welcome.

           Second Property.  It must be some great good, or else it affects little.  Affections are stirred according to the degrees of good or evil in the object presented.  A thing we hear may be so inconsiderable, that it is no great odds how it goes, but if it be good, and that great also, of weighty importance, this causeth rejoicing proportionable.  The greater the bell, the more strength is required to raise it.  It must be a great good that raiseth great joy.

           Third Property.  This great good must intimately concern them that hear it.  My meaning is, they must have propriety in it.  For though we can rejoice to hear of some great good befallen another, yet it affects most when it is emptied into our own bosom.  A sick man doth not feel the joy of another’s recovery with the same advantage as he would do his own.

           Fourth Property.  It would much add to the joy­fulness of the news if this were inauditum or insper­atum—unheard of and unlooked for—when the tidings steal upon us by way of surprise.  The farther our own ignorance or despair has set us off all thoughts of so great enjoyment, the more joy it brings with it when we hear the news of it.  The joy of a poor swineherd’s son, who never dreamed of a crown, would be greater at the news of such a thing conferred on him, than he whose birth invited him to look for it, yea, promised it him as his inheritance.  Such a one’s heart would but stand level to the place, and therefore could not be so ravished with it, as another, who lay so far below such a preferment.

           Fifth Property.  To fill up the joy of all these, it is most necessary that the news be true and certain, else all the joy soon leaks out.  What great joy would it afford to hear of a kingdom befallen to a man, and the next day or month to hear all crossed again and prove false?  Now, in the glad tidings of the gospel, all these do most happily meet together, to wind up the joy of the believing soul to the highest pin that the strings of his affections can possibly bear.

1. The news which the gospel hath in its mouth to tell us poor sinners is good.It speaks promises, and they are significations of some good intended by God for poor sinners.  The law, that brings ill news to town.  Threatenings are the lingua vernacula legis —the native language of the law.  It can speak no other language to sinners but denunciations of evil to come upon them; but the gospel smiles on poor sinners, and plains the wrinkles that sit on the law’s brow, by proclaiming promises.
2. The news the gospel brings is as great as good.It was that the angel said, ‘I bring you good tidings of great joy,’ Luke 2:10.  Great joy it must needs be, be­cause it is all joy.  The Lord Christ brings such news in his gospel as that he left nothing for any after him to add to it.  If there be any good wanting in the ti­dings of the gospel, we find it elsewhere than in God, for in the covenant of the gospel he gives himself through Christ to the believing soul.  Surely the apos­tle’s argument will hold: ‘All things are yours and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s,’ I Cor. 3:22, 23.  The gospel lays our pipes close to the fountain of goodness itself; and he, sure, must have all, that is united to him that hath that is all.  Can any good news come to the glorified saints which heaven doth not afford them?  In the gospel we have news of that glory. ‘Jesus Christ, hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel,’ II Tim. 1:10.  The sun in the firmament discovers only the lower world; absignat cælum dum revelat terram—O it hides heaven from us, while it shows the earth to us!  But the gospel en­lightens both at once—‘Godliness hath the promise of the life that is now, and of that which is to come,’ I Tim. 4:8.