Contemporary Australians are adept at being the masters of their own world – or at least thinking they are.  Technologies like various social media along with an ever more personalised array of consumption possibilities reinforce, if not direct this phenomenon.  This can make the Holy Spirit’s call through the apostle Paul to continually rejoice, pray and give thanks seem at best a little quaint, and more likely naive.  But as the Spirit warns elsewhere: ‘Do not be deceived; God cannot be mocked’ (Gal 6:3).  The truth is that God’s exhortation to rejoice, pray and give thanks is for our own good and something that exists outside of our subjective thinking and feeling at the time.  It’s part of how God is faithful and keeps us blameless (1 Thess 5:23-24), indeed clothed in the garment of salvation and arrayed in Christ’s garment of salvation (Isaiah 61:10).  This truth stands outside whatever truth we invent for ourselves.  God blesses us with his truth – graciously addressing our untruths and leading us to the truth of his eternal faithfulness. Thanks be to God.