"Love, where it is unobstructed, is always a joy. It is the deepest of all joys - the joy of the heart. 

And yet who can fail to see that this love is a species of death? It only exists by reason of a complete surrender of the very thought of self; the man loses himself in the being of another. The joy of love is the actual fruit of sacrifice, and would have no being apart from sacrifice.  It is the joy of a spirit that has ceased to behold itself in the glass of consciousness. It is the joy of a spirit which has lost its personal care in taking up the care of another, and which has found it's own burden to fall in the lifting of a burden which is not its own. (What parent cannot see this principle in sacrificing for one's own children? The principle is the same with all those we sacrifice for.) 

Jesus said, "Take my yoke upon you, and you shall find rest." The yoke which He asked his followers to take was the burden of humanity. He told them to enter into His own spirit of universal love. He did not conceal from them that this yoke would bring a load of universal care, but He said that the universal care would destroy the individual care and to the personal life bring rest: the new yoke would be easy and the new burden light. This thought pervades the parting utterances, "These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full." Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives give I unto you."

Jesus bequeathed to His followers a peace He possessed; Christ's peace was in the Cross, and it was in it for this reason that His Cross was made, not of wood, but of love. The cause of His suffering was the source of His individual rest. He had become oblivious of all personal pain, because love had given Him a pain that was impersonal; the throbbing of the pulse of humanity still His own.

  The object of Christ's love was humanity itself; not intellectual humanity, not aristocratic humanity, but suffering humanity, in every grade and of every order. The class to which He appealed was that of the laboring and heavy-laden, a category which, comprehending as it does the whole family both of active and of passive sufferers is absolutely coextensive with the universal life of man. It is as if He had said: you think that my kinghood is disproved by the burdens that I bear. I tell you that it is the bearing of these burdens that makes me a King. The new power which I bring into the world is a power of love, and therefore a power of sacrifice. This cross I carry, so far from being an obstruction to the realization of my kingdom, is itself the very scepter of that kingdom. That which I have won, that which I offer to My followers, is not the power to avoid the calamities of life, but the power to lift these calamities.

I offer to make each man king in proportion as he becomes a priest, bears witness in his own life to the truth of sacrifice. He shall be free and fearless and independent in proportion as he has died to self interest, lost the thought of self in the thought of another, succumbed to the burden of love; that is the power which has made Me king!" 

George Matheson - "Landmarks of New Testament Morality."