3 minute read
Living, drinking, feasting
MEDITATION
by Major Alistair Dawson
THREE words describe the rich and positive experience of my Christian life: living, drinking and feasting. They come from an old chorus:
I’m living on the mountain, underneath a cloudless sky, / I’m drinking at the fountain that never shall run dry;/ O, yes! I’m feasting on the manna from a bountiful supply, For I am dwelling in Beulah Land.
I guess I’m sentimental, but what an experience it is to really sing and enjoy that chorus. Yes, I’m living, I’m drinking and I’m feasting on the God who supplies my needs. ‘Know this: my God will also fill every need you have according to his glorious riches in Jesus the Anointed, our Liberating King’ (Philippians 4:19 The Voice).
Fear not that thy need shall exceed his provision,/ Our God ever yearns his resources to share;/ Lean hard on the arm everlasting, availing;/ The Father both thee and thy load will upbear.
Those words of Annie Johnson Flint have never been in the Salvation Army songbook, but the next verse in the same song has:
His love has no limits, his grace has no measure,/ His power no boundary known unto men;/ For out of his infinite riches in Jesus/ He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again. (SASB 30)
Am I alone in being sentimental? Perhaps the Founder also was when he penned the following words.
O boundless salvation! deep ocean of love,/ O fullness of mercy, Christ brought from above./ The whole world redeeming, so rich and so free,/ Now flowing for all men, come, roll over me! (SASB 509)
Living, drinking, feasting on and within the love of God – what a relationship to be in, to share and enjoy!
If God can love the whole wide world, then he is not going to have too much trouble loving me, for every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. As Herbert Booth wrote in a song that was in the 1986 songbook:
All my past is known to thee, Lord, let me come./ All my future thou canst see, Lord, let me come./ Take me, I can trust my all In thy hands whate’er befall,/ Then no tempest shall appal, Lord, let me come.
Why not take a quiet moment, and sing the words of Fanny Crosby’s hymn, ‘Pass Me Not, O Loving Saviour’ (SASB 782)? It will set your mind free for what is to follow, for we look out upon a world that has many opportunities to discover, as the Simon and Garfunkel song ‘Patterns’ put it, ‘The pattern of my life/ And the puzzle that is me.’ From early in life we all demand to be included, and so we plead, ‘And while others thou art calling,/ Do not pass me by.’
We have a need to be recognised, to be seen for who and what we are and to have the hope of inclusion in everybody’s affection. How many of us would love to know our true worth? That is one of the reasons I love the way Jesus met Zacchaeus: ‘And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and saw him’ (Luke 19:5 King James Version).
Perhaps nobody else had seen Zacchaeus that day, in the sense of valuing his true worth. The crowd that gathered murmured that Jesus had gone to be the guest of a man who was ‘a sinner’. One can only wonder why, knowing how the crowd felt and in the presence of Jesus, who truly loved him, he said, ‘Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold’ (v8 KJV).
No longer in the songbook, but worth recalling, are these words of Charles Wesley:
What am I, O thou glorious God,/ And what my father’s house to thee,/ That thou such mercies hast bestowed/ On me, the chief of sinners, me!/ I take the blessings from above/ And wonder at thy boundless love.
God’s love and understanding of my life open up a whole stage in my spiritual and emotional development. I am not the accumulation of other people’s thoughts and feelings, but the humble recipient of the God who came to my place, who looked up and who saw me.
The Polish-born writer Sholem Asch said: ‘To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.’ Is it not better to be the person God created you to be?
