AN UNPREACHED SERMON (158)
This is a picture of Rudyard Kipling - nothing to do with 'exceedingly good cakes.'
The writings of Rudyard Kipling are long out of fashion, but the first verse of one of his poems, learned at the school, has been a great help to me when trying to get to the meaning of a Bible passage. It’s a little verse that can apply to almost any part of the Scripture you happen to be studying. Here are the lines:
“I keep six honest serving-men:
(They taught me all I knew).
Their names are What and Where and When
And How and Why and Who”.
Last week I found myself using them in relation to a Christmas card I had received. The end of year greeting made use of a Bible verse and was the way the sender wanted to wish me well for Christmas and the New Year together. The card struck me as a clever combination of the two. I pass the verse on to you.
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13 ESV).
Surely, there can be no more comprehensive prayer than that for each other as we prepare to say farewell to the old year and move into the new? Five of our “honest serving-men" point us to how all-embracing a benediction this is. Some of the most magnificent words of our faith are found in this Pauline prayer. Our honest serving-men can help us appreciate their grandeur and depth.
WHO?
The prayer is addressed to “The God of hope”. He is the only real source of our ultimate hope for the future. Said Dr Jowett, “It is in God that assurance is born, and a fruitful optimism sustained”.
WHAT?
Several things are mentioned and echo what Paul mentioned previously (Rom 14:7).
• Joy always carries with it the idea of something permanent, not merely transient like happiness. At this time of the year everyone wants a little happiness, but for so many it never seems to last. Once the decorations are packed away into the garage for another year, any sense of happiness can so easily be boxed up as well. Joy remains always.
• Peace is not necessarily the absence of trouble; we all long for that both at the personal and global levels. But the peace of God which passes all understanding is an abiding consciousness that “it is well with my soul”. This can only come from a clear realisation that having been reconciled to God through Christ there is a deep well of sheer contentment within us. I like to think of it as a sense of “unshakeable undisturbedness”.
• All peace and joy. These two qualities belong together; joy and peace resting on everything; touching our affections, guiding our decisions and stilling the conscience.
• Fullness is implied in how Paul prays for these qualities to fill our lives, not that we just experience them spasmodically. God is not in the business of making us feel good from time to time - but all the time, including the bad times.
I rather like the way many at this time of the year choose to brighten up their homes with lights, (although I draw the line at illuminated reindeer in front gardens and inflatable Santas on rooftops).
You would have to be a real Scrooge, however, to walk down a darkened street and not feel a warm glow within you as you pass house after brightly lit house. The Lord longs to illumine every window in the house of our lives with His shining presence of joy and peace.
WHY?
The answer is not hard to find: “So that you overflow” with the qualities Paul prays for. Older translations speak about “abounding in hope”. We could almost say, “bubbling over”,so long as you don’t imagine it means you are to have a bubbly personality all the time. What it does imply is that every part of life, every sphere of activity and every combination of circumstances are to be infused with and increasing in hope. It seems to have been one of Paul’s favourite words for in this epistle alone he makes use of it twice to express the overflow of God’s glory (Rom 3:7), the overflow of God’s grace (Rom 5:15); and a related word is also found in Thessalonians of love among Christians flowing between one believing heart and another (1 Thess 3:10).
HOW?
All self-effort to manufacture these qualities is excluded. Like everything else in the Christian life, it is the work and ministry of the Holy Spirit. And bear in mind that love, joy and peace are the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22).
It may be impossible by strenuous human effort to create these qualities under our own steam, but God has given us the gift of faith to act as a conduit through which the Spirit flows bringing them to us in abundance. By trusting and believing in the God of hope a bridge is built over which the Spirit Himself comes as a kind of living link between us (who need hope constantly) and Him (who possesses it endlessly). We are filled as we trust!
WHEN?
Now and always. The God of hope is most concerned with our future and our present; as far as He is concerned our past has been effectively dealt with. This is what makes Paul’s prayer so appropriate as we move out of the old year into the new. Maybe the translators of the Authorised Version saw this more clearly than the more modern translations and started the sentence with an emphasis on what God wants to do in us and for us now. “Now” it begins “may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost”.
You could do no better over these increasingly busy next few weeks, and before the New Year gets underway, than take some time out to make Frances Ridley Havergal’s words your own:
“O fill me with Thy fullness, Lord,
Until my very heart o’erflow
In kindling thought and glowing word,
Thy love to tell, Thy praise to show.
O use me, Lord, use even me,
Just as Thou wilt, and when, and where,
Until Thy blessed face I see,
Thy rest, Thy joy, Thy glory share”
Just an afterthought! Why not make a list of the “Six honest serving-men" and keep them in your Bible? Next time you are reading a passage, particularly some of the stories in the Gospels, you will have a handy little tool to open up the incident and get even more out of your reading.
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