Then what shall I do? Well, I will abide among the lilies. His saints shall be my companions. Where they flourish I will try to grow. I will be often in their assemblies. Ay, and I will be a lily too. By faith I will neither toil nor spin in a legal fashion, but I will live by faith upon the Son of God, rooted in him. I would be pure in life, and I would have the golden anther of looking to the recompense of the reward. I would lift up my soul aloft” towards heaven as the lily lifts up its flower. Jesus will come and feed by my side if I am a lily, and even I may yield him some pleasure by my humble gratitude.
Beloved, this is a choice subject, but it is more sweet as a matter of fact than mere hearing can make it. “He feedeth among the lilies.” This is our joy, that Christ is in his church, and the pith of all I want to say is this; never think of yourself or of the church apart from Jesus. The spouse says, “My beloved is mine, and I am his”, she weaves the two into one. The cause of the church is the cause of Christ; the work of God will never be accomplished by the church apart from Christ, her power lies in his being in her midst. He feedeth among the lilies, and therefore those lilies shall never be destroyed, but their sweetness shall make fragrant all the earth. The church of Christ, working with her Lord, must conquer, but never if she tries to stand alone or to compass any end apart from him.
As for each one of us personally, let us not think of ourselves apart from Christ, nor of Christ apart from us. Let George Herbert’s prayer be ours.
“Oh, be mine still, still make me thine,
Or rather make nor mine nor thine.”
Let mine melt into thine. Oh, to have joint stock with Christ, and to trade under one name; to be married to Christ and lose our old name, and wast his name, and say, “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” As the wife is lost in the husband, and the stone in the building, and the branch in the vine, and the member in the head, we would be so amalgamated with Christ, and have such fellowship with him that there shall be no more mine nor thine.
Last of all, poor sinner, you will say, “There is nothing in all this for me,” and I should not like to send you away without a word. You are saying “This is a day of good tidings, but it is only for God’s own people.” I beg you to read through the first and second chapters of the Song, and see who it was that said, “My beloved is mine,” because I should not wonder but what you are very like her. She was one who confessed, “I am black”, and so are you. Perhaps grace will, one of these days, help you to say, “I am comely.” She was one with whom her mother’s children were angry—perhaps you, too, are a speckled bird. She had done servile work, for they made her a keeper of the vineyards. I should not wonder but what you are doing servile work, too, trying to save yourself instead of accepting the salvation which Jesus has already wrought out for sinners. So it came to pass that she became very sorrowful and passed through a winter of rain and cold. Perhaps you are there; and yet you know she came out of it her winter was past, and the birds began to sing. She had been hidden in the secret places of the stairs, as you are now; but she was called out from the dust and cobwebs to see the face of her Lord.
One thing I wish to whisper in your ears—she was in the clefts of the rock. O soul, if thou canst but get there, if thou canst shelter in the riven side of our Beloved, that deep gash of the spear from which flowed blood and water, “to be of sin the double cure”; if thou canst get there, I say, though thou be black and grimed with sin, and an accursed sinner, only fit to be a firebrand in hell, yet shalt thou, even thou, be able to sing with all the rapture of the liveliest saint on earth, and one day with all the transport of the brightest ones above, “My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.” There, go your way with those silver bells ringing in your ears; they ring a marriage peal to saints, but they ring also a cheery invitation to sinners, and this is the tune they are set to—Come and welcome! Come and welcome! Come and welcome! Sinner, come! God bless you, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
