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Why
spend money on what is not bread,
and your labour on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what
is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.
Why spend money on
Just listening to the news on TV, I hear that the recession is likely to end sooner rather than later, but we will not notice the difference! I am afraid that this kind of report looses me. The good and the great of our financial institutions would seem to occupy a different realm to mere mortals who have to go out and earn a living every day. Now we live with added uncertainty as unemployment rises and industry slows down. Putting our trust in people and putting our trust in possessions is always a hazardous undertaking, for all of these things are temporary and give brief and uncertain enjoyment at best. In the time of Isaiah the prophet, about 800 years BC, people were just the same as we are. They took little time to think of the good of their eternal souls and spent what they had on that which could neither sustain body nor give satisfaction to the heart. We have raised such behaviour to a much higher level and still we are not satisfied. The picture of the miserable millionaire is not so far off the mark. Harvest gives us time to pause and consider. We must eat, but where does our food come from? We must have shelter and warmth and so we work. Is this all that there is to life? Why are we spending our money on that which is not bread and labour on what does not satisfy? In verse 1 of Isaiah 55 there is an invitation. It is this. ‘Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come buy and eat! Come buy wine and milk, without money and without cost.’ God is speaking to us through Isaiah and He offers us something without any cost. It is free. Isaiah speaks of two things, wine and milk. Wine is ‘that which makes glad the heart of man’. God is offering us joy and gladness in our lives. The harvest was always a time of joy for a year’s produce was brought in and another year was more certain. Let a man truly know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ in his life, and he will be a happy man, a contented man and the deeper he drinks into the spirit of Christ, the more happy will he become. God, when he made the world, considered the happiness of his creatures. You cannot help thinking, as you see everything around you, that God paid great attention to our need for pleasure and contentment as His creatures. He has not just given us our absolute necessities, he has given us more, not simply the useful things, but even the ornamental. The flowers in the hedgerow, the stars in the sky, the beauties of nature, the hill and the valley—all these things were intended not merely because we needed them, but because God would show us how he loved us, and how anxious he was that we should be happy. It is like milk, too, for there is everything in the gospel that you want. Do you want something to lift you up in trouble? It is in the gospel—"a very present help in time of trouble." Do you need something to strengthen you for duty? There is grace all-sufficient grace for everything that God calls you to undergo or to accomplish. Do you need something to give you hope? There are flashes of joy in the gospel that may make your eye flash back again the fires of bliss. Do you want something to make you stand firm in the midst of temptation? In the gospel there is all that can make you immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. There is no passion, no affection, no thought, no wish, no power which the gospel has not filled to the very brim. The gospel was evidently meant for humankind; it is adapted to it in its every part. There is knowledge for the head; there is love for the heart; there is guidance for the foot. There is milk and wine, in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. All of this is offered freely. The price was paid upon the cross by our Lord Jesus Christ and you and I may come and buy without money and without price. All the great resources of God, who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, the wealth in every mine; all of this is there for us. The only thing that is needful is that we turn from our wicked and foolish ways, from our commerce in that which is neither bread nor gives satisfaction and acknowledging our sin, run to Christ.
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For further details please contact MKW@bhbc.gb.com |
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