God (Christianity) -- Worship and love; Spirituality
His love for the Person of Christ was so intense that it threatened to
consume him; it burned within him as a sweet and holy madness and flowed
from his lips like molten gold. In one of his sermons he says, "Wherever
we turn in the church of God, there is Jesus. He is the beginning,
middle and end of everything to us.... There is nothing good, nothing
holy, nothing beautiful, nothing joyous which He is not to His servants.
No one need be poor, because, if he chooses, he can have Jesus for his
own property and possession. No one need be downcast, for Jesus is the
joy of heaven, and it is His joy to enter into sorrowful hearts. We can
exaggerate about many things; but we can never exaggerate our obligation
to Jesus, or the compassionate abundance of the love of Jesus to us. All
our lives long we might talk of Jesus, and yet we should never come to
an end of the sweet things that might be said of Him. Eternity will not
be long enough to learn all He is, or to praise Him for all He has done,
but then, that matters not; for we shall be always with Him, and we
desire nothing more." And addressing our Lord directly he says to Him:
I love Thee so, I know not how
My transports to control;
Thy love is like a burning fire
Within my very soul.
Faber's blazing love extended also to the Holy Spirit. Not only in his
theology did he acknowledge His deity and full equality with the Father
and the Son, but he celebrated it constantly in his songs and in his
prayers. He literally pressed his forehead to the ground in his eager
fervid worship of the Third Person of the Godhead. In one of his great
hymns to the Holy Spirit he sums up his burning devotion thus:
O Spirit, beautiful and dread!
My heart is fit to break
With love of all Thy tenderness
For us poor sinners' sake.
I have risked the tedium of quotation that I might show by pointed
example what I have set out to say, viz., that God is so vastly
wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without
anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of
our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is. Such worship as
Faber knew (and he is but one of a great company which no man can
number) can never come from a mere doctrinal knowledge of God. Hearts
that are "fit to break" with love for the Godhead are those who have
been in the Presence and have looked with opened eye upon the majesty
of Deity. Men of the breaking hearts had a quality about them not known
to or understood by common men. They habitually spoke with spiritual
authority. They had been in the Presence of God and they reported what
they saw there. They were prophets, not scribes, for the scribe tells us
what he has read, and the prophet tells what he has seen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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