Read Psalm 1, Meditation (4)

(Our biographical descriptions are from Wikipedia.)

The testimony of the Church.

Frederick Brotherton Meyer (1847-1929), a contemporary and friend of D. L. Moody and A. C. Dixon, was a Baptist pastor and evangelist in England involved in ministry and inner-city mission work on both sides of the Atlantic. (He was a favorite of my father’s, as evidenced by several of Meyer’s books in his library which I inherited.  My father finished seminary at Louisville about the time Meyer passed away.)

 

·       F. B. Meyer on Christ our Passover.

The life of the church between the first and second advents is symbolized by the feast on that memorable night. With joy in our voices and triumph in our mien, we stand around the table where Christ's flesh is the nourishment of all true hearts, straining our ear for the first clarion notes which will tell that the time of our exodus has come. Christian people are very much too thoughtless of the necessity of feeding off God's table for the nourishment of spiritual life. There is plenty of work being done; much attendance at conferences and special missions; diligent reading of religious books; but there is a great and fatal lack of the holy meditation upon the person, the words, and the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

·       F. B. Meyer on the Faith of David.

As day after day he considered the heavens and earth, they appeared as one vast tent, in which God dwelt. Nature was the material dwelling place of the eternal Spirit, who was as real to his young heart as the works of his hands to his poet's eyes. God was as real to him as Jesse or his brothers or Saul or Goliath. His soul had so rooted itself in this conception of God's presence that he bore it with him, undisturbed by the shout of the soldiers as they went forth to the battle, and the searching questions addressed to him by Saul.

This is the unfailing secret. There is no short cut to the life of faith, which is the all-vital condition of a holy and victorious life. We must have periods of lonely meditation and fellowship with God. That our souls should have their mountains of fellowship, their valleys of quiet rest beneath the shadow of a great rock, their nights beneath the stars, when darkness has veiled the material and silenced the stir of human life, and has opened the view of the infinite and eternal, is as indispensable as that our bodies should have food. Thus alone can the sense of God's presence become the fixed possession of the soul, enabling it to say repeatedly, with the psalmist, "Thou art near, O God.”