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Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 0-223 Sunday 12 Nov 2000

Reading: PSALM 36 – CHARGED WITH LOVE

(From ‘Encounter with God’ Bible Reading Notes)

The host asks, ‘Are you enjoying the party?’. Pleasure and delight are the sincerest forms of thanks: ‘You give them drink from your river of delights’ (v 8).

Ideas have consequences. The sin is not in conceiving forbidden ideas but in nursing and nourishing them. A man has a dazzling idea: he will declare himself a God-free zone, he will live God- less (vs 1-4).

Consequences follow ideas. (See Ps 14:1) Once the demons of reckless practical atheism are loose in the house they poison the fountain of ideas in the imagination which feed ambition and behaviour. (See Rom 1:28-32) Shut in with himself, self-absorbed, narcissistic, sin deludes him with the easy assurance of immunity to divine interference. An atmosphere of isolation and unreality pervades his inner life. And the clock is ticking (v 12). Yet this man would no doubt plead that with a dull deity off his back he is free to enjoy his pleasure.

The psalmist replies that he knows of a vast pleasure beyond the imaginings of the godless (vs 5-10). Godlessness is centripetal, it sucks all down into its centre. The life of God is centrifugal, up and out into the infinite expanses of: ‘How priceless is your unfailing love!’ (v 6).

The Psalmist chooses sensuous images to convey the ravishing delight of knowing God (vs 7-9; e.g. Song 4:16) in a creation in which, said the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘All things are charged with love, charged with God and, if we know how to touch them, give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him!’ There is such a thing as a Christian hedonism, a holy intoxication of pleasing God and being pleased by him which is at the root of true spirituality and praise. (See Phil 3:7-14)

When you celebrate Holy Communion, remember that there is a feast, a food and a drink, a fountain of light, for the life of the world.

– Dennis Lennon

Copyright Scripture Union, 2000

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