Sweet peace

My big Christmas present this year from my mom was an old-fashioned Crosley turntable and speakers in a wooden box. I had been without a working record player since I moved to Alabama and found my expensive Sony system broken inside the 12 ft. Budget truck I had rented.

The first record I wanted to hear upon setting the new machine up on top of my kitchen table was not what I thought I would when I opened the gift on Christmas morning at my mom’s house.

I thought I wanted to hear this bootleg Paul Simon LP I have from when he performed live in L.A. in the late ’70s and did all this incredible guitar and piano instrumental stuff with the live audience in the background.

What I ended up yearning to play most were some of my dad’s old records that I inherited when he died. What got me was looking at the old vinyls and seeing his little stickers he had put on the labels with his handwriting in this red ink pen he bought by the dozens and used on everything from prescriptions to greeting cards.

Seeing the word “ALL” in all caps and underlined made me cry. That was meant for me, as his cassette-tape maker for his doctor’s office, to know I was to use any of the songs on that side of the record for my compilations.

Playing these songs was SO important to him. He was compelled to make them part of the psyche of his children as well as every single patient who spent any time at all in his waiting room or on the examining table, etc.

They were such an integral part of his lifeblood as a family doctor that, before he caught on to making cassette tapes from the music, he would personally stop what he was doing to flip the side over when it was time!

By chance, the first record I picked to break-in my new record player was one by Tennessee Ernie Ford, entitled, “Nearer the Cross.” I lifted my brand-new record arm for the first time and the first song on the A-side was, “Sweet Peace the Gift of God’s Love.”

The lyrics began with, “There comes to my heart one sweet strain,

A glad and a joyous refrain,

I sing it again and again,

Sweet peace, the gift of God's love. The hymn ended with, “In Jesus for peace I abide, And as I keep close to His side,

There's nothing but peace doth betide.

Sweet peace, the gift of God's love

*****

Jordan said in a recent study based on Romans 12, “The ultimate hope of our heart is not simply forgiveness, or simply justification or even heaven, but it’s really the glory of God. You and I, in Christ, are meant to savor and to experience God’s glory. That’s the ultimate thing that will wipe away every tear, rectify every wrong. That’s the ultimate thing that in the end will let you sing that song, ‘It was worth it all.’

He went on, “We sing that song, ‘It will be worth it all when we see Jesus.’ Because it’s the glory of God that makes that possible.

“II Cor. 4: 17. There’s that affliction. There’s the patience in tribulation. You see, the hope that sustained Paul’s joy in the afflictions--He said, ‘I’m rejoicing in hope; that makes me be patient in tribulation. I can endure because these afflictions are not meaningless. They’re not absurd. They’re not cruel. They’re not pointless. No, it’s working for me an experience of the glory of God that will outweigh every moment in every degree of suffering in this life. They work for me a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.’

“Patience is something that sustains you; keeps you there. Paul doesn’t just tolerate tribulation. He says, ‘God takes this tribulation and makes it serve you.’

“That passage in Romans 8 is right down to the level of the things you suffer because He left you here and didn’t take you to be with Him the moment He saved you. Some of that is bodily suffering. Some of it is the calamities of life. Some of it is the assaults of others. Some of it is your own stupidity.

“But what the hope in Christ does is He says He can take even that and, as He promised Israel, ‘give beauty for ashes.’ I can look out there and say, ‘My ace in the hole is in the end it’s just glory!’ And I can rejoice in that hope. Then I can abound, and when you’re abounding, you don’t think so much about hoping. You think, ‘I already got it, man!’

*****

“I once asked a guy in the airport if he knew where he was going to spend eternity and he answered, ‘I’m having too much trouble getting through today to worry about eternity.’ But that’s a mistake of thinking that that kind of future orientation, that future thinking process, limits the present usefulness in reality of life.

“Listen, understanding that you rejoice in hope, liberates you right now! If your future is glorious, if your future is sure because of Christ, you don’t have to live for money. You don’t have to live for power. You don’t have to live for fame. You don’t have to grasp and stash and chase for pleasure and for excitements that just slip through your fingers. You’re free to live for others. You’re free to serve the Lord by serving others. You’re free to let your love be genuine, let it be radical and sacrificial because of the joy that you have in Him. To let it sustain you, and it’s our prayers that allow us to see and savor the greatness and the preciousness of our hope.”