How's Your Apples?

18 November 2012

Dear Phyllis,

I don't profess to be a spiritual man. At best, I am a vanilla Christian – as opposed to being some exotic spiritual person. But the other day I did have some unusual devotions where the Lord spoke clearly to me. What He said was simple, but it has challenged me to do a lot of basic thinking. In reading Song of Solomon chapter 7 the bottom part of verse 8 suddenly stood out -“The smell of thy nose is like apples”. The NIV translates that“Your breath smells like apples”, and I won't quibble over that. The obvious truth is that our breath smells like what we eat. If you eat garlic, you will smell like garlic. If you eat kimche, you will smell like kimche. If you eat apples you will smell like apples.

When the Lord spoke to me about apples, my mind immediately went back to S. of S. 2:2, 5 where the Christian, in speaking about Jesus, says, “As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my Beloved among the sons. I sat down under His shadow with great delight and His fruit was sweet to my taste. … Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples...”Obviously, there is a direct connection between S. of S. 2:3 and 7:8. It didn't take a great deal of exegesis for the Holy Spirit to explain to me what He was trying to emphasize. That is: “If we feed on Jesus we will smell like Jesus”.

From there my mind went to John 6:53 where Jesus said, “Except ye eat the flesh pf the Son of man and drink His Blood ye have no life in you.” That is a tough verse, and I have spent a lot of time mulling it over in my mind. There are only three possible interpretations. One is cannibalism, and it doesn't take long to dismiss that. The second is the Catholic approach of transubstantiation – that the bread actually becomes the organic flesh (meat) of Christ, and the wine becomes His Blood. (They haven't told us if His Blood is O+ or what type it is yet.) This is the driving engine for the mass system, where a believer has to take communion everyday in order to have the life of Christ physically in their system. Unfortunately, if you had an accident on your way to church, or vomited up the wafer shortly after taking mass, you would lose your salvation. Obviously this is not what Jesus had in mind by that statement.

The only other explanation is that it is spiritual. I don't believe it is a departure from biblical truth to spiritualize much of the Bible and the teachings of Jesus. Human nature gravitates to the external. Most religions are external. Buddhism must have its material idols. Catholicism must have it's crucifixes, statues and physical bread and wine. Judaism, in the time of Christ, was basically physical with its washing of hands and pots. We read where the Pharisees got bent out of shape that Jesus disciples eat without washing their hands. Jesus denounced them for substituting their traditions at the expense of the commandments of God. When the disciples didn't come up to speed, He said, “Are you without understanding also? What enters a persons mouth won't defile them. It only goes into their stomach. The problem is the heart. It is the things that come out of the heart that defile them.” (Mk. 7:1-23). The whole teaching of Christ has to do with our hearts.

When He talks about eating His flesh He obviously has a spiritual meaning. If this is such an important spiritual truth, the question naturally arises, how do you eat Christ's flesh? He explains this a little bit five verses later when He said, “As I live by the Father, so that he that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me.” (Jn. 6:57). When He said, “As I live by the Father, so that he that eateth Me, even he shall live by me”; that is: to eat Christ, is to live by Christ the same way that Jesus lived by the Father. As I have thought a great deal about this over the years, I keep coming back to the question, How do you do it? My answer to that is, “I don't know”. But then I ask myself, “Have you ever done it?” To that question my answer is “Yes”.Obviously I have done it. I have lived a Christian life for 55 years. Somehow I have lived by Christ. I know that Christ has lived, and does live, in me. This is a great mystery, and the greatest miracle I have ever seen. This was something that amazed me so much 55 years ago when Jesus came to live in my heart, and I was born-again. Suddenly there was a radical transformation in me. The things that used to be so important just faded away, and things I used to think were the dumbest things possible became my greatest joy – Bible study, Christian fellowship, witnessing, etc. It had to be Christ. There was no other explanation.

Being born-again is a one time experience, but the daily Christian life is something that happens every day. It is one thing to accept Jesus into your heart, but it is a totally different matter to feed on Him every day. I am sure this is why Jesus called Himself the Bread of Life. Eating bread is not a one time experience. You can no more live without eating bread (food) than you can live without breathing air. People who don't eat get sick. Just as three square meals a day is important for a healthy life, it is equally important that we feed on the Bread of Life (Jesus) every day.

I won't attempt to write some detailed exposition how you feed on Jesus, but one thing seems obvious; this entails a consistent, lengthy, devotional life. We talk about how we should spend a lot of time in prayer, but you can't do that with a hurried life-style. You can't do that by sitting up late every night watching TV, and then running off to work the next morning. I suspect this may be one of the greatest tragedies of our modern technological life. We don't have to feed the horse, clean the barn, and saddle the horse to go into town. All we do is get in a car and we are there. But are we any better off? Life is easy today, but it is questionable that there is less stress. If anything, the stress of daily living today is much higher. One of the things that has gone with the rigors of daily living of the pre-high-tech days is waiting upon God.

We were talking about this problem at our early morning Wednesday prayer meeting last week. One brother complained that his life is much more difficult than living was 200 years ago. He had to be in two or three different countries occasionally, and committee meetings were a way of life. He complained that the stress was terrible. One could envy the man who didn't have a cell phone tracking him down 24-7. What a blessing it would be to quietly ride a horse for an hour going from one place to another . There would be no road-rage. Your prayer life would be deepened riding a horse. (Although some people have told me that their prayer life has been greatly deepened by riding in a car with me. Some people have said that the most fervent times of prayer of their life was when I was sitting behind the wheel.) To me it seems incontestable that the quality of Christian writers 200 years ago was radically different than today's writers. Matthew Henry wrote with a quill pen, but today's writers, with their computers, cannot be compared with the depth of what Matthew Henry had to share.

It was this problem of today's high speed life that spoke so much to me when the Holy Spirit said to me the other day, “Your breath smells like apples” I thought,“Really? What does my breath smell like?” To what degree have I been feeding on Christ? Oh that is a big problem! I spend an hour a night looking at Fox News on my computer. When people are around me, what is the first thing that comes out of my mouth? Am I so filled with Christ that the election and Benghazi hardly matter? Is it a major topic of discussion how the Dallas Cowboys or the Green Bay Packers are doing this year? There is no two ways about it. I will smell like the thing that I feed on the most.

But when the Lord spoke to me about apples, my mind went back to the original verse in S. of S. 2:3 – “As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my Beloved among the sons. I sat down under His shadow with great delight and His fruit was sweet to my taste.” Oh my goodness, what a blessing! What volumes could, and should be, written about that! The Song of Solomon is the full spectrum of the Christian life. The verb tenses in chapter 1 are forward looking, and the verb tenses in chapter 8 are past tense. Chapter 2 is a time of new discovery. That is why the believer says here “I sat down under His shadow with great delight and His fruit was sweet to my taste.”

Oh the joy it is to first experience what it is to sit down under Christ shadow! In the parable of the sower in Matt. 13, we read about the seed that fell in the stony place, that “when the sun was up they were scorched” (Mt. 13:5). In the interpretation of that parable Jesus described the sun as heat because of the Word (Mt. 13:21). And the problem with the third type– the thorny place – “was the care of the world and deceitfulness of riches”. Here are problems that all Christians face. In S. of S. 1:6 we see the Christian complaining that she was black because of the sun. These are problems a new Christian faces. But then it is a wonderful day when they can sit down under Christ shadow and the heat of the sun falls on Him protecting her. It is a hallelujah day when a Christian comes to the place that they realize it is a privilege, and a cause of great joy, to suffer a little heat for Jesus sake (Mt. 5:10-12). And what a joyous experience when Jesus frees us from being possessed by things and the cares of the world. To sit in His shadow is to let Him worry about those things. How marvelous to be simply taken up with the security that we belong to Him. It was not a first time experience for me the other day, but I was enormously blessed in sitting down again under His shadow. I mean to tell you it was real. Oh it was relaxing. There are so many things that become distractions and weigh us down. It was so relaxing to sit down under His shadow again.

And His fruit was sweet to my taste. Man howdy, it was oishii (good)! His fruit is, of course, the fruit of the Holy Spirit (Gal. 5:22). The love, the joy, the peace; oh to experience, enjoy, and feed on that is tremendous! Small wonder the believer in S. of S. 2:3 says, “As the apple tree is to the trees of the wood, so is my Beloved among the sons.” Where else are you going to find fruit like the fruit that Jesus gives? You can go any place else, and it is like chewing on pine cones.

For the past, almost one year, my number one book has been the Letters of Samuel Rutherford. I know of no other book in English that is like it. The problem is that it is written in code language. If you don't know the code of the Spirit there is no way you could figure out what he is talking about. But to me it is highly meaningful. Like no one else who ever picked up a pen; his life, his experience, his letters are saturated with the Song of Solomon. He frequently talks about how the Lord has brought him into His banqueting house and the sweetness of the apples. This was where he lived. He lifted up Jesus to heights that I have never read, seen, or heard from any other source. How my heart burns as I read about his walk and relationship with the Lord!

I grieve at my own dumbness and inability. It was a huge blessing when the Lord spoke to me about our breath smelling like apples last week. But it made me want to chew some mints to improve the smell of my own breath. It was a terrific challenge about feeding more on Christ that I might smell more like Him. What He said to me was very practical and real. But I have no idea how to share this with others. If the Lord would simply take His Word and make it meaningful to you, I would be grateful beyond expression.

Oh, He is wonderful!

bill