our church, sit at our tables, because God has seen our need and come down to meet it. Do not, I beg of you, associate God’s visitation only with tragedies. Think of Him as you stand among the golden corn, as you listen to the song of the birds, as you enjoy the good things which are your daily possession. That leads us to the central thought of the text:
OUR DAILY BREAD IS GOD’S GIFT
Day by day we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” but when the bread is given we do not always recognize whence it comes. One of the best services a Harvest Festival can render is to remind us of the connection between God and our daily bread. Living in towns and crowded streets we do not hear the song of the reapers or see the wagons laden “with four months’ sunshine bound in sheaves.” We see bread over at some modern bakery and almost think of the loaf as a manufactured article. Today we set the truth of the text to music and sing: “All good gifts around us are sent from Heaven above.”19 We see in the Harvest God’s answer to our daily prayer.
That is not to deny man’s part. In the natural as well as the spiritual, man plants and waters, sows and reaps, grinds and labors; but in both cases, it is true that without God there will be no increase. We talk glibly about the laws of nature and second causes, and those very laws imply a lawgiver and the second causes lead to a great First Cause. Don’t stop your scientific investigation continue it. Trace back far enough and you are sure to come to God. Pay your tribute to the farmer, the miller, the baker, but do not forget that God hath visited us and given us bread, that “He opens His hand and satisfies the desire of every living thing.”
Therefore, this day is the festival of the Divine beneficence and should be the occasion of the people’s gratitude and praise. God has visited us in giving us bread. The heart should sing its thanksgiving and the people shew forth His praise. But instead of saying, “God be praised,” we often murmur and complain because the bread is not buttered on both sides and jam and cream added. Bread stands for what satisfies the real needs of life. Most of our discontent springs from our desire for luxuries we do not need and that in some cases we are a good deal better without. What we need is bread, and not too much highly spiced confectionery. There is a book on my shelves called The Durable Satisfactions of Life.20 The writer sees all those satisfactions in the things bread implies—health of a day, mental balance, power to appreciate beauty and truth, the rare delights of friendship, love and home, ties that bind us to the unseen world, and faith which fills even the dark hours of life with the light of immortal hope.
All these are ours, and God did not spare His only Son, but gave Him to be the Bread of Life. Eat your bread with singleness and thankfulness of heart. Try to count your blessings. The task is impossible but it is a good exercise. All you can do, and this you ought to do, is form a grateful heart to sing your Doxology praising God who has visited his people, giving them bread.
19. This is not a reference to the famous song from Godspell, but rather an earlier hymn that actually provides the lyric for both the original hymn and the one from Godspell. Here are the particulars: “Harvest Hymn” by Matthias Claudius (1780).
We plough the fields, and scatter the good seed on the land;But it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand:He sends the snow in winter, the warmth to swell the grain,The breezes and the sunshine, and soft refreshing rain.
Chorus:All good gifts around us Are sent from heaven above,Then thank the Lord, O thank the Lord For all His love.
He only is the maker of all things near and far;He paints the wayside flower, He lights the evening star:The winds and waves obey Him, by Him the birds are fed;Much more to us, His children, He gives our daily bread.
20. A book by C. W. Eliot, published in 1910.
“DAVID HARPING BEFORE SAUL”—1 Samuel 16.17, 23
(Preached six times from Lumberhead Green, undated, to Katherine Road 2/24/35)
1 Samuel 16.17, 23 “Saul said unto his servants, ‘provide me now a man that can play well.’ And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took a harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and the evil spirit departed from him.”
These words cannot be understood apart from the man to whom they refer. You will have to look at Saul before you look into the words. When you look upon the first king of Israel you are looking upon one whose story is told in the Old Testament. You are also looking upon one whose failure was as complete and tragic as any recorded in Scripture. When Saul is first introduced to us our hearts go out to him. He was a man every inch of him—tall, strong, comely. Modesty mingled with strength, humility with bulk, and a gracious magnanimity with conquering power. He had a keen eye, swift powers of judgment, and was ready and strong in action. Discovered by the man of God, acclaimed by the people, he looked the heaven-sent leader of his people.
But alas! The promise of those early days was blighted. The blossom never heightened into the fruit of great and worthy achievement. He struck a few brave blows for freedom. There were a few bright flashes, but after that the dark. The first king of Israel died by his own hand, a miserable failure, a striking revelation of how, notwithstanding great gifts and early promise, a man may miss his chance, fail in his task, and miss his high destiny. The Bible is a faithful book and there are no stories more powerfully told than those in its pages. You cannot forget the story of Saul and you cannot miss its lessons. For our immediate purpose, we hone it down to one or two lessons appropriate to the occasion. We begin with—
THE KING’S DEMAND FOR A MINSTREL
“Provide me now a man that can play well.” The demand came out of a condition that needs examination. The king had fallen into a distemper, a fit of melancholy and depression and the old way of describing his condition was to say that an evil spirit from the Lord was tormenting him. That was the popular notion of the time. We do not now think of such spirits as coming from the Giver of all good things. Putting the whole story together we can see what happened. In Saul’s earlier days, the Spirit of God was welcomed, followed, obeyed. Later on, that Spirit was refused, rejected, disobeyed. Humility giving place to pride, Saul preferred his own way to God’s. The Spirit of the LORD departed from him because, to borrow a word from the New Testament, Saul “grieved the Holy Spirit.” “My Spirit shall not always strive with men.” The gracious, willing, guest found no acceptance or welcome, and departed. The effect of that departure was that from that hour the gracious king became a prey to gloom and melancholy, a victim of the torturing jealousy which goaded him to undo and mar the fair promise of the early years.
In less dramatic fashion, what happened to Saul occurs in our own day. When men shut God out of their lives they leave room for all manner of evil spirits. We try to live without the God for whom we were made, and for whom our souls cry out, and we leave the door open for torturing evil. Jesus saw and taught that in the parable of the house without a tenant.
I am not unmindful of the physical causes that so often make for shattered nerves and disordered minds. But a large part of the trouble of our times is the forgetfulness or rejection of God. The root cause of much of our pessimism, our fears, our cynicism, and some of our nervous wrecks, is to be found in the forsaking of God. Nothing can save us but the return to God and the recovery of His Spirit.
For mark the expedients to which a man resorts when he rejects God. The man who used to send for a prophet and seek counsel with God cries for a minstrel and sends for a musician. Later on,
