Song of Solomon and Hudson Taylor

There is no time so profitably spent as the morning hour given to Jesus only. Nothing can make up for it, Hudson Taylor says. And lived it. People recall hearing the strike of a match every single night at 4 am when he would get up to spend an hour with the Lord in prayer and the Word. It’s sobering to think of, when I contrast it with my own thin commitment to God. He goes onto to how in his presence we will see our own blackness and says, “Nothing humbles the soul like sacred and intimate communion with the Lord.”

All the service we do and ALL the fruit born of not abiding in Christ is fruit of the flesh and not of the Spirit. Also convicting. If I am not abiding in Christ in an active, every day sense, nothing I do, great or small will have eternal value.

I was able to go to a women’s study with my mom and they are going through the book of Esther. In chapter 5, Esther enters into the Kings court, knowing that doing so could cause her death. Perhaps she is even more concerned with humiliating her husband, whose wounds from the refusal of his last wife in front of all people are still fresh. Esther knows that if she put all her labor to saving her people without petitioning the king and going into his court, none of it would matter.

My Kings court is a beautiful place, that I rarely take time to enter. And if God was faithful to Esther, how much more will he dress me in the robes of his own righteousness and be pleased by my sight before him? It is audacious to enter into the king’s court, to ask something of the King directly, to speak to him face to face. But we do have unending access to him through Christ. Christ petitions for us. Taylor says that zeal in service to the neglect of personal communion incapacitates us for the highest service. We are not our own, we don’t rely on our power but that of the King.

All of this from Hudson Taylor is coming from Union and Communion, a book he wrote on Song of Solomon. The “she” in song of Solomon is all of us and the HE is Christ. One other thing he said that I loved,

Once she was contented in His absence—other society and other occupations sufficed her; but now it can never be so again. The world can never be to

her what it once was; the betrothed bride has learnt to love her LORD, and no other society than His can satisfy her.