Aug | 18 | Evanjellyfish

Key Word:- DESIRE

Title:- Evanjellyfish

Ecclesiastes 3:11 ……..Also He has put eternity in their hearts,……...

Recently I read an insignificant little paper written by a member of the American Humanist Society that had the audacity to quote just the first two lines of Emily Jane Bronte’s poem, “No Coward Soul is Mine,” to vainly try and bolster up the shattered dyke of the denial of the sense of the infinite and the knowledge of immortality, which is bound up in the heart of each one of us. It attempted to do this whilst spouting on about the glorious optimism and bravery of humanism within society at large. What HUMBUG!

Listen Friends to what Bronte really said beyond the first two lines of the poem! (This is, by the way, the last poem she ever wrote.)

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.

O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life, that in me has rest,
As I, undying Life, have power in Thee!.

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by Thy infinity,
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality.

With wide-embracing love
Thy Spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

Though earth and moon were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou -Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

Emily became ill after attending the funeral of her brother Bramwell. Overcome by tuberculosis she died aged 30 refusing the help of the medical profession which she distrusted greatly. An introvert with no real close friends, her world famous novel “Wuthering Heights” brought the sceptics rebuff that ‘no woman of such a circumscribed life could have written such a passionate story.’ Again, what HUMBUG!

Friends, passion is a misplaced, misunderstood and much maligned quality within the Church. Gentleness, balance, wisdom, circumspection, have in our Evangelicalism been presented from such a high and calmed vantage point, that passion is attributed mainly to those ignorant youths, who bark and leap like little Labrador puppies all over the great things of God! Our methods of discipleship and mediocre mentoring often result in training people and men especially, to be so quiet, so well bread, read and dead, that it is easy to hitch them to the white stick’d blind, that they, now also bound misled and scared to see, may be together led carefully, quietly and miserably, along the safe pathways of the ‘agreed upon’. So much so that are churches are more like Bruce Forsyth then Bruce Willis. What HUMBUG!

Surely as those born again by the Eternal Spirit, who have enlivened eternity so bursting within our hearts that our chests expand big with the eager expectancy of heaven, breathing out gregarious groanings, hyper ventilating our dizzy little heads with visions of the New Jerusalem, if we who are gagging for God and a better world to come, if we cannot be a people of passionate bravery, treading down the waves of fear and crying “Charge!” and “Onward!” “Farther in!” and “Higher up!” to one another, then who can?

Out of so many millions of men in the church, I could not tell you of any current heroes that I can count on but one hand that has the audacity to shout “Follow me even as I follow Christ!” All of our boys have for years been told to make nice and keep taking the estrogen and yet we wonder why we are so limp and insipid! Passion! It might get in you trouble sometimes but there is no life without it!
Bronte, a 30 year old isolated introvert put burning passion down on a page, looked into death and eternity and cried “No Coward Soul is Mine!” What about you pussycat?

Listen:- Then He appointed twelve, that they might be with Him and that He might send them out to preach, and to have power to heal sicknesses and to cast out demons: Simon, to whom He gave the name Peter; James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James, to whom He gave the name Boanerges, that is, “Sons of Thunder”; Mark 3:14-17

Pray: - Lord, when we together write Your story in my life, let it be one of felt pleasure and of pulsating passion. God! Help us to burn the pink plastic moulds that have produced wet Evangellyfish for far too many years! Amen.