VISITING THE GARDEN

VISITING THE GARDEN

“I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey: eat, O friends; drink yea, drink abundantly, O beloved”, the bridegroom tells his friends in verse 1 of Chapter 5 in the Song of Songs. Christ now visits His garden, which is your ministry. He delights to see your plants and trees. He gathers His myrrh. Myrrh is a bitter, aromatic gum exuded from the Commiphora tree. Those members of the Body of Christ are likened to the Commiphora tree, which produces myrrh, symbolic of Christ’s holiness fragrant through His Body. The holiness is not of the members concerned but is of Christ. That is why the divine Author calls this as His myrrh. Christ has gathered His myrrh with His spice. Those members of His Body planted in your garden produce His spice, symbolic of Christ’s love fragrant through His Body. The love is not of the members concerned but is of Christ. Christ has gathered His myrrh with His spice in the garden. Holiness and love are to be blended. A holy child of God should also love others. The Holy Spirit manifests Christ’s holiness and love through you to the world.

Secondly, Christ eats His honeycomb with His honey in His garden. There is a honeycomb in His garden. Pure honey, and not adulterated honey, is stored in the honeycomb. Honeycomb means a storing place where His word, which is rightly interpreted without the blend of any false doctrine, is stored. A honeybee flies here and there and gathers honey from different flowers in far-off gardens and stores it in a particular honeycomb. Likewise, you have to collect the pure interpretations of God’s written word from different churches and ministers and from the writings of various authors, dead or alive, and to store the same in His honeycomb. This also includes the personal testimonies of many God’s people. Christ in you or the Holy Spirit eats this honeycomb along with the honey. This means that the Holy Spirit uses you, the storehouse, and reveals the interpretations or revelations through your ministry as if He consumes the very storehouse and its content. Christ has to consume this honeycomb and honey to nourish His Body, the Church. Such interpretations, which you have collected, don’t belong to the sources of collection but to God alone. That is why the divine Author calls the honeycomb and honey as “My honeycomb, my honey”. By the grace of God, you might have very good and pure revelations or interpretations from the Word stored in the honeycomb of your garden. This honeycomb is not yours but His only.

In my garden, this particular book, which you read now, is the sweet honey of Christ Jesus stored in His honeycomb, which is meant for all. Christ in me delights to eat this honey in order to nourish the Body of Christ with a dosage of this particular honey.

Thirdly, Christ drinks His wine with His milk. The wine is extracted from the grapevines. Jesus said in John 15:1, “I am the true Vine and my Father is the husbandman”. Jesus, the true Vine, was crushed in the vine press at Calvary and His blood gushed out as the Wine for the whole world. His precious blood was shed on the Cross about 2000 years ago and dried. But His blood, though dried, is still alive and evergreen spiritually through the power of the Holy Spirit. Through this spiritual blood of Jesus, our sins are washed away, our diseases, however dreadful, healed and supernatural miracles performed. In our churches, this spiritual blood is offered during Holy Communion. Through this Blood, we commune with God, the Father. These days, the children of God travel far and wide to attend healing or miracle crusades being held by famous evangelists, little knowing that they would get healed in a Holy Communion service. They should treat the wine as the Blood of Christ shed on the very Cross of Calvary and the bread as the Body of Christ broken for them and believe as such with all the seriousness. They should also believe that they are in communion with God, the Father and His Son Jesus through this Holy Communion Service.

Christ in you, a member of His Body, drinks His wine. This wine is of Christ only and not of any particular denominational church. Once I heard a lady preacher, while giving a sermon in a church, saying that she would partake of the communion service being held in her church only. Her doctrine is not correct. The only qualification for the Holy Communion is that you must be a member of His Body, the unseen universal Church.

Christ drinks His wine with His milk. Milk means spiritually the primary or the basic doctrines of the Word essential for the growth of new believers (I Pet.2: 2). Milk is such an important food that is required for the growth of children. These days, the new believers are not taught the basic doctrines of the New Testament concerning salvation and new birth, eternal life, witnessing and evangelism, the Person of Jesus, the ministry of the Holy Ghost, the invisible Body of Christ, etc. But, instead, doctrines about the tabernacle of the Old Testament, the lives of the Old Testament saints, the battles fought during the Old Testament etc., are taught in a superfluous manner. I am not against teaching of the Old Testament truths but against giving undue importance to these and relegating the New Testament truths to the background. Some churches preach superfluously on the second advent of Jesus, arguing that there are two comings of our Lord i.e. one secret coming (called “rapture”) and the other “open coming”. I don’t want to deal with this contentious doctrine in this book, except saying that Jesus is coming again to this world. Like this, our preachers concentrate on unimportant doctrines, relegating the basic doctrines to the background. All this has led to the stinted growth of believers. They are still babes, unable to witness and evangelize the whole world. As such, the members of the Body of Christ ought to be fed with His wine, the spiritual Blood but also with His milk as if Christ drinks His wine with His milk. The Blood of Jesus and the Word of God, the two edged Sword of the Spirit sustain the Body of Christ, the Church.

During the New Testament period, most of the believers did not have any written books of the Old Testament. The New Testament gospels and epistles, etc., were not there. But, the believers and apostles witnessed and started evangelizing the world, even in the absence of transport and communication facilities. What happens today? Every Christian family has the Holy Bible and all the modern facilities of transport and communication are available in plenty. We have the Holy Bible in our hands but lack in the basic doctrines of the New Testament. We have enough scriptural knowledge but are not filled with His Spirit unlike the early apostles and believers.

The Bridegroom tells His friends that He had eaten His honeycomb with His honey and drunk His wine with His milk and exhorts them to eat and drink abundantly. This means that Christ wants the produces of your garden to be shared with the other members of His Body.

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