“The ‘Sweetness’ of the Gospel”

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But you would be fed with the finest of wheat;

with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.

Psalm 81:16

            Hymnwriter, John Newton, wrote,

How sweet the name of Jesus sounds

            In a believer’s ear!

It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,

            And drives away his fear.

This writer still recalls (as though it were only yesterday) his grandfather in his model-T Ford singing: 

Take the Name of Jesus with you,

child of sorrow and of woe.

It will help and comfort give you.

Take it then where’er you go.”

Grandad could barely see the wooden roadblock as he turned onto the road where he would deliver vegetables from his garden to a home in need.  He asked me, “Did I hit something, David?”  A few days later he taught me how to plant a vegetable garden at our new family home on 13 acres.  His garden was one allotted to him as a Firestone employee in the rubber capital of the world.  Weeks later he would die from an injury sustained from an encounter with a machine years earlier at Firestone.  I found myself grieving in the darkness while returning to Ohio from a week’s vacation in Canada with the family of a school friend.  My father’s first words the morning he met me after I got into the car were: “Granddad died while you were gone.”

Years later I made reference to my grandfather in a native American church where I was privileged to deliver the morning sermon.  During the service some Christian grandmothers had openly shared their own sorrow over conflict of conscience in the face of certain native religious practices experienced the previous day. Also in attendance that morning was a Christian work team having just completed a week of service on the reservation.  One of them stood and shared how, in God’s providence, their theme hymn for the work week was the very one my grandfather had sung so many years before: “Take the Name of Jesus with you, child of sorrow and of woe.”  Truly the name of Jesus brings sweetness to the believer’s ear.  That sweetness is nothing less than “honey from the rock”–the Rock of Ages cleft for you and for me.  “O taste and see that the LORD is good.” [1]

David C. Brand

[1]. Psalm 34:8