THE HEART AND FRUITFULNESS

D. R. Freeman

The Supper is a heart matter. The Lord speaks thus to the heart of the assembly. The language of Hosea 2: 14–23 can be taken up in the light of the assembly and her relations with Christ. The enjoyment of our inheritance, our ‘vineyards’, flows out from the Supper, the place where the Lord gathers us in the wilderness. Responsive singing, as with Israel in Exodus 15, and the understanding of relationship expressed in the words “My husband”, indicate betrothal. “I will sow her unto me in the land” suggests the fruitfulness that is for God, not

now just “her vineyards”, but God’s inheritance secured in the land of His purpose. All is on the basis of mercy, “God being rich in mercy”, Ephesians 2: 4. There is peculiar freshness about recovery days, resulting in God owning “Thou art my people”—He is not ashamed of them—and in our owning Him in language corresponding with what was found uniquely on the lips of Jesus—“My God”.

MUSINGS

FRAGRANCE FOR GOD Paul says, “We are a sweet odour of Christ to God”, 2 Corinthians 2: 15. Wherever you think of the apostle—serving among the saints; in his prayers and communion; in peril and shipwreck; in the loneliness of prison life; combating evil and error—the odour of Christ was there. God had in him the continuance in character of the fragrance which ascended to Him from the life of Christ in all the varied circumstances of His service here. The holy anointing oil (Exodus 30: 22–33) with its five ingredients, each present in divinely ordered proportion, is a type of the perfect blending in Christ of all that is delightful to God in manhood. Olive oil was one of the elements, speaking of the Holy Spirit’s service that there may be the continuance in the saints, for divine pleasure, of the fragrance of that dependent Man.

There is no odour for divine pleasure in what marks us naturally—disobedience, discontent, earthliness, selfishness—but the Spirit would ever engage us with Christ and thus produce in us features that carry the holy, fragrant odour of that Man. It is as if the Father would say, ‘I

have had this in Jesus, and now I have it also in My people’.

FCM