How Great Thou Art

When I was just a young boy, a hymn that I was immediately attracted to was "How Great Thou Art."  It was first written as a poem in 1885 by a young Swedish pastor, Carl Boberg, as he noticed the creation around him following a fierce thunderstorm.  He only intended what he wrote to be a poem about the awe he felt as he saw God in that creation and was moved by God's wonder, but later music was added.  The hymn was translated into English in about 1925 and made its rounds through the church in England and America.  

In the early 1950's, the church I was a member of in Dallas bought sheet copies of the hymn and pasted them into the front cover of our hymnals.  It was at this time that I became familiar with "How Great Thou Art" and in fact it made its way into my heart so much so that for the past almost seventy years has become a reminder of just how awesome our great and mighty loving creator God really is.

As I read this morning from a newly published expanded translation of Proverbs, *"ProVerbs: Becoming a Pro in God's Wisdom," written by my friend and a pastor, Johnnie R. Jones, I began to sing "my hymn" again.  The Proverbs of Solomon reveal who our God really is and how much He desires for His children to have a taste of His wisdom in order to live out a godly life.  More than just reading words and sayings, God's message in Proverbs, when read over and over and meditated upon, become glimpses into His heart. God says that He wants us to understand Him and His ways for us so that we can become wise and understanding, able to share how awesome and loving He is with those around us.

A Psalm that came to my mind as I read this morning from Jones' book was Psalm 19:14 which says, "May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing to You, my Rock and my Redeemer."  It seems that if anyone is able to really grasp the wisdom of Proverbs and understand how to apply it to their daily life, you must speak it out loud and to meditate upon those words over and over.  We all know what it means to speak words out loud but what does it mean to meditate upon those words?

God created some animals that we call "ruminants."  Those animals, such as a cow, have a complex stomach which is made up of four compartments.  As the cow chews its food, it swallows that food which goes into a first compartment and then is regurgitated to be chewed some more, then swallowed into the second compartment, regurgitated again to be chewed some more, and so on until the food is swallowed into the fourth and final stomach compartment completely processed into nutrition for its body.

It is with this comparison we can better understand the meaning of meditation, or ruminating on God's Word. When we read the Proverbs particularly, or any other portion of Scripture, our goal is to gain the greatest possible spiritual nutrition from those words. That is exactly what the psalmist meant when he spoke of "...the meditations..." of his heart.  For you and for me, to speak the words and then to meditate, or ruminate on them means to extract from the words all that can be gotten for our spiritual health.  Will we ever get everything from them?  No!  And yet we continue to chew on them, over and over, learning to understand more and more of the One who is perfect in love and mercy and grace and peace and who desires to have an eternal relationship with each one of us..

As the old black preacher, S. M. Lockridge said, "Oh, that's my God ... do you know Him?"  And then there are the words of that cute little song sung by the Teddy Bears in 1959, "To know, know know him, is to love, love love him, and I do, yes I do."  Reading the words of Proverbs with the help of Jones' expanded translation, "ProVerbs" is very helpful in learning to "know Him ... and love Him."  This is the greatest of all of life's goals, to know Him and to love Him, "and I do, yes I do."

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* Jones, Johnnie R., ProVerbs: Becoming a Pro in God's Wisdom, S-Y-D Publications, McKinney, Texas, 2020, www.HisAboundingGrace.org