NO CREAM

                                                                                No Cream

Breakfast porridge was a staple in our home when I was growing up in Scotland in the 60s. Unlike nowadays, where I see everything from sugar to bananas, honey to muesli, being added to a bowl of porridge, we simply added a dash salt and a splash of milk. In those days the milkman would deliver milk in glass bottles to our doorstep. Because the cream would rise to the top, it was often a contest to bring in the milk (especially in winter) before it froze and/or the crafty little blue tit birds had beat you to the cream! They would peck through the tinfoil bottle caps. Salt and cold cream on hot porridge, yum! yum! Those were good old days. Or is it just some romantic notion to yearn for the past?

What about the present? What about the future? Why do we tend to think things are always getting worse? Has it something to do with the aging process? I think it may have more to do with the way we look at things. Is the glass half full or half empty? Have the birds eaten the cream for your porridge? Has the past stolen your joy? Have your memories of making daisy chains on a sunny day given way to Shakespeare’s winter of discontent? Where is God in all of this? Was the last petal you plucked from the daisy, the one that says, “He loves me not!”? Have you ended up with no cream for your morning porridge?

Image from Net

By rearranging the letters of ‘no cream’ we get ‘romance’. The Bible becomes God’s love-letter to His bride when your final daisy petal is ‘He loves me!’ The romance is on! Yes, Jesus loved His bride to death! That's what Christ’s cross is all about. For ‘Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her’ (Eph. 5:25b). He promises His bride ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ (Exod. 33:3). To believe His promises is to have the joy of the Lord in the present, for ‘Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body’ (Prov. 16:24). Yes, ‘no cream’ turns into ‘romance’ by taking the Lord at His word. However, those who didn’t take the Lord at His word, those who love the ‘good old days’ more than Him, died in the wilderness. ‘And with whom was he provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief’ (Heb. 3:17-19). They kept on looking back in unbelief instead looking to the Lord and believing His promises. By rejecting the Lord’s advances, they changed romance back to no cream, and thus they proved that they were not counted as His bride. It was the same when ‘Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt’ (Gen. 19:26).

Christ’s bride includes only those who, like Paul, ‘press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus’ (Phil. 3:14), those who hold the ‘He loves me!’ petal in their hand, i.e., a ‘white stone’. ‘He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it’ (Rev. 3:2:17b).

Dear reader, has our gracious Lord exchanged that old ‘He loves me not!’ daisy petal that has been troubling you for years, for a ‘white stone’? Have the birds eaten your cream? Has the devil robbed you of your joy? Or has the Lord being wooing you, changing your mind as you learn of the great love He has for His bride? Has your ‘no cream’ been changed into ‘romance’?