He Knows

He Knows

Good fathers know their children. They know who they are, down deep. They know what they need. My God is a very good Father. My hopes and dreams stand transparent before his eyes. The present condition of my heart is not hidden from him, nor is my future. He sees it all with great clarity and great love.

So perhaps I should not have been surprised when, browsing a cavernous antique shop’s basement full of old books, I found the one meant just for me. Walking past the musty shelves and brushing the spines with their faded titles, I stopped before a ninety-year-old collection of Communion sermons titled In the Breaking of the Bread by James I. Vance. What first caught my eye was the book’s publisher, the same one who also published two of my books. That was tender. But what took my breath away were the chapter titles of this book—the very subjects I had been reading and writing about for more than a year. My imagination had been wrapped up in the truth of the presence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and in the rich metaphor of the table. So imagine how my heart fluttered when I turned to the book’s contents page and glimpsed the words “The Mystical Friendship” and “Christ Liveth in Me” and “Inside the Cup.”

These words showed me the book was mine, and even more, that my Father knows where my mind and heart and energies are focused. He knows even how to place my hands on a precious book written decades before I was born, at the exact moment I needed to find it. That day, in the dim light of that basement-turned-book-treasury, I read, “Jesus is not far away. He is with us. . . . He is here. We may not always realize His presence. We may not see Him. . . . [But] Christ is with us. Heaven is at our doorstep. Jesus is at the table. It is always so.”^a

Oh yes, he is indeed. And he knows.

O LORD, you have examined my heart and know everything about me. . . . You know everything I do.

Psalm 139:1, 3

^a James Isaac Vance, In the Breaking of the Bread: A Volume of Communion Addresses (New York: Revell, 1922), 15.