I was professionally engaged with Billy Graham, the eminent evangelist, before and after the events of 1949 in the Los Angeles Crusade that launched his person and work into decades of eminence. So it was that I met some of the persons who were well known either to the public or in their fields. One of these was Stuart Hamblen, a popular western/country-singer/entertainer. He was newsworthy for his occupation and wealth, and for a prize horse that he nurtured to race in major competition. Soon after his response to Graham to surrender his life to Christ, Hamblen wrote his most famous piece of music: This Ol’ House. He meant the piece to be a reflection that his body was the thing he lived in, was wearing out so to be unsatisfactory, and that it would ultimately be replaced with that God would provide in future hope. On this day, he was careful to explain his meaning to us. As he talked, I was struck, not by animation for gaining his greatest achievement in popular culture, but by his deep disappointment in what had happened to him and his song as related to his so recent experience. The animated music had gained first place in the national charts for a period, was interpreted in the popular culture as a country piece of optimism and dreamy escape from worldly demands. (The concept has held for the sixty-five years since his lament. Even at this writing, I heard reference to it in a popular turn a few weeks ago, that has held in Hamblen’s unsought use of his composition.) He meant it as a personal hymn, in his idiom, but it missed the target of meaning he had for it. Although missed, the meaning of the composer reflects a sophisticated spiritual truth, that this physical body is a house we live in to be replaced by one that never grows old.
Although the body is natural to nature, and admired as a magnificent living physical monument in nature, it requires extensive care for maintenance, and becomes temporary to nature. It is a lively structure in which a person lives. Our bodies are the homes of our persons. These bodies need protection and care for the good of the person. Spiritual faith is, at its best, when it provides hope – that there will be a home for the person when the ol’ house of the physical body has collapsed. The body has a beginning, middle, and an end. Then what? Scripture offers a resurrected body, changed, in which the person can dwell.
What about the physical body? It is a marvelous model for thought and faith. What do we bring into our houses of flesh? That brought in affects both the body and the person alive in it. Proper nutrition influences the condition of the house, but it also contributes to the person in the house – for personal energy, attitude, longevity, choices, and the list extends. It has rooms for relationships, and those relationships are affected by the quality of furniture and decoration of our lives – for good or ill. No one enters our house without either our invitation or through break-in. Depending upon our self-stewardship, we either resist or acquiesce to the break-in. God refuses to break-in. He stands at the door and knocks to gain invitation or rejection. He is that respectful of our freedom and choice of the décor and persons we include in the privacy of our life houses. Because he is God, he will not accept some décor, or some persons who do not want to fellowship with him. To invite him in is to include a divine interior decorator into our lives. His fellowship, promising immortal blessing, must be honored with his context of life. As the womb of our mothers was the house of our gestation, so Christ, through the Holy Spirit, turns our body homes into the womb of mother-nature for a gestation period until delivery to a better context. In language we turn the process into an analogy of words challenging thought and pointing to spiritual experience. We can in spiritual terms have what we have in physical homes: clutter, filth, neglect, and a long list of negatives; or we can have beauty, order, love, cleanliness, maintenance, and a long list of affirmatives. When rightly understood the Christian formation relates to the beginning of the structure of the house of our Father who art in heaven. Ultimately the persons gaining ownership of such homes are projected to become the lively stones of God’s heavenly Temple. Of course, to many persons, all this seems like fantasy. It is not a necessary personal belief for Christians, but for those who adopt the analogy there is a workable way to improve in thought and devotion following the lively mystery of God for fellowship with God. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020