Every Day Sweeter

We used to sing a chorus in Sunday School, “Every day with Jesus, is sweeter than the day before.” It’s poetic. But is it realistic? Can each subsequent day actually be better than the day before? Because that’s not how it normally happens in this world.

This world is subject to a number of downward forces - things like gravity, and frailty, and entropy. By nature, things fall. Old things fall .. apart. Energy evaporates, or leaks.

It happens in relationships. The burdens of life weigh heavily on a couple, and, though they once glided along with their hearts in the clouds and their feet scarcely touching the ground, now they are being ground down into the dirt. Their zest for life gives way to recliners placed far from each other across the room. There is scarcely energy to talk anymore. Maybe just grunt.

But a relationship with Jesus is different. For one, he is not from below, but from above, and so the relationship is not subject to the same gravity as that with another sinner (and, we are all sinners, save, of course, Jesus). He is not frail or fading, but eternal. He is our energy resource, a “spring of water welling up into eternal life.” It truly can be the kind of relationship in which “every day is sweeter than the day before.”

Two illustrations: Jesus turns the water into wine. But the story is not about whether you prefer water or wine. It is about the quality of the wine, better than the best wine that the proud papa had provided at the beginning of the wedding, because what Jesus supplies is always better than anything else you have experienced before. A relationship with Jesus will similarly outstrip the best of what this “passing away” world is able to offer.

The second illustration is Ezekiel’s stream - not exactly Ezekiel’s, but God’s, which streams from the holy city, and, as it flows, it becomes, not more shallow, but deeper, exactly what you would not expect. Further, as this water flows richer, fuller, deeper, it reaches the sea, and, instead of becoming salty when coming into contact with the salt sea, it has a freshness that makes even the sea waters fresh as well. If “the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul,” then the fresh water of the Lord is pure, converting the sea.

Perhaps those words are not merely poetic. Perhaps they are, in addition, prophetic - because, with Jesus, every day is sweeter than the day before.