Have You Any Room for Jesus?
Words: Daniel Webster Whittle (b. Nov. 22, 1840; d. March 4, 1901)
Music: Room for Jesus, by Charlie C. Williams (b. Sept. 4, 1852; d. Sept. 11, 1882)
Note: Major Whittle, a veteran of the Civil War, later worked for the Elgin Watch Company. Then he committed himself to serve the Lord and became a full-time evangelist. His hymn has a powerful message, not only for the unsaved, but for lukewarm believers. For the utterly amazing incident that brought about Whittle’s conversion, see the first link at the botom of this article. (And imagine the joy of those two men meeting in heaven!)
(Stanza numbers in brackets below refer to the stanza number in The Cyber Hymnal. Find the link at the bottom of the article.)
In 1959, college students, newly returned for the fall semester, decided to try answering a novel question: How many of them could stuff themselves in the Volkswagen Beetle of that day?
The car was designed for four people, with maybe room for an extra one if it’s a child. But if you aren’t expecting to drive anywhere, and a bunch of people simply pile into every nook and cranny, the students found they could manage seventeen or eighteen. And it became a fad for a while. The current record, officially recognized, is twenty!
And what about the capacity of outdoor stadiums? The largest in North America is Michigan Stadium, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which seats 107,000–though there are claims of larger crowds there than that. The biggest in the world is the May Day Stadium in North Korea, which can hold 114,000 people.
The word “room” (from the Old English word rum) means space. To make room for something is to provide space for it.
It’s an important factor when purchasing a computer. How much information can it hold? This is calculated in bytes. A byte is a small unit of information, perhaps representing a letter of the alphabet or a single number. As the capacity of computer hard drives grows, new terms are needed to describe this “roominess.” A terabyte is one trillion bytes. Even bigger are petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes, and yottabytes. (The combined space of all the computers in the entire world does not amount to even one yottabyte.)
But we can think of room in another way too. At the personal level, it can represent our priorities and what we do with our time and our treasures. Do you make room in your busy life for times of recreation and fun? Do you make room for family time? More importantly, do you make room for the Lord?
The Bible says of the wicked, “God is in none of his thoughts” (Ps. 10:4). Such a person has no room at all for God. The Lord doesn’t figure in his plans or activities. The Lord’s will is not consulted, the Lord’s person is not honoured. But what of the more religious of us?
Some have the idea that the answer to the question involves church attendance. That attending church Sunday by Sunday is making room for the Lord–which means roughly giving God His due for one hour out of one hundred and sixty-eight each week. But that could only be “church-ianity,” not Christ-ianity.
The Christian faith involves a personal relationship with Christ. Honouring Him as we should will not only mean a commitment to church activities. It will affect how we relate to our family, and to our friends and neighbours. And it will affect how we perform at school, at work, in our leisure hours and more.
It’s the desire of God the Father that we recognize “Jesus Christ is Lord” (Phil. 2:11), and that “He is Lord of all” (Acts 10:36). In Revelation, the Lord is pictured knocking on the door of a church, seeking admittance (Rev. 3:20). He also wants to be “received” into each part of our lives at the personal and individual level (Jn. 1:12).
(1) Have you any room for Jesus,
He who bore your load of sin?
As He knocks and asks admission,
Sinner, will you let Him in?
Room for Jesus, King of Glory!
Hasten now His Word obey;
Swing the heart’s door widely open,
Bid Him enter while you may.
(2) Room for pleasure, room for business,
But for Christ the Crucified,
Not a place that He can enter,
In the heart for which He died?
Questions:
- What are the things that take up the most “room” in your life?
- What are you doing to keep Christ central and in control in all things?
Links:
- 22 November 1840 – Daniel Whittle Born
- Have You Any Room for Jesus?
- Have You Any Room for Jesus? (The Cyber Hymnal)
- Have You Any Room for Jesus? (Hymnary.org)