God

“my good above all others”

November 27, 2006

I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.” (Psalm 16:2) It’s been almost two weeks since I posted–and not a particularly positive two weeks, either. I’m not sure what season of life I’m in, but I do know it’s been a test. Perhaps I’ve been having what […]

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“to you I lift up my eyes”

November 7, 2006

One of the psalms in The Divine Hours yesterday was 123, which somehow did not show up in my search for scriptures with the word mercy. Here it is: To you I lift up my eyes, O you who are enthroned in the heavens! Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their […]

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“behold your God!”

November 6, 2006

If you’ve read my last two posts (here and here) on Isaiah 40, you may well have wondered why I totally ignored verses 9, 10, and 11. After telling us that we are all like grass before the Lord, Isaiah says, Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news; lift […]

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a powerful, compassionate God

November 5, 2006

Friday, I wrote about the glorious promise of strength in Isaiah 40. As I noted then, the concluding promise of strength to walk, run, and rise up gets even better when put into the bigger context of the chapter. I backed up just a few verses to consider the contrast of the youth who faints with the strength that comes from God. But the picture Isaiah paints grows richer and fuller when we take the chapter as a whole.

It begins with the famous “Comfort my people” and continues with “speak tenderly to Jerusalem.” That sounds good. But then, as we move further, we find God’s greatness described in wonderful pictures and contrasted with the smallness, the weakness of man. We are told that “all flesh is grass” and that it dies under the breath of the Lord. And just so we don’t miss the point, Isaiah reiterates, “Surely the people are grass.”

A little later, we get a series of images that reinforce the magnitude of God and His power:… read the complete post

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a promise of strength

November 3, 2006

The last few weeks have been pretty stressful for me, with money problems, the usual midterm grading frenzy, and assorted other irritants and situations that add up to a real possibility of losing my hope and my joy. This past weekend, as I realized that some of these situations weren’t going away with the end of October but would continue into November (and beyond!), I got rather discouraged. Then Wednesday night a friend gave me good–but hard–counsel, and I was reminded that I was in for the long haul. To put it another way, I wanted a leisurely walk around the block, but he told me I’m in a marathon.

I don’t like running.

Yesterday, though, I had a wonderful reminder of God’s faithfulness. In her broadcast, Joyce Meyer read from Isaiah 40, and I heard something I had never noticed before:…

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a merciful God

October 27, 2006
This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series mercy

Number 3 in a series on mercy.

Studying the word mercy, I see that over and over God is identified with mercy. Not only does He give mercy, He is mercy. In Psalm 145, David praises God:

The Lord is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
The Lord is good to all,
and his mercy is over all that he has made. (8–9)

And then there are these other passages:

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prayer: nourishing the life of God in us

October 19, 2006

If You Will AskI just got Oswald Chambers’ If You Will Ask, and I’m already loving it, one chapter in. According to Chambers, prayer “develops the life of God in us” and “nourishes” that life; in other words, if we don’t pray, we are starving ourselves. That’s a sobering thought!

He goes on to say the life of God in us

is nourished by refusing to worry over anything, for worry means there is something over which we cannot have our own way… Never let anything push you to your wits’ end, because you will get worried, and worry makes you self-interested and disturbs the nourishment of the life of God. Give thanks to God that He is there, no matter what is happening.…

He concludes his discussion of worry with this beautiful thought:

The secret of Christian quietness is not indifference, but the knowledge that God is my Father, He loves me, and I shall never think of anything He will forget, and worry becomes an impossibility.

I shall never think of anything He will forget: this is one of those Selah moments. Pause, and calmly think about that!

The chapter ends with a prayer from Chambers’ journal:

O Lord, this day may your beauty and grace and soothing peace be in me and upon me. May no wind or weather or anxiety ever touch Your beauty and Your peace in my life or in this place.

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