“I will extol You, my God, O King, and I will bless Your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless You, and I will praise Your name forever and ever. Great is the Lord, and highly to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall praise Your works to another, and shall declare Your mighty acts. On the glorious splendor of Your majesty and on Your wonderful works, I will meditate. Men shall speak of the power of Your awesome acts, and I will tell of Your greatness. They shall eagerly utter the memory of Your abundant goodness and will shout joyfully of Your righteousness.” Psalm 145:1-7
As I was finishing a run recently, I was overcome with the urge to glorify God. As I pondered His glory, I had to check my soul to make sure it wasn’t merely an emotional high. After all, it was a beautiful day and I had just completed my first good run in a long time. Thankfully, while the weather and my mood may have been contributing factors, upon reflection, they were minor ones as I truly just needed to praise God. However, my contemplation led me to consider how easy it is to glorify God when the sun is shining and things to seem to be going well, but what about the dark and cloudy days or when times are tough?
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We can be certain that God will give us the strength and resources we need to live through any situation in life that he ordains. The will of God will never take us where the grace of God cannot sustain us.
You may readily judge whether you are a child of God or a hypocrite by seeing in what direction your soul turns in seasons of severe trial. The hypocrite flies to the world and finds a sort of comfort there. But the child of God runs to his Father and expects consolation only from the Lord’s hand.
You can look forward with hope, because one day there will be no more separation, no more scars, and no more suffering in My Father’s House. It’s the home of your dreams!
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ by grace you have been saved, and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” (Ephesians 2:4-7)
This was not the topic that I originally intended for this week’s post, but given a few divinely inspired events, my plan was changed. As is my habit, I started the day with the “verse of the day” emails from Bible Gateway and KLove. The one from Bible Gateway was a portion of Psalm 139. It is a favorite of mine for many reasons; one of those is that it was the last passage my parents read together on the eve of my mother’s death. That circumstance coupled with the quote that I posted this week beckoned me to consider love and grief.
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Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope.
Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. (Hebrews 10:23)
Hope is an integral part of our faith, but what is it really? The world tells us that hope is a feeling or a desire. That connotation hardly works in this passage. How can one hold fast to a feeling or a desire? Just because we have a feeling something will happen or we desire it does not make it a certainty. The word that Paul uses in this passage is really defined as “favorable and confident expectation”.
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Hope is called the anchor of the soul (Hebrews 6:19), because it gives stability to the Christian life. But hope is not simply a ‘wish’ (I wish that such-and-such would take place); rather, it is that which latches on to the certainty of the promises of the future that God has made.
We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. 1 John 4:16-17
We all like to be reminded that we are loved…especially by those who are dear to us. My wife was out of town this weekend and I wasn’t feeling the greatest on several levels. At one point, I considered staying home from church on Sunday morning. However, realizing that it was not a wise choice in that moment and that there are others who would love to attend a worship service, but are unable, I rose to the occasion and went. During the praise time, the worship team led us in “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us”. For various reasons, I desperately needed to hear those words.
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Shout joyfully to the Lord, all the earth; break forth and sing for joy and sing praises. Sing praises to the Lord with the lyre, with the lyre and the sound of melody. With trumpets and the sound of the horn shout joyfully before the King, the Lord. Psalm 98:4-6
Praise when things are going well, when we are blessed by a great time of Christian fellowship and learning, or amid a large body of believers is usually fairly easy, but what about the dark days…the days of pain and suffering? As I’ve mentioned many times, music is important to me. I love to listen to it, I love to sing it, and I love to dance to it. What I love most is singing to praise God. As much as I love it, there have been two periods in my life that required a bit of effort to sing praise. The first was a longer period (several years) from the time it was determined that I was chronically ill until God began to instruct me regarding the value of trials and pain with respect to my soul. During that time, songs like “Blessed Be” and “Untitled Hymn” became very important as I struggled understand and to come to peace with God’s plan for me. The second period was the years from 2012 to 2015 in which we dealt in varying degrees with the various health issues of our fathers and their deaths. While I had previously learned about God goodness even in trials, the struggle was still difficult and there were many times that I had to will the praise out of my mouth. Rather than succumbing to the urge to be silent, I knew that praise to God is especially critical in difficult times. What makes it so critical is the message that it sends.
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