God is for us.
God is for us. He is on our side. He loves us, and His heart is set to help us, to give us aid.
It is a tremendous blessing to read passages in the Old Testament about God pouring out streams of life on the earth to make it flourish. Psalm 65 is one of my favorites:
You visit the earth and water it;
You greatly enrich it;
the river of God is full of water;
You provide their grain,
for so You have prepared it.
You water its furrows abundantly,
settling its ridges,
softening it with showers,
and blessing its growth.
You crown the year with Your bounty;
Your wagon tracks overflow with abundance.
The pastures of the wilderness overflow,
the hills gird themselves with joy,
the meadows clothe themselves with flocks,
the valleys deck themselves with grain,
they shout and sing together for joy.
~Psalm 65:9-13 ESV
Of course, God does send the rain and make the crops grow. God is our Provider, giving us water and food so we can live. But this psalm is also a metaphor for spiritual truth. The Holy Spirit--the Living Water of God--comes down, poured out from above, to bring spiritual life to the children of men. God nurtures us with his Spirit. By the power of His Spirit, even the hardest ground, the wagon tracks, compressed by wheels carrying heavy loads, can overflow with abundance. The NLT says, "...even the hard pathways overflow with abundance" (v. 11).
I will heal their apostasy;
I will love them freely,
for my anger has turned away from them.
I will be like the dew to Israel;
he shall blossom like the lily;
he shall take root like the trees of Lebanon;
his shoots shall spread out;
his beauty shall be like the olive,
and his fragrance like Lebanon.
They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow;
they shall flourish like the grain;
they shall blossom like the vine;
their fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon.
~Hosea 14:4-7
God is for us. God loves us. God demonstrated His love for us, clearly and decisively, when while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). Amazingly, it doesn't stop there! Since our great God did not spare His own Son, but gave Jesus up for us all, we can be assured that He will also--along with the gift of salvation through Christ--graciously give us everything else we need for life and godliness (Romans 8:32, 2 Peter 1:3).
God loves us. His desire is to see us succeed, to grow in grace and godliness, and to walk in righteousness and victory. He is here with us, through His Holy Spirit, and He never stops working on our behalf, helping us learn how to access His power and His wisdom which He graciously, freely offers.
God is for us, and He loves us. He envelops us and indwells us with love. Romans 5:5 tells us, God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. This is amazing. Maybe you've heard about God's love so many times, the words stopped meaning anything. Stop and ponder it: God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
I was thinking about God's love, and also about the prayer in Ephesians 3, and I realized something. Read the prayer, carefully, and then I will tell you what I realized:
I bow my knees before the Father . . .
that according to the riches of His glory
He may grant you to be strengthened with power
through His Spirit in your inner being,
so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith--
that you, being rooted and grounded in love,
may have strength to comprehend with all the saints
what is the breadth and length and height and depth,
and to know the love of Christ
that surpasses knowledge,
that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
~Ephesians 3:14, 16-19 ESV
This is what I realized: God strengthens us with power, through His Spirit inside of us, so we can comprehend the vastness of His love and know the love of Christ.
We can't even begin to understand His love for us, until His Spirit in us strengthens us for the task. We are rooted and grounded in His love, yet in order to comprehend and experience the infinite dimensions of this all-surpassing love, we need the strength and power of the Holy Spirit. And here is the best news of all: He pours His Spirit out on us abundantly, precisely so this can happen.
Dear Lord Jesus, thank you.
Thank you for your all-surpassing love.
Please pour out Your Spirit on me and into me, drench me and fill me.
Help me to know and experience the fullness of Your love.
Please give me more of You, more of Your love.
Please enable me to feel how much You love me.
Please make my heart sing because of how much You have done for me.
I want to overflow with eager anticipation for what You are doing in me each day, and how triumphantly You can use me to reflect Your glory and draw people into Your kingdom.
Even when I am crushed and beaten down, You are preparing for me an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.
Please help me confidently wait in steadfast faith for the unimaginable delights You have prepared for us in our eternal future with You.
But, as it is written,
"What no eye has seen,
nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared
for those who love Him" --
these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit.
For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
~1 Corinthians 2:9-10 ESV
(This is a repost of an older post, slightly edited. I needed it today.)
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