His Power and Glory

by Laurie Aker

In Psalm 63, a love song to his beloved God, David proclaims that God is his God, that he seeks after Him with his heart, soul, mind, and strength, and with all that he has within him. As the circumstances escalate, in the vortex of emotion, under the intense pressure, he doesn’t take matters into his own hands or run after the solutions the world has to offer. We witness the beautiful, ardent longing of a man who is consumed with His Lord with every fiber of his being, clinging with every bit of energy and believing that ultimately God was holding him safely and holding all things together in His almighty hands. He was confident that he would see God’s power and glory. Our heavenly Father knows that this outlook is often times much more easily established in trouble, suffering, and affliction, rather than in the midst of prosperity, ease, and calm because the pressure of difficult circumstances both drives us to God and more readily refines our hearts. We are blessed to witness the internal, intimate worship of this servant of God as he runs to the fountain of life in the midst of the desert because he has developed a deep and abiding trust in God and in His Word and not in himself. Paul too learned this intimate trust in the Lord, in His power and His glory. He understood that all things, including the tremendous trials and tribulations the Lord had allowed in His life, which at times even felt like a sentence of death, were intended by God to press him to lean into Christ:

For we do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.  (2 Cor. 1:8-11)

The Lord is with you. He wants to grow you in your ability to know this experientially. As we learn to follow the Lord more and more by faith and fix our eyes upon Him, He will demonstrate His power and His majesty before our very eyes and reveal Himself to us. Trusting Him, knowing that He is forming us into His very image, He reveals himself to us as the source of all joy, peace, and truth; the Lord of all; and God Most High.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. (2 Cor. 4:7-12)

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This blog post is an excerpt from the Thistlebend Discipleship Study Falling in Love Again with Your Lord available here.