Love

I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you'll be able to take in with all Christians the extravagant dimensions of Christ's love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.
~Ephesians 3:17-18 (The Message)

Here I am on day 9 of the 90 day challenge and I'm still keeping up. I find myself right now in the middle of Leviticus, where I'll stay for another day before moving on! :) I'm amazed at the words and stories that I'm reading every day. Stories of an unfaithful people and a faithful God. Day after day I'm incredibly overwhelmed by the amount of love shown by the Lord.

At first I was calling it patience. Saying that God was so patient in not giving up on the people He created. So patient in not walking away from them every time they just made a royal mess of things. So patient in not kicking them to the curb as they so rapidly sinned against Him or argued with Him or doubted Him. I thought of it as patience.

Then I realized that I was wrong. This wasn't just patience. This was LOVE. It wasn't the picture of someone who just forced Himself time and again not to just call it quits and succeeded in pressing on just because He had amazing self-control. No, it was instead the picture of love, a love so deep and abiding and persistent that out of it flowed a patience that I can't even fathom.

No, God is not just patient. God is in love. In love with me and you and all who have come before and all who will follow. God shows what love truly is and in so doing we see so many other things, things like compassion and patience and faithfulness and tenacity and mercy and grace. Yet it's not these things alone that drive God's actions. What defines every other characteristic is His love.

Oh that we may all understand what love He has for us. What love He has for all of His creation. For that's where everything else comes from.

This is a treasure I've found from these first nine days. I can hardly wait to see what else He will show me. Pretty sure though that this is a big one...in fact, the one that the whole thing hinges on. Such a great reminder to me and I see it ever so much more clearly by seeing the history of the saints in such rapid progression. Awesome!

Seek Him. Know Him. Be loved. By Him.

Show Me How

I'll run the course you lay out for me if you'll just show me how. God, teach me lessons for living so I can stay the course. Give me insight so I can do what you tell me-my whole life one long, obedient response.
~Psalm 119:32-34 (The Message)

This morning as I read these verses I realized that for this to truly be the desire of my life and my heart then I need to be willing to actually seek out what God has to show me. I am quick to state that I desire to walk more closely with Him, that I want to love Him above all else, that I hope to stay only in His will but I'm not as quick to reorganize my life to figure out how to do that. These 90 days are just one way that I think that I can begin to structure my life even more closely to the challenge in these verses: to be shown how to run and to learn the lessons to run well. That's just one of my hopes for this process!

It's a day into this 90 day journey and I can already see that it's going to show me a lot about God and I'm quite certain that I'll also learn quite a bit about myself. In drinking deeply from His wisdom I have already found that there is much to see that I've not noticed when taking it in much more slowly. I'm seeing already how much His faithfulness is reflected towards His people and how much love and emotion is apparent in His relationships with them. I am impressed with how often God spoke to those He loved and how quickly they followed even when they had questions.

I also see sin and the ramifications of it: the desire to be like God, the desire to manipulate situations to solve for problems, a desire for attention and favor and honor, greed, lying, hiding. All leading to a deeply grieved God and death, whether immediate or eventually.

Amazing to realize that even though He knew we would break His heart in so many ways, He still looked at His creation of Adam and said that it was very good. Through all that was to happen, redemption was always part of His plan too. I'll never be able to grasp that.

1 day in. This is going to be amazing.

90 Days: A Challenge

When she first mentioned it my initial response was one of hesitancy and distance. Really? 90 days to accomplish this task? Doesn't that seem a little intense, a little too much, a little too hard, a bit unnecessary? I remember my first comments of how I couldn't take in that much information that quickly, that I had so much other stuff going on, that I was probably too busy.

Funny how God sometimes won't let a thing go.

Mere weeks later, I'm poised to begin the task, to tackle the challenge, to stop with the whining and excuses and complaints. Will it be hard? Certainly. Will it require me to give up some things that I'd rather do? Absolutely. These things are completely true but they're not the real questions I should be asking. These are the questions that have made me agree to the task:

Will it push my faith and reliance on God?
Will it refine my character and realign my priorities
to be a better reflection of what's important to Him?
Will it open up opportunities to more greatly
reflect on His character and understand who He really is and has been and will be?
Will it make me more like Jesus?

When I found myself answering yes to these questions, I knew that I needed to do it. Not because it's a requirement, not because I had to, not because I'd feel left out if I didn't join but because when you find something that has the potential to do everything in the questions above, you must at least give it more than a passing glance.

This is something that I want to do. Something that I probably need to do. Something that, with God's grace and my discipline, I will do.

So, 90 days. It's going to be quite the journey.

Thanks for the invitation, friend!
:)