It was two years ago when I felt God leading me into an independent study of Psalm 103. I spent the summer reading it aloud daily, reading it to others, having others read it to me, listening to recordings of people reading it, reading every commentary on it I could find, reading it in every translation I could find. Never before had I become so captivated by and immersed in a passage of scripture.
It truly makes me wonder what life could be like if we treated all of our engagement with scripture with this level of voracity? Live it, breathe it, search eagerly and endlessly for it.
The hunger was divine because I am certainly not disciplined enough to stay with a passage this long and lovingly on my own. I pray for that hunger to continue and grow like a consuming wildfire all around my everyday interactions with the Word of God.
There was so much I learned (and more to learn still) in the rich verses of Psalm 103. But the overarching theme that emerged from out of it all was like a blinking marquee sign from God:
“THIS IS WHO I AM.”
All of the intimate moments of internalizing his goodness, his grace, his healing, his righteousness, his faithfulness, his forgiveness, all these different attributes finally merged into one tangible picture of the God my heart loves and that has loved me all of my life.
It was like peering into patches of dense fog in a place where you know the terrain, you know there is a line of trees as you enter the forest, you know there is a stream that cuts through the pasture, you know there is a lake that mirrors the landscape, but the fog is obscuring parts of it, making things fuzzy and disorienting, until the sunlight dawns and the mist is evaporated, bringing everything you love about this scene into perfect, clear focus.
And though it isn’t a comprehensive list, the mini series for The Wake Up Call became my attempt to pull out some of these significant truths of who God is and hopefully give us a beginning place to grasp these different aspects of him.
It is a little like rock climbing, in a way. You stand before the massive, incomprehensible rock face as a whole, but as you draw near, you also see little handles, little climbing holds, where you can begin to work your way into a sort of understanding about grabbing ahold of this mountain.
So, I’d like to link the series here, as a whole, as a little tiny library of who God is. Each entry a little tiny book you might grab and cozy up with a blanket, some coffee, and your bible anytime you need a reminder of how God shows up as this truth in your life.
With each attribute, I have presented one way to grasp at the reality of his presence there, but my prayer would be that these words begin to seep into your soul and as you review your own life experiences, you see evidence of how he has shown up in full expression of each of these wonderful words. Or, if there is a facet that you feel you have not seen in him yet, I pray that it materialize before your very eyes, right in the midst of your actual circumstances.
I pray that you begin or continue to build your own tiny library of sorts, that you can return to and remember and in some cases, revive, the spirit of the Living God that has always lived in you.
And as you endear yourself to this library, you allow each of his qualities to become more and more real in every facet of your life.
The Lord of Compassion and Mercy
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