My Devotion this Morning...

After writing the post about Joshua’s devotion yesterday, I thought my own devotion this morning was very interesting…very timely. I love how God seemingly, often, orchestrates my quiet time.

I’ve been reading through a series of devotions that Michael Card has written from the book of Job. If you’ve ever struggled with how a faithful God could allow those terrible things to happen to Job, then you too would probably benefit from these devotions.

Is it possible that God’s best show of faithfulness is not based on his provision…but his presence? Below is my devotion today…written by Michael Card and published in “A Daily Walk in the Word”

THE FACE OF FAITHFULNESS
Who is God for you? What should His faithfulness look like? Is He the predictable, theological Entity, frozen on the throne? Or could He possibly, unimaginably, be the God we meet in Job, the God we see in Jesus, who descends from the throne room where He has been dealing with the accusations of Satan. He shows up, having been moved there by Jobs’ tears and ours.

Who is Jesus for you? How is faithfulness written on His face? Is He merely the caricature of man-made Christianity, or might He be the very image of the God whose disturbing faithfulness to us looks like Incarnation? Could it be that He came not to wave the magic wand and make the cancer go away, but to enter into our sufferings? Could it possibly be true that the best show of His faithfulness is not the healing or the unexpected financial help, but the unthinkable thruth that God has chosen to be with us through it all? Could it be that the miracle is not His provision, but His presence? (I love that...)

Ask yourself, how did God speak of His faithfulness? What are the words He most often used in both the Old and New testaments to describe what it would look like? Never will I leave you. Never will I forsake you (Deut. 31:6; Hebrew 13:5). The dwelling of God is with men and women, and he will live with them (Rev. 21:3; Exodus 25:8).

But still, author Walter Brueggemann was right when he wrote, “He is not the God we would have chosen.” But neither could we have dreamed up nor imagined such a God; a God, the immediacy of whose presence is incarnate in us by His indwelling Spirit. A God who is committed to completing this act of indwelling us, of living in and through us. It is His deepest desire. It is the greatest of all His wordless miracles and yet we are unsatisfied with Him and want more. He is not the God any of us would have chosen but, as Brueggemann marvelously concludes, He is the God who has chosen us…