Tag Archive for Creator

See Your Heavenly Father

2014-08-03 Devotional with Hymn No comments

Jesus said to His disciples: 

“Who do you say that I am?”
Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
(Matthew 16:15-16, NASB)

We can learn so much about our Heavenly Father through creation. We look into the night sky and glimpse His immensity. We taste His power in the storm. The days and nights and seasons remind us of His faithfulness.

But knowing about Him is not the same as knowing Him personally. Colossians 1:15 points us in the right direction when it says:

Jesus is the image of the invisible God.

Jesus came and made the eternal, holy Father seeable and touchable. He was part of a family as human as yours and mine. He experienced daily life in a body, just like we do. He faced our temptations, felt our pain, endured our fatigue and hunger, and died as we die.

Yet in this human being we saw our Father, pure and at full strength, live and in person, not some watered-down imitation. We heard His timeless wisdom and saw it lived out. We witnessed the miracles of the Creator, but now up-close and personal. No stage, no curtains, no fancy lighting. Nothing between Him and us. He let us stand right in front of Him as, on a small scale, He did what our Creator does every day:
He turned water into wine.
He produced a lot of food from a very little.
He stilled storms.
He healed diseases.

In Jesus, we were gripped by God’s unconquerable love, reaching out to forgive us even as we tortured and murdered Him.

Our God is awe-inspiring and holy, all-powerful and all-wise, unbound by matter and time, infinitely above us in every way. Yet He is also with us. God has come to us. He is one of us. We can be as comfortable with Him as a child sleeping close to her mother.

Listen…and sing if you want:
Hymn: See the Father Walk Among Us
Recording
Printed Music & Lyrics

Dependence

2014-02-11 Devotional No comments

My Creator,
I am completely dependent on You,
whether I recognize it or not.
You are the very breath of life within me.
Should you withdraw for a moment,
I would return to dust.
I, and everything I know,
exist only by Your love and
timeless wisdom.

Help me trust that love
in each simple concern of my daily life.
Help me rest in that timeless wisdom
instead of listening to
each tick of my own clock.

And Lord God, my Holy Father,
make me come to You more quickly,
more eager to see You and
know You and
know that I am with You,
till my every breath be
faith and
prayer and
love.

In all the beautiful glories of heaven,
You will still be the only Source.
Let me look to You now,
my Savior,
my Light of Life,
my God.

I lift up my eyes to you,
to you whose throne is in heaven.
As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master,
as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress,
so our eyes look to the Lord our God.
(Psalm 123:1-2, NIV)

Living in the Father’s Presence

2014-01-02 Beatitudes, Devotional with Hymn No comments

This is the first of an eleven-part series on the Beatitudes.
Each part features a hymn to a familiar tune. 

We are needy creatures living in a material world. We need food, shelter, and clothing. To meet these needs, we work, we worry, we gather and grasp. And if we get more than we need for today, we hungrily store it away for the future.

By nature, we are self-centered, driven by desires of which we are only vaguely aware. We long to wrap ourselves in pleasure and security and the admiration of others. We crave glory and gold.

And so it goes. We live, we long, we scramble, and we die, with our hearts entwined with the physical world around us.

But our Creator made us for better things. He made us to be like Himself, to share the endless abundance of all He is. He designed us for love…for eternity. But when we turned away from Him so long ago, we lost sight of our birthright and our destiny. We degenerated into the fearful, selfish creatures that we are.

But our Creator didn’t abandon us. He sent His own divine Son as a human being like us, to show us Who He is and who we can be. He came to renew us in the full image of our holy and loving Creator. He came to teach us that this Creator is our Father, and that He longs to be our Father in a deeper and more personal sense. He wants us to realize that He is always with us. His loving eye focuses always on us. He wraps our entire existence in Himself.

Jesus Christ came to teach us and show us what it means to live in the presence of this Father who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. He is already aware of our every need. And this Father requires of us only one thing: that we trust Him.

As we trust Him and live before Him, the logic of daily living is turned upside-down. With such a Father, trusting makes sense, not worry. Giving is logical, not grasping.  A close relationship with this Father is our highest good, our greatest security, and our deepest pleasure.

 Listen…and sing if you want:
Hymn: We Are Children
Recording
Printed Music & Lyrics 

God, I Want to Know You

2013-09-29 Devotional with Hymn No comments

O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. (Psalm 139:1, NIV)

God, You created this entire universe,
so vast and beautiful,
so mysterious and wonderful.

You also created me.
You conceived me before I was born.
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
And You patterned me after yourself.

You love me.
You know every thought before I express it,
every word before I speak it.
Yet You love me.

And You want me to know and love You.
You want that more than anything.
My Creator, I don’t want to ignore such an intriguing possibility.

God, I want to know You.

Listen…and sing if you want:
Hymn: Come and See the Works of Our God
Recording
Printed Music & Lyrics

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