May Our Hearts Leak Love

My God,

You reign over all your creation

Not a flake of snow falls

outside your providence and decree

Each particle of dust falls

at your command and your will

with no other option but your own

and we praise You for it falling!

Hearts yearn for your presence

and satisfaction solely and wholly

found in the blessed Trinity.

We give our lives to your purpose!

With each passing moment

we needed and are sustained by

Your love, grace, and eternal will.

Hallelujah to our God Almighty!

May our hearts be transformed

and may our hearts leak love

with the unending Truth and grace

of our Savor, King, and Creator.

It is finished!

Praise Him for His beauty and holiness

and may our cries exalt and worship

our Lord, Jesus Christ!

Psalm 139: 23-24

#PraiseHim - Risen From The Dust (Psalm 113:7-9)

Risen From The Dust

Psalm 113: 7-9

He raises the poor from the dust

and lifts the needy from the ash heap,

to make them sit with princes,

with the princes of his people.

He gives the barren woman a home,

making her the joyous mother of children.

Praise the Lord!

God chooses the poor and weak to show His glory to the world.

In the last post of the #PraiseHim series, we come to a text that gives us a glimpse into God's grace. We clearly see that God has compassion on those who are the rejects of the world. He cares deeply for His children and will raise them out of their poverty to a life of reconciliation and redemption with Himself.

I struggle to write anything on this topic because I tend to think of poverty as solely a label for people who have little in their bank account. I tend to think of most of my life because most of my life has been spent with little to no money in my bank account. What I fail to think about is that this passage is about more than fiscal earning.

This passage focuses on how God chooses us and gives us life. Without God's intervention in our lives we are spiritually poor (Romans 3:23) and spiritually dead in our sin (Ephesians 2:1). We have all sinned and openly rebelled against God and His ways, which makes us poor in the eyes of our Creator.

God's grace is the only way that someone may be reconciled to God because we can not earn our way back to a right relationship with Him. We simply can not do it. We try all the time to prove our worth, our value, and our strength to others, but God sees us for who we truly are. God knows our sin. He knows our filth. He knows that we publicly and privately rebell against Him.

God "raises the poor from the dust... to make them sit with princes, with the princes of his people." God does this to show His glory and to display that He is the only one who can truly redeem the relationship. The imagery of bringing the poor to sit with princes shows us that God sees our sin, cleanses us through the blood of Jesus, and makes us a "royal priesthood a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light" (1 Peter 2:9).

The last verse of Psalm 113 says that God gives the woman who can't have children a home and a family. Historically speaking, women who could not have children were seen as outcasts. They remained unmarried or they were treated very harshly by the community as a whole.

Did God treat women like that? No way! He says that He gives them a home and a family! God provides protection and a community of support. God provides and fulfills our deepest needs and desires.

We often think that we are the ones who make our own way, and we often slip into thinking that if we work hard enough that we will be filled with joy. The only way that this will happen is if we turn to Jesus, confess our sins, trust in His life, death, and resurrection to be an efficient and sufficient substitute for our great poverty. God is the one who provides us with what we really need - HIM.

We need Jesus. We need Him to bring us out of the dust and reconcile us to Himself. We need Him to fully fulfill our desires and our longings. Nothing else will satisfy our thirst.

We need to be redeemed by Jesus.

If you have trusted in Jesus you are adopted into His family and your deepest thirst will be satisfied at the cross of Christ. His sovereign choice of adoption redeems our lives to be one of joy and perfect fulfillment in Jesus.

God is good and gracious.

Jacob Luis Gonzales

#PraiseHim - A Wrinkled View (Psalm 113:4-6)

A Wrinkled View

Psalm 113: 4-6

The Lord is high above all nations,

and his glory above the heavens!

Who is like the Lord our God,

who is seated on high,

who looks far down

on the heavens and the earth?

I was one of those kids who had tons of opinions, and I know that it has always been clear to the people around me. I usually made statements that tended to sound like a factual force of opinion that was hardly ever taken with a grain of salt. Most of the time the things I said were brushed off because I always thought that my thoughts were aligned with the facts. 

Don't we all do this to a certain degree? Don't we all tend to believe that our ways and our stance on something is the correct or appropriate perspective? This kind of thinking does not lend itself to only to sports, politics, and music. 

This kind of thinking makes us believe that the way we think something should happen, look, or turn out should be the right way. We naturally want to believe that God has the wrong way. We end up thinking that we are like God in that we believe our plans, ways, and interpretations should be correct stance, and we believe that God's plans, ways, and interpretations are the incorrect stance.

These two verses set us up to see that God is holy. What does it mean when I say that God is holy? John Piper said it clearly when he said this:

"God is holy means that God is in a class of perfection and greatness and value by himself. He is incomparable. His holiness is his utterly unique and perfect divine essence. It determines all that he is and does and is determined by nothing and no one outside himself. His holiness is what he is as God which no one else is, or ever will be, and it signifies his intrinsic, infinite worth."

God is in a class by Himself. He is very much unlike us in that He is perfect. Perfection can be a hard thing to grasp because nothing on earth is perfect, so even our attempts to define holiness falls short of its real meaning. Think about this: Our definition of perfection is imperfect.

So, when it says in Psalm 113:3-4 that God is above all nations and there is no one like Him, the psalmist is saying that God deserves our praise because His ways and His thoughts are so much higher than our own.

Isaiah 55:8-9 states it so clearly:

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways

and my thoughts than your thoughts." 

This is one of the most comforting passages in Scripture to me, but sometimes after thinking about this verse it leaves questions unanswered. The comfort of knowing that God's ways and thoughts are higher than my own is not always comforting because I sometimes doubt the promises of God. Doubt is a sign of unbelief in God's goodness, His faithfulness, and His graciousness.

When we doubt God we actively think that our ways and our thoughts are more faithful and based on truth. We naturally think that our ways are best, but how did that how did that happen? When did people start doubting God's promises and His ways?

Doubting God's promises started with our ancestors, Adam and Eve (Genesis 3). Adam and Eve doubted that God told them the truth about the tree, and they believed in the lie that they could be like God by eating from the tree. Adam and Eve had no reason to doubt God's promises. Ever since Adam and Eve we have been born sinful and naturally desire everything that defies God and His ways.

I remember when a teacher told my class to take a piece of paper and make it into a tight paper ball. After we all did this we were told to try to make it flat again. We quickly realized that no matter how hard we tried we could not get it back to the way it was originally. This is sort of like our human nature. Adam and Eve had a sinless nature, but they sinned and could no longer have a perfect relationship with God again. They could no longer fully desire God's ways and thoughts.

What is the solution? If we can't fix it ourselves, what are we to do? How can we overcome our sinful nature and have a perfect relationship with God where we desire His ways and thought?

All questions find their answer in Jesus Christ. Adam brought sin. Jesus brought redemption. Adam brought condemnation. Jesus brought forgiveness. Adam brought death. Jesus brought life. (Romans 6)

We can't overcome our sinful nature. Only Jesus can overcome sin.

On our own, we can not desire God. We need God to reveal Himself to us by the Holy Spirit to transform our hearts and minds to love Jesus. The Holy Spirit testifies to Jesus' work on the cross, and Jesus displays the love of the Father for His children!

We were dead in our sin, but Jesus made us alive (Ephesians 2). Our minds are transformed to desire the will of God (Romans 12:1-2). Once we repent for our pride and make ourselves humble before God, He forgives us and gives us a clean heart and a new mind that desire Him.

We are always tempted to believe that our ways are straight and our ways are correct, but we need to go to the Bible to test our thinking on every subject. God has revealed His ways and thoughts for us so that we could test our thinking.

God is holy and we are not. God's ways and thoughts are perfect and ours are wrinkled. God is above all nations and peoples and we are not. God is not like us and this should give us great joy!

God is good and gracious.

Jacob Luis Gonzales