DAILY DEVOTIONAL – October 12, 2020
“Steadfast”
Prayer: Almighty God, Your love is limitless. Your patience is eternal. Your grace is all sufficient. Thank You Lord for Your long-suffering with us, and thank you for Jesus who has brought us Your salvation through His own blood. Amen.
Scripture: Psalm 103:8-14
The Lord is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
9 He will not always chide,
nor will he keep his anger forever.
10 He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
12 as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
13 As a father shows compassion to his children,
so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.
14 For he knows our frame;
he remembers that we are dust.
Devotional – “Steadfast”
As any of you who have raised children know, some of the most significant epiphanies we have of the reality of God’s love for us come through our experiences in raising children. This weekend my son provided me one of those moments when I was reminded of how incredibly patient God is with me.
This past Sunday we had a barbecue for our middle school and high school youth groups. The wind was blowing pretty good and my son gets all kinds of excited when the wind is really going. He has recently started to express his excitement by running around in circles squealing at the top of his lungs. The problem is, he never looks straight ahead when he is running because he wants you to notice him. After several narrow misses and many warnings from me to stop running around, it finally happened. Jesse ran face first, well, side-of-face-first (because he was looking at me), into the metal arm of a chair. Thankfully, he was okay; crying mainly because it surprised and startled him. After ignoring dad’s warnings time again, where is the first place he wants to run when he falls and gets hurt? To the same dad who warned him so many times to stop. Of course I was happy to comfort him and console him, and it was in that moment I was reminded of God’s fatherly patience and love for me. After all, like father like son, right? I thought to myself, “This is what God puts up with from me everyday!” My very next thought was that of verse 8 from Psalm 103. “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”
In His great Fatherly love and patience with us, I can’t imagine what He must see as He watches us go our own way, lost in our own desires and our own pursuits, oblivious to His leading, His instruction and to anything and everything else happening around us. Like little children, even we adults can get so lost and caught up with what we want and what we think is best that we remain completely unaware of the danger we pose to ourselves and the effects we have on those around us.
My tendency as a parent sometimes is to try and stop my children from doing anything that would jeopardize their safety. But how much fun would that be for my kids? How would they know of my patience and love and forgiveness if I stopped every opportunity, even the painful ones, for me to be those things to them? I believe that is why God is so patient with us and our sin, and the suffering our sin brings into our lives and the lives of others.
People often ask how a loving God could seemingly do nothing while bad things happen. God is never doing nothing, even when He appears to be still and silent. Scripture says in 2 Peter 3 that, “[God] is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” The important part of what Peter just said is that God is patient “toward” you. God never sits on His hands. God is never idle. Even in His patience, He is moving toward us and moving for us. Everything God does is to bring us closer to Him, to bring us to a place of repentance and reliance on Him so that as it says in Psalm 103, He can show us His love and how “He does not deal with us according to our sins or repay us for our iniquities,” and so that He can show “compassion to His children…to those who fear Him.”
As God promised, He sent His Son Jesus to the cross, to bleed for our sins and die our death and rise again from the dead so that through faith in Christ we would be forgiven and our sins removed from us as far as the east is from the west. So my friends, the next time our sinfulness gets us into a mess and we look up to heaven and dare to ask God, “why are you letting this happen to me?!”, remember, “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. (Psalm 103:8) He is patient toward you, not wanting you to perish but to come to repentance (2 Peter3:9),” so that as Ephesians 3:18-19 says, we would “comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Thanks for spending time with me again today in God’s Word, and remember, that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today and has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
