"God, put salt on my lips, that i might thirst for You." saint augustine exodus chapter 33 has always meant a lot to me and perplexed me and fascinated me and stirred up desire within me time and time again to know and speak with God like moses. it says they spoke as friends. and the one thing that moses asks of God is just to see His glory. that is his request. moses pleads that God's presence would go with the Israelites.
and then recently a teaching by jonny hughes really grabbed me & made me think. he says: "this is our big idol: comfort. and so we live and as we get older, we try to create these cocoons that are more and more comfortable. but actually I don't think comfort is the place where we meet with God. i think actually it's often desperation... hunger is the soil in which God's presence finds growth." luke 51:53 "He's filled the hungry with good things, but the rich He has sent away empty" these words really pulled me and my prayer for you and for me is that we would hunger to meet with the living God and become desperate to know His presence, like moses. jonny hughes also said, "if Jesus needs to encounter and meet with God face to face, then so do we. i've tried to live the christian life in terms of spiritual performance, trying to impress God, and it just leads to burn-out. what we need as christians is to be continually encountering the person of Jesus through the Spirit. & encounter with God is the bread & butter: sitting in front of Him every day." a prayer to know intimacy with Him. p.s. i would love if you would listen to this teaching, too, friend. click HERE! Let us go right into the presence of God with sincere hearts fully trusting him.
For our guilty consciences have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water. Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise. Hebrews 10:22,23 Oh, that we might know the Lord! Let us press on to know Him. He will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn or the coming of rains in early spring. Hosea 6:3 i've just been thinking about God & His beauty a lot today, so this is the product of those thoughts and revelations about who i am as a created being, made in the image of a Creator.
my hope is that, in some way, you might be inspired by this and find yourself creating something in whatever way it is that you create, and through your creating you might find the ultimate Creator. inspired by psalm 104 "So often I thank Jesus for enjoying beauty. How much more lovely is it to serve someone who likes and creates beautiful things? I was humbled to realize that if He is the Creator of all we see, then beauty originates from who He is. He is beauty. He is light. He is art. He is color. We serve a God who makes everything of worth eternal. When He is passionate about something, He doesn’t hold back. He made our souls eternal, our relationship with Him eternal, and beauty eternal." -a post i stumbled upon this quote really got to me because i simply couldn't agree more. praise God for beauty!
my prayer for the day is that we would see God as a beautiful one... that we would be constantly surprised by His beauty throughout the day, and that we would have eyes extra open, aware, and sensitive to the ways that He is beautiful and has filled our lives to the brim with it all around! just too many beautiful people and food and sunsets and colors and sounds and little glimpses of Him to let them go unnoticed. & ohhh i love that He's that kind of God. so God, show us Your beauty. You are everything good, You are everything beautiful, You are everything, You're everything... my prayer today is that we would see God as our Father like this.
that we, as His dearly loved sons and daughters, would ask Him to reveal His intimate love by letting Him show us what needs whittling out of our lives in order to become the people He has intended for us to be. this prayer is a raw one. a humbling one. but it is one that will inevitably bring us closer to God when we find that He is a loving Father. http://www.hespeaksinthesilence.com/2014/01/dad-stories-memories-of-a-man-who-got-it-right-5/
^^my heart is so filled with love from these words. so much beauty.^^ |