Tag Archives: Joy

The oil of gladness

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Let your heart be filled with overflowing joy, let fear dissolve, your countenance chastened and restored.  Have you had the grand opportunity to sit down and read the Word of God.  Not just studying it or using it as an attempt to secure some understanding, but honestly sitting down and relaxing into its grandeur.  For example, the book of Hebrews, such a short book it simply astounds.  I can read it over and over and be edified each time, delving into God’s love for Jesus and how that love became the greatest gift from a loving Father to all the Earth.  It is a Holy Spirit inspired road map of how God’s grace frees believers from the prisons of law, sin and death.  Hebrews is a reassuring manual on what to expect as a believer, resolving misunderstanding, building appropriate expectation and securing hope.  This book is the quintessential guide to Divine and Christian relationship, explaining the need and benefits of enduring relationship, even explaining the positive effects of chastisement and testing.

There is great joy of maintenance in the Word of God.  Just as in Hebrews, the other epistles provide sufficient detailed explanation on church life, family, kingdom works, reputation, gifts, healing, protection, preparedness and warnings against enemies, complacency and backsliding.  Reading them builds confidence, courage, faith, strength and thorough understanding and logical reliance upon the Truth of Christian Hope.  We are of the same family, sharing in the riches of righteousness and glory, not due to worldly qualifiers of fitness, survival or class but because we believed.  That is something which cannot be taken from us, even by death.  Did you hear that, even through death we cannot be stripped of our heritage, or lineage or kinship to Christ Jesus?  What a gift, but lest we fall prey to worldly weakness, remember to heed this word not just read it.  Obedience is love for God, verified in faith.

Be glad, be of good courage and know that the Lord is our God for now and forever, Amen.  Jesus, may I make full use of the gifts I have been given to Your greatest Glory.

Contentment

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Peace from God and all His blessings, may they keep you warm through the cold and dark of night.  He loves us you know.  He sees each of us in our own circumstances, taking the time, in His omniscience, to walk through this life individually with every single person that has ever been born.  All of us have been offered a relationship with the maker of time and space.  Each of us, so incredibly important to Him that He made specific plans, attempts and dispatched uniquely-employed messengers to provide us ample opportunity to choose wisely.  Resisting such kindness, care and dedication is almost unimaginable, but He also said that He loves us enough to allow us to choose something other than His will for our lives.  I am content in His love and the knowledge that this Earth is my training ground, an opportunity to learn to love and be loved with the ominous specter of impermanence spurring me to make good use of my time.

You see it is no small thing to know that the King of all universes knows me by name and cares for me each moment of my life.  I have a cornucopia of hope, residing in my bosom, assuring me that no circumstance is outside His Will.  This world and death have lost their control over my internal topography.  Certainly, I am affected by pain, by joy, by love, by wind and rain and sea, but they are additions, improvements, enhancements given me on my journey to see the King.  This world shall not take my life, I give it freely at the time of His choosing, so that I may enjoy that rapturous moment in recognizing His Glorious face.

I too have loved this world, with its crimson, its thinkers and its skies, its dreamers, its children and its silver haired know-it-alls.  I have been shown the good and the bad and I cried, tears of joy and of agony.  I have known evil, seeking its own fulfillment, searching for all that it may consume, but I have known that even that served the purpose of God.  Young men have told me their visions and old women their hopeful dreams.  This life has been lived with purpose, hope and a knowledge and discernment of joy, song and worship for a King who is truly worthy of everything that I can possibly give.  In that loss may not exist.

The Lord is my strength, my hope and my strong tower, I shall not be moved for my feet are rooted firmly in the Rock of Ages the foundations of time and space.  I serve the Lord God Almighty, The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit.  Forever and ever amen.  Jesus be praised.