PSALM 36:5-10 – “Your steadfast love, O LORD, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds. Your righteousness is like the mountains of God; your judgments are like the great deep; man and beast you save, O LORD. How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings. They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights. For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light. Oh, continue your steadfast love to those who know you, and your righteousness to the upright of heart!”
THEME OF THE DAY: THE AMAZING LOVE OF GOD. There is a great hymn of the faith titled The Love of God composed in 1917 by Frederick M. Lehman. The third stanza reads – “Could we with ink the ocean fill and were the skies of parchment made, were ev’ry stalk on earth a quill and ev’ry man a scribe by trade, to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry; nor could the scroll contain the whole, tho’ stretched from sky to sky.”
Aren’t the word pictures in the stanza amazing? While reading it, did we feel overwhelmed by the depth of God’s love? Speaking of being overwhelmed, when was the last time we experienced such a sense of God’s love? How easy is it to recall that last sacred time we were alone with God meditating on His love and felt the magnitude of God’s love as the hymn writer described?
I believe one of the greatest needs in the lives of Christians is to experience God’s love beyond mere acknowledgement. It is easy to proclaim “God so loved the world” (John 3:16) but what about personally experiencing and being personally transformed by the truth that God so loves me?
In today’s scripture, the theme of David’s psalm is the steadfast love of God. He would stress it in verses 5, 7, and 10. With each reference, he points us to three most important qualities in God’s love; qualities, if we meditate on them, will overwhelm us, and to be overwhelmed with God’s love is to be a normative experience for God’s people.
The first quality in God’s steadfast love is its reach – “Your steadfast love, O LORD, extends to the heavens” (verse 5). That’s far! And that means it can reach down in our lives no matter the degree of sin or failure we find ourselves. If we remember and believe this truth, we will be overwhelmed by God’s love.
The next quality is the value of God’s steadfast love – “How precious is your steadfast love, O GOD!” (verse 7). Once a person encounters the love of God in Christ, this transformation called “new birth” (John 3:5-8), the now child of God knows the only source of true life and contentment is the steadfast love of God. The result? The love of God becomes so precious and the chief possession of inestimable value to the child of God.
A final quality in the steadfast love of God is the work it does in the maturing Christian – “Oh, continue your steadfast love to those who know you” (verse 10). To know and experience the love of Christ creates an intense thirst to want more of His love in experience and knowledge. The result is Christians give themselves over to the zealous pursuit of satisfying this life-consuming spiritual thirst.
The love of God, the amazing love of God. May we seek Him to overwhelm us with His love that transforms us more and more into the image of Him who is love.
PRAYER: “Father, deepen a thirst in me to know Your love that disciplines my life to seek it earnestly.”
QUOTE: “To know the love of Christ only intensifies the heart to know more the love of Christ.”