God and you

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. Psalms 139:7-12

Dears in Christ,

Greetings to you, and I wish you well. May God guide you and keep you in perfect health and faith and may His grace abound in your life.

Today I wish to write on Psalms 139, considered to be one of the Grandest Psalms ever written. It’s a poem of adoration to the absolute sovereignty of God too lofty for the mind to comprehend. As Charles Spurgeon puts it, “Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continuing investigation of the great subject of the Deity”

Harry Emerson Fosdick, who was the most celebrated preacher of his day, As a young man, plagued by self-doubt due to his own sins, was gripped by a depression so powerful that he went to a shop and bought a gun, and went into hiding on his Father’s barn, so that he could load the pistol and end his life, at that moment, he heard his father’s voice calling, “Harry!”, “where are you Harry?” “I need you”, Fosdick dropped his pistol and ran towards his father’s house thinking what he required, only to find that his father was not at home. It was his Heavenly Father who had called him.

He had tried to escape God, he wanted to end it all. He wanted to be left alone of the burden of sins and the incapacity to be righteous. Weakness, shame and failure was all that he saw. Born again at a very young age of 7, he knew the Bible, he had heard from the sermons in Church. But he never realized about the God, who needed him intimately. Like a lover waiting at the doorstep and that night changed everything. He realized the God for whom even the darkness is like light.

Divine Love, that just simply won’t throw up its hands in despair at our raucous sinfulness, but rather waits for us to come back to him.

Francis Thompson, wrote a wonderful poem called the Hound of Heaven, this well-loved Christian Poem is described as follows, “The name is strange. It startles one at first. It is so bold, so new, and so fearless. It does not attract, rather the reverse. But when one reads the poem this strangeness disappears. The meaning is understood. As the hound follows the hare, never ceasing in its running, ever drawing nearer in the chase, with unhurrying and imperturbed pace, so does God follow the fleeing soul by His Divine grace. And though in sin or in human love, away from God it seeks to hide itself, Divine grace follows after, unwearyingly follows ever after, till the soul feels its pressure forcing it to turn to Him alone in that never ending pursuit.”

The last lines of the poem go like this,

“Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He Whom thou seekest!

Thou dravest love from me, who dravest Me.”

God is speaking to the running, those who are running from God. The weakest and the blindest who cannot see that God loves them and wants to shower them with His love. But they don’t find the love they are seeking because they have rejected it from God. God is saying, “You drove love away from yourself because you have driven My love away from you.”

I want to end with the words of Late Dr. S.M. Lockeridge’s sermon excerpt, “I’m coming to tell you this that the heavens of heavens can’t contain Him, let alone some man explain Him. You can’t get Him out of your mind. You can’t get Him off of your hands. You can’t outlive Him and you can’t live without Him.”

May you feel God every moment of your life, and May God bless you.

Bro. Gideon Paul Rufus

God’s Love Missions Family