The Greatest Gift"

The Special of the Day… From the Orange Moon Cafe…

"The Greatest Gift"

   

   This week's memory verse references one of the most powerful and life changing of all Biblical truths.

   "The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in Him" (Lamentations 3:24).

   We could lose everything, but if the Lord remained, we would have lost nothing.  This is not to minimize the earthly gifts of life that come from God and bless us in innumerable ways.  "He giveth to all life and breath and all things" (Acts 17:25).  Indeed, one of the ways we experience the Lord as "my portion" involves the people, possessions, places, and purposes He bestows in order to reveal His role as the Giver "of every good gift and every perfect gift" (James 1:17).  However, we must never forget that God made us first and foremost to be filled and fulfilled by Himself.  "To live is Christ" (Philippians 1:21).  As spiritual beings in our essence, only the living presence of the Spirit of our Lord can fulfill our innermost being.  Even God's gifts cannot occupy this dwelling place of the heart wherein the gift of Himself must serve as the love, the light, and the life of who we must deeply are.  Therein believers "live through Him" by being spiritually inhabited by Him.  "I will dwell in them" (I John 4:19; II Corinthians 6:16).

   Much would seem to argue against the proposal that God alone serves as the Life of our lives.  It feels as if we need other things, and again, our Heavenly Father grants to us "life and breath and all things" as marvelous gifts of the most generous grace and lovingkindness.  However, we must never idolize the gifts by mistaking them as able to satisfy the depths of our spiritual being.  They cannot.  Only One can.  God Himself occupies that holy role.  He will not be satisfied until He dwells within us as the love, light, and life of our hearts - and until we know Him as described by the Psalmist: "Thou art my hope, o Lord God" (Psalm 71:5).  As my wife Frances expresses in her life motto, "Having Him, we have all."   This is true, just as it is also true that God also grants to us countless gifts intended to direct our hearts to know Him as the Giver, but even more, as the truest and greatest Gift of all.

"He is thy life." 

(Deuteronomy 30:20)

Weekly Memory Verse

   The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in Him. The LORD is good unto them that wait for Him, to the soul that seeketh Him."

(Lamentations 3:24-25)

    

  

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