Happiness in God’s Comfort

Hello friends. 🙂

Our church has been having a week of meetings, and on the third night, I had an experience I’d like to share.

After the ordinary mayhem of bedtime, Mom and Dad tucked the younger girls in and then went to bed themselves after wishing me a goodnight. I sat at the dining room table, slowing sipping my second cup of hot chocolate before bed. My church notebook, bible, and clutch lay in front of me, and I got the sudden desire to flip open my bible.

Setting my cup down, I reached for it and half-quickly started paging through. The girls dropped something in their room and the noise startled me. I glanced up and then back to the book in front of me.

My attention was immediately drawn to this verse:

In the multitude of my thoughts within me, thy comforts delight my soul.

Psalm 94:19
kjv

It felt like a pulsing red button to my soul.

In the multitude of my thoughts within me, thy comforts delight my soul...

The beauty, the grace, the sufficiency, the peace, the mercy, the faithfulness of God are His comforts.

God Himself is the comfort yearned for in our soul.

Imagine… of all the things you ever think about, it is the comfort of God which bring delight to our very souls.

And it is God’s comfort alone.

Hard to comprehend, and yet so lifechanging!

If that is really true (and it is!), then you don’t need sugar, or friends, or hobbies, or books, or a clean house, or perfect health, or anything else you can put there, to bring delight to one’s life. And in fact, it is those things which bring on such a multitude of thoughts.

A multitude of thoughts which is burdening, and wearisome, and draining, and discouraging. All those other things detract; it’s only in God’s comfort can our very souls be delighted.

It is when we are anchored in God’s delight, that we can then overflow into those other things as a means to worship.

But back to my story.

As I finished getting ready for bed, I just kept repeating that verse. I can’t necessarily say I was overwhelmed or struggling with a certain area in my life, but that didn’t mean my thoughts weren’t all over the place.

It just struck me as such a GOOD ending to a day God had been ministering to me in.

The fact that I have a bible, even several, in my possession that are in my written language, is such an amazing blessing!

Earlier that day…

As I went about my day’s work, I had been listening to Revive Our Hearts podcast. They had recently posted a series called, “How We Got Our English Bible“.

It’s a four-part series on the history of the English bible. Though I had known there was quite a bit of turmoil surrounding it, I had not nearly understood just how precious having a Bible of my own and in my mother language is.

This quote reminded me that it’s not because of any man or system, that we have this wonderful privilege of having God’s Word.

God has sovereignly and supernaturally preserved His Word for us over 3500 years. Why would he do that? He did it so that we could know Him and so that we could know the story of His grace and mercy in redeeming fallen sinners through the sacrificial death of Christ in our place.

Nancy Demoss Wolgemuth

At the end of the series, they played an audio clip of the Kumayl people of Papua New Guinea receiving the New Testament in their own language for the first time in 2010. The rejoicing that was evident through that short audio was so real and beautiful, I couldn’t help but praise God for His wonderous ways and Word!

God convicted me on how I view His Word. Do I read, and study, seek, and live by it as the priceless treasure that it is? Do I consider Jesus, the Living Word, to be the Wonderful Counselor, the Prince of Peace, that He is?

Psalm 106

I want to point out a couple verses in Psalm 106, in light of those questions.

It recounts Israel’s history with the Lord and His Word.

Praise the Lord. Give thanks for He is good, and His loyal love endures. Who can adequately recount the Lord’s mighty acts, or relate His praiseworthy deeds? How blessed are those who promote justice, and do what is right all the time… We have sinned like our ancestors; we have done wrong, we have done evil. Our ancestors in Egypt failed to appreciate your miraculous deeds. They failed to remember your many acts of loyal love, and they rebelled at the sea by the Red Sea. Yet He delivered them for the sake of his reputation, that He might reveal His power...They believed His promises; they sang praises to Him. They quickly forgot what He had done; they did not wait for His instructions… Deliver us, O Lord, our God. Gather us from among the nations. Then we will give thanks to your holy name and boast about your praiseworthy deeds. The Lord God of Israel deserves praise, in the future and forevermore. Let all the people say, “We agree! Praise the Lord!”

Psalm 106:1-3,6-8,12-13,48

Praise be to God, as it says at the end there, that we can ask God for deliverance from the “nations” that we run to. And praise be to His Worthy name that He is everything we can, and will, ever need.

–LIZ–