Today ask God to open the eyes of your heart to recognize and delight in the many blessings that God is pouring out on you.
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SHAUNA: This is Shauna on Joni Eareckson Tada: Sharing Hope. And I can’t wait for you to hear what Joni has to say about God’s blessings.
JONI: I am the most blessed quadriplegic in the world you’ll ever meet.” Sure, I battle cancer, and I live in a wheelchair, and I’ve got pain in my hip and my back, and I’ve got breathing problems, but I am so, so happy! The Lord Jesus fills my heart with his joy even with all these afflictions, and through all the trials, I find Him to be ecstasy beyond compare. And I’m just so blessed to know him, to be saved, to be part of his family. I am blessed to have escaped hell, and I have a home in heaven. I have the blessing of friends, a mission to accomplish, and the strength to get up in the morning and face the day. I am one blessed woman. And that’s what I love about the God of the Bible. He loves to bless me. And you, too. God does not bless us begrudgingly. God’s eager to bless us. He does not wait for us to come to him. He seeks us out, because he finds great joy in doing us good. God is not waiting for us; no, he’s pursuing us. In fact, scholars say that’s the literal translation of Psalm 23:6, “Surely goodness and mercy shall pursue me all the days of my life.”
God loves to show mercy. Now, let me say that again. God loves to show mercy. He’s not hesitant, indecisive, tentative in his desire to do good to his people. He enjoys doing you good and showing you mercy. And even when he does discipline us, he does it in kindness with our good in mind. I love the way John Piper says that even when it comes to this broken world, God’s anger, he says, “… must be released by a stiff safety lock, ah … but His mercy has a hair trigger. It’s what God meant when he came down on Mount Sinai and said to Moses, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love.’” God said that in Exodus 34, and he’s still saying it. He says the same in Jeremiah 9:24, “I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.” Oh, friend, he delights in showing you, his love.
God’s never irritable or edgy. His anger never has a short fuse. No, instead he is infinitely energetic with unending enthusiasm when it comes to showing us his joy and delights. Now, this is so hard for us to comprehend because we are so not that way! I mean, we’ve got to take a nap every day just to cope, not to mention thrive. Our emotions go up and down. We awake bored and discouraged one morning and feel hopeful and excited the next. Piper once said that “We are like little geysers that gurgle and sputter and pop erratically. But God is like a great Niagara Falls – you look at 186,000 tons of water crashing over the precipice every minute, and you think: Surely this can’t keep going at this force year after year after year. Yet it does. And that’s the way God is when it comes to blessing us. He never grows weary of it. It never gets boring to him.” The thunderous waterfall of his blessings have no end.
So, friend, today ask God to please open the eyes of your heart to recognize and delight in the many blessings that God is pouring out on you. In small and great ways, God is inexorably wooing you to his side. Do not resist him. Count your many blessings [the lady from the wheelchair says], be grateful that he has chosen you to be a happy recipient of all his many expressions of care and of love.
© Joni and Friends