God's Story

I mentioned in my last post that I had been working, travelling and sick. I guess I should have added "reading" to that list of things I have been doing because I finished reading another book. I read God's Story: Finding Meaning for Your Life through Knowing God by Anne Graham Lotz and it was excellent. The best thing about it was that I got something totally different out of it than what I thought I would get. Love that when God reveals something of His character in a way that is so unexpected. Another reason I liked this book is because it has a 100-page study guide and lots of teaching outlines with it for personal and group study. For those of you who are not big readers (in that you don't like to read books without pictures) it is a longer book - approximately 400 actual pages to read but the good news is that when you pick it up it looks much longer than that. The last 125 pages are all extra study notes and the like. See, you only have to read 275 of those pages! Yahoo for you! Like before, I will list the chapters for you to peruse:

I AM Your Creator

1. I Fill Your Emptiness

2. I Mend Your Brokenness

I AM Your Father

3. I Forgive Your Sinfulness

4. I uproot Your Bitterness

5. I Redeem Your Wastedness

I AM Your Savior

6. I Share Your Loneliness

7. I Overcome Your Helplessness

8. I Calm Your Fearfulness

9. I Understand Your Weakness

I AM Your Redeemer

10. I Reject Your Religiousness

11. I Banish Your Hopelessness

There are too many passages to quote that I just love so I can't pick just one. All I can say is that, I learned about things of the Lord on each page and how He has orchestrated meaning for our lives today all the way back into Eden. This book confirmed, yet again, that the Lord will use whatever means necessary to demonstrate His glory and elicit praise from His children.

On a personal note, I find the Lord revealing Himself to me in the strangest places right now. Should it be strange to have the Lord reveal characteristics of Himself to me wherever He chooses? Is He not there in the most unfortunate of places, the most comfortable of silences, the most intimate of moments, and the most unusual of situations? Surely He is. He is there to comfort or compel you, challenge or champion you, and cast vision or captivate your attention. Wherever you are and whatever you're doing, He is there waiting to reveal Himself to you. And, unfortunately for me, He is usually not shouting. Don't you wish He would just shout it outloud sometime? He is probably not going to get my attention with a trip wire. Most of the time, you just have to be prepared and ready to hear His still quiet voice. When do we get prepared and ready to hear Him? It is not in the moment before He chooses to speak. It is in the hundreds of thousands of moments prior to that. This preparedness is an ongoing process. It is dynamic in that there is ebb and flow and always moving and changing. It is not a place that you arrive at and park. There is no parking in preparation. When He decides to speak, and if you are His child, He will speak to you, you will miss the message without proper preparation of knowing His character, His promises, and His desires for your life all found in His inerrant Word. After all, it is God's Story. He wants you to read it, take notes about it, study it, understand it, apply it, live it, breathe it, share it. It's the best selling autobiography ever written. Be part of something bigger than you could ever be by yourself. Be part of God's Story.

This book is a great read and I highly recommend it.