God has emotions like ours!

Well, actually I should have written it the other way around. We have emotions like God. It is He who made us like Him and not the other way around. But I wrote that heading for a purpose. We very often forget that God feels like we do! He can feel it so bad that when Israel sinned, He wanted to destroy the whole lot at once. He was fed up with them and rightly so. He waited ten times before He finally said, 'enough is enough' and decided that they would not enter the promised land. There was a time when He said regarding them that even if Noah and Daniel pleaded for them, He would not listen. 
What I want us to know is that we bring pain to the heart of God in numerous ways. He is grieved when we fail to honor Him in our speech or action. He is sad when we treat Him like our slave. He is upset when we treat His holy commands with scant respect. And why is it that we think about it so less? Do we see that we take great care not to hurt someone whom we respect here on earth but somehow treat God on a different level? Do we think that God just doesn't care when we - whom He so lovingly adopted as His own - treat Him as someone whom we met on the street and just waved Him off? If only we have a sensitive spirit that is so desirous to give Him glory in all that we do. He surely deserves it. Yes, we may still continue to cause Him pain but can we at least try to minimize it? God help us all.

Love is more than a feeling!

Love is more than a feeling. That is a cliche remark that we must have heard much and yet how less do we think of the consequence of such a statement. We have the perfect example in the life of Jesus who demonstrated that love supremely on the cross. However, we still find some kind of solace in singing love songs to Jesus while we fail to really love Him in return. The remark by Jesus is crystal clear - 'if you love Me, keep My commands'. And then we search hard to find out His commands, not knowing that there is one staring at our face all the time, i.e. to love the brethren. Well, we do love our brethren especially the ones who we love to love. But then, there are those who rub us the wrong way and then there are those whom we rather avoid, just to be on the safe side. We just don't have that love feeling for them. We think that by loving God, we will be able to love the brethren. But actually by loving the brethren, we are showing that we love God. We keep waiting on God to love the brethren and we find out sooner or later that God is waiting for us to take the plunge and do it anyhow...

The God who deigns!

I have been sharing in church about the mercy of God for the past few weeks and it was quite a spiritual treat for me as well. We often either ignore or minimize the mercy aspect of God's nature and I suspect it is because we are uncomfortable with the fact that we were once children of wrath and deserve nothing but judgment. Mercy has to do with sinners and we want to erase that past as much as possible. What we fail to realize is that sin is never too far away and we need His mercy even now. We feel we are more deserving now that we are saints and sons and we think that God is now working in our lives apart from mercy . Mercy also give us a picture of bowing face down before Him deserving only judgment and we are not very keen on that. We would rather think and meditate on God's love because it seems to set us more on equal terms with God. We fail to see that love of God cannot reach us without His mercy falling on us first.
Please understand that the mercy seat in the tabernacle had cherubim on both sides signifying that the God who delights in showing mercy on His people is also the God of glory. The cherubim reveal the glory of God and we have to see Him not on equal terms but as the God who is exalted beyond compare. And yet, He is the Lord God who decides not to destroy us for our rebellion but deigns to reveal His compassion on a level that is astounding and awesome. All glory be to Him now and forever more.