The Beginning of the End

Date:  Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Day 119 of 149


Well, it's now official.  I am one month away from leaving Taipei, Taiwan after spending around 150 days here.  Amazing.  Also, consider this gift:  I arrived on a fasting month and will be leaving on another fasting month.  TLC has 3 months out of the year that they devote to prayer and fasting:  March, July, and November.  How fitting.  How gracious of God.  It seems as God wants me to learn the joys of a life devoted towards continual prayer and regular seasons of fasting each year.  LORD continue to teach me the immense worth and eternal importance of a life spent rediscovering the joys of prayer and fasting.  And as I pursue a life of prayer and fasting may You continue to reveal Your glory in ever diverse manners and mediums.  Redefine Your glory to me each and every day, LORD.  In Jesus' great name I pray, Amen.

Here is an excerpt from my journal on the topic of God's glory:

How do we live for God's Glory?  Notice Matthew 22:37-40, "You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the greatest commandment.  And the second is like it:  You shall love your neighbor as yourself."  In other words, the way we live for God's glory is to live devoted, fully sold out, for Him.  Or  as Pastor John Piper says, "God is most glorified in us, when we are most satisfied in Him."  There is no other greater commandment than this:  as God's creation we must love Him unconditionally because He loves us unconditionally.  Discipleship extends naturally out of this love.  As we partner with each other to spur one another towards increasing our love for God, we come closer and closer to finally fulfilling that great commandment.  So how do we glorify God?  Love Him and love others.

We want to live in His Glory, bask in it, bathe in it, radiate it, share it, display it, and reveal it.  This is what discipleship is all about, sharing, partaking, and enjoying the Glory of God with others.  We want to develop our spiritual taste buds such that we acquire the taste of God's glory.  We want to become connoisseurs of God's glory--seeking out other ways to ignite our taste buds in more diverse and revelatory ways.  One of my professors, Jerry Root, has the quote that I love, "All truth can be plumbed more deeply, applied more widely, and seen more clearly as it is applied to other coherent truths."  If this is true, and I believe wholeheartedly that it is, then God's glory--and by extension His love--is the absolute truth that we are to search out, discover, immerse ourselves in, be put in awe by, and ground our ultimate joy and satisfaction in and through.  It is not enough to just receive it and keep it for ourselves, such a wonderful beauty can never be hoarded selfishly.

I can't wait for what this life has in store!  Every new day an opportunity, every second the chance to glimpse and experience God's glory in a different more amazing way.  Can't wait for what God has in store for me!