Speechless Humility

"And when he had spoken such words to me, I set my face toward the ground, and I became dumb... There remained no strength in me, neither is there breath left in me." (Daniel 10:15, 17)

When we meet God we also have a sense of weakness. I don't think you will ever be strong until you know how utterly weak you are. And you will never know how utterly weak you are until you have stood in the presence of that great plenitude of strength, that great fullness of infinite power that we call God. When for an awful, happy, terrible, wonderful moment the eyes of our hearts have gazed upon the transcendent God, high and lifted up with His train filling the temple, then we will know how weak we are.

I've been preaching since I was nineteen years old and now I'm sixty-three. And yet, after all these years of preaching, I come into the pulpit shaking inside - not because I fear the people, but because I fear God. It's the fear and trembling of knowing that I stand to speak of God and if I don't speak rightly about God, what a terrible error it will be. If I speak evilly of God, what a frightful crime! It is only when I speak well of God that I dare sleep at night without asking forgiveness.

Most of us have never had a true vision of Your power, Lord, and so have not experienced a real sense of our own weakness. May I fear You in speechless humility. Amen

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God Is There First

"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty." (Revelation 1:8)

The unconditioned priority of God in His universe is a truth celebrated both in the Old Testament and in the New. The prophet Habakkuk sang it in ecstatic language, "Art thou not from everlasting, O LORD my God, mine Holy One?" (1:12). The Apostle John set it forth in careful words deep with meaning.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made (1:1-3).

Here we acknowledge (and there is fear and wonder in the thought) the essential unity of God's nature, the timeless persistence of His changeless being throughout eternity and time. Begin where we will, God is there first. He is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending. If we grope back to the farthest limits of thought were imagination touches the pre-creation void, we shall find God there. In one unified present glance He comprehends all things from everlasting, and the flutter of a seraph's wing a thousand ages hence is seen by Him now without moving His eyes.

Your timelessness is a truth that is beyond my comprehension, Lord, but it leads me to fall before You in awe. Amen

~A. W. Tozer~