At the end of His prayer, Jesus taught us to say (and think), “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory”. None of us have any real power. In a universe as vast as ours, we are small!! We can’t claim (or shouldn’t) any glory or credit or significance (other than the fact that we have been loved by God). The world and it’s history are divinely conceived, divinely created, divinely managed. Something “healthy” happens in the human heart when it stops competing with God for control and credit, stops demanding or needing the attention and approval of others, starts pointing, instead, to the One who truly deserves such attention and praise. How wise and kind of the Lord to teach us this life-renewing thought. It is not about me! The glory and the story belong to God!
How true….the vastness of our God. Whenever I decide that I am “too big for my britches” as my daddy says, I think back to a time when God showed me just how big He is. It was the summer of 1999 on a trip to Washington/Canada that we went whale watching. I remembered thinking how big Shamu is at Sea World and how scary it would be to encounter an Orca in the wild. Out in that little rubber dinghy, the guide announced that he had spotted a pod of whales, 7 in all. He said we have to stay about a quarter of a mile out so we won’t agitate them (excellent plan!). From where we were, those 30 foot long, 8 ton creatures looked like small trouts. Seven Shamus and one little me….and ocean as far as I could see. My feeling was very similar, I think, to those of Neil Armstrong when he explained, “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” Such a big God and so personal, too….amazing.
Open Windows key verse for today: 1 Chronicles 29:11
Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and thou art exalted as head above all.
Perfect timing, as always!