Your name and renown are the desire of our hearts. Isaiah 26:8 (NIV)
Listen to Isaiah 26 in The Message:
...Throw wide the gates
so good and true people can enter.
People with their minds set on you,
you keep completely whole,
Steady on their feet,
because they keep at it and don't quit.
Depend on God and keep at it
because in the Lord God you have a sure thing.
Those who lived high and mighty
he knocked off their high horse...
All the exploited and outcast peoples
build their lives on the reclaimed land.
The path of right-living people is level.
The Leveler evens the road for the right-living.
We're in no hurry, God. We're content to linger
in the path sign-posted with your decisions.
Who you are and what you've done
are all we'll ever want.
Through the night my soul longs for you.
Deep from within me my spirit reaches out to you...
I have never cultivated a taste for coffee. I am, however, a great lover of Diet Coke. A local convenience store (Holiday) tempts me with 44 oz of it for 99 cents. This morning on my way in to the watering hole I saw a woman reading a book with a captivating title, Silence on Fire, and I asked her about it. It is based upon the writings of Thomas Merton.
We spoke and she shared with me that she is reading it as part of her 12 Step program and what followed was a few minutes of sharing as she waited for her ride to a meeting. She is determined and pursuing a better path. She has chosen her Master.
Today I found myself telling Jesus again, "You are my choice. You are all I will ever want." I remembered how He said to His friends, "I have earnestly (with passionate longing) desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer." His desire was so keenly focused upon them, upon us, as he revealed in the flesh the Savior who had been concealed in all the generations of Seders past.
Christ's heart and strength were purposefully directed towards us and our redemption. That purpose, sharpened knife-edged and unforgiving of His divinity, dictated that He would die in our place with the full weight of His obedience bringing down the hammer of God's vengeance upon the nails. (Like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be recovered, so we must die. But that is not what God desires; rather, he devises ways so that a banished person does not remain banished from him. 2 Samuel 14:14) "Not my will...but Yours."
It remains His passion to eat with us. To share the Marriage Supper of the Lamb in His Father's Kingdom with those forgiven ones whose desire is to live for Him. If Merton is right then our lives will be shaped by that desire every bit as much as was Christ's.
The end is love with reclaimed people living on reclaimed land.
The Desired Ones.
Us.
Kat with John
Dedicated to the woman at the Holiday. May Christ continue to order all your "Steps." Thanks for sharing.
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