I Am God's

Psalm 24:1

So much of our faith expression benignly proclaims that God is mine. For instance, here is the text from a praise chorus—

Your love never fails, it never gives up

It never runs out on me

—“One Thing Remains” 

(italics mine)

The song is about God’s steadfast love, its trustworthiness, and its surety; but there is a note here that we need to be cautious about—that second line—there is the assertion that God is mine. We need to be careful with that thought because it could easily be tweaked ever so slightly into making God beholden to us—God is ours, therefore, God will be with us with whatever we want, whenever we want it, however we want it, with no expectation of us or required response from us. 

Now, let me be clear—this chorus is a strong comfort for those of us who have all too ready memories, experiences, and pains left by human beings failing to be who we thought them to be, steadfast, or sure—God will never be any of those things. God is God and not a human being, as God told Hosea. 

But what happens in a culture completely defined by self, self-interest, and self-gratification? It hears this affirmation and simply subsumes God into its thinking—God is the holy ATM, spitting out blessings, help, comforts, and problem solving whenever we want, no matter why we want it, or where our hearts might be at any given moment. 

Psalm 24 becomes the guard against such thinking and we need only read one line into it to find a brilliant confession of faith—

The earth is the Lord’s,

and all who dwell within it.

This thought turns the tables, bringing a new perspective into our thinking—faith is not so much the affirmation that God is mine, but that we are God’s

Allow that thought to sink in.

First, notice how it in no way diminishes the assurance that God is present. Everything we experience; everywhere we are; and everything about us is held by God. God is the source of our lives and loves. God is the ground of all that is. All creation flows from God’s own being. No wonder God sang in praise and wonder of creation, “it is very good!” All we see anywhere we are flows from the love of God. Each person, each tree, each blade of grass, each bird, each insect, and on through the gamut—all are works of love—God’s love. As such, they are always held as treasured by God. 

Second, that means as we wander through our path within the world, love is there to guide us, keep us, and protect us. God wants us to fulfill our promise as the children of God, realizing the fullness of being made in God’s image. That means that God will indeed be there when the path gets rocky. God will be there when we cry out like Peppermint Patty on report card day—she got all D-minuses, so her friend Marcy counsels, “There are rainy days to go with the sunny ones; there is night to go with day; and there are valleys to go with the peaks.” Patty laments, “And it’s raining tonight in my valley.” God will be there. If God is there, then grace is there. If grace is there, then hope is there. If hope is there, then there can be joy—in all things, there can be joy.

But, third, hope comes because we belong to God. That means God is free to handle our questions, demands, prayers, laments, and exultations as God chooses to. That means that what we ask for is not always going to be what we get. In fact, God may well answer us with absolute silence. We tend to see things only from inside the globe of our own perspective—i.e., we miss a lot. That especially becomes true when we suffer—nothing creates tunnel vision like suffering. God never ceases seeing the whole picture encompassing 7000000000 human beings, of whom probably 6.9 billion see the world only through their own eyes. That means what we assume to be good may not be so—God, though, always sees what is truly and properly good. And, yes, that means sometimes, God is going to say no to our demands. Silence can indeed be golden.

Fourth, our task then becomes accepting God on God’s terms rather than our own. Silence gives us room to think. It gives us space to ponder something from a myriad of angles, taking in all the possible consequences, outcomes, and possibilities. That space and time may well lead us to a deeper appreciation of what God is doing. For instance, one of the truly horrifying passages of scripture is Ps. 137:9 wherein the Psalmist asks for the joy of violently destroying the children of Israel’s enemies in vengeful recompense for Israel’s suffering. God answers in silence, thanks be to God. In that space and time, the faithful got to rethink their response, let anger fade, and allow grace to rise. Israel slaughtered no innocents. Think of all the pain missed when we had space and time to allow anger to cool before speaking or acting. Furthermore, Israel, in this case, was kept from evil by accepting that everything was in the hands of God. They could vent their rage, but they left acting to God. God would do what was right and good, and Israel would accept that response. We let God be God, even when we don’t understand what God is doing or when what God is doing is not what we want. 

Finally, we prepare ourselves for service. It will not be God who always acts, but rather God calls us to become God’s intervention, intercession, or interruption, if need be. Sometimes the best answer to our prayers is not passively receiving something, but going and doing, becoming something for someone else, but then finding the very thing we needed for ourselves. For example, remember the folk tale about stone soup? A man was hungry, but he was in a poor country with nothing to spare, so he took on cooking a meal for everyone, and the people found that as they added ingredients, they had more than enough. The man got fed, but he got fed by undertaking feeding everyone else. Love works like that. We need love to survive, but in order to find such love, we find that we first meet the world in love. To experience grace, be gracious.

So, making a simple shift in perspective leads to wondrous changes in outlook. Shifting our thinking from God is mine to I am God’s opens a treasure trove of grace, peace, and comfort. It opens to us the fullness of God who is free, omnicompetent, and always present.