For the first two weeks in August, I had the privilege of being the guest speaker at my church. In fact, for the first time I had my own series. It was great fun and a new challenge not just in hearing from God and creating messages, but in making sure the series had a flow too. While preparing the message for the first week, I came across my life verse. It has resounded with me ever since.
I delight greatly in the Lord;
my soul rejoices in my God.
For he has clothed me with garments of salvation
and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness,
as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest,
and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
- Isaiah 61:10
One of my habits each morning has become to wake up early and go for a walk in order to pray and meditate on a verse. (I've found that kneeling induces sleep, so I must keep moving.) In the dark and quiet of the morning God speaks very clearly to me and I usually take time to journal my thoughts later in the morning. Keeping in mind that I am not a professional theologian, I wanted to share a couple of my thoughts on this verse and why it has become my life verse.
For me, the first two lines set the tone. Delight and rejoicing. Within the hallowed halls of this blog, I have expressed my desire to be one who delights in God in all circumstances. In fact, I think that is why God has my life in one giant time out, in order for me to delight in him now. If I can delight in Him while I am lonely, unfulfilled at work, and learning the ropes of marriage all over again, then I will know that in the future it is not the fact that things are going my way that is allowing me to delight in God.
It also strikes me how the speaker uses the preposition 'in' within both the first lines. Not delight around the Lord, not while thinking about God - but firmly planted 'in'. That wording alone takes me to one of my favorite teachings of Jesus in John 15. "Remain in me" and "Remain in my love," Jesus says in the John 15 passage.
There was a video game when I was a kid, don't remember the name, but it had to do with landing a spaceship on the moon. In the corner of the screen, you had to keep a dot centered in a circle in order to land safely. If the dot left the center region, doom followed. Jesus is the target and our soul is to remain fix in Him.
The Isaiah verse speaks to me as a life verse because it states (but does not overstate) the reason for the delight. The salvation and righteousness that God has clothed me with. Both of those things I could not provide for myself, though I often try. God has made me beautiful, not because I earned it, but because He loves me; hence the imagery in the last two lines. The bride and groom on their special day, holding nothing back from making themselves look beautiful for the impending spouse. While I did not nor could not make myself look like that before God, He took the initiative to dress me up. Christ became sin for me so that I could be righteous.
God doesn't love me because I am beautiful, I am beautiful because He loves me.
It is so simple, right? We delight and rejoice over our salvation and righteousness. That's it. Not anything else. In fact, it is when we lose sight of these two things and try to make it about any other factors, that is when we are no longer 'in' Him. Whatever other accouterments we try to add onto salvation and righteousness diminish what God has done rather than making it better.
Delighting in Him means constantly living in the fact that God did for me what I could never do for myself. Out of my delight, fruit will flow. My life verse is going to help me live in that simplicity.
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