How excellent is His name

I used to travel extensively and often I got to travel to some of the most beautiful places on earth. I remember going to the Columbia River Gorge one time and I drove for miles and miles up and down it sightseeing and I remember thinking how I wish someone could have been there with me to see it and share in enjoying God’s beautiful handiwork with me, but alas I was alone.

I was thinking about this the other morning when I wrote Words for the Day. More often than not when I am trying to find a Bible verse that is appropriate for that day’s devotional, I will open my Bible at random and I will instantly open it to the exact verse that I need. The very first words that I read will be the very verse that I need for whatever subject that I am writing about. This really spooks me out and makes the old hair stand on in I tell you, because I can actually “feel” God’s presence leading me to the verse that He wants me to use that particular day.

Unfortunately I am usually all alone and others do not get to share in this phenomenon. Sometimes my wife is around and I tell her, but usually it is just me getting to enjoy feeling God’s presence up close and personal. It enhances my faith exponentially to see God personally leading me to the verse that I need.

The other day my wife and I were very discouraged. We had been fighting the local Florida Keys Bureaucrats about the zoning for our church and they were throwing up roadblock after serious roadblock in issuing our permits. I was wondering out loud to her whether God might just want us to build somewhere else and it might be a lost cause.

I walked over to my desk to write WFTD, but I could not think of a subject to write about. This rarely happens, but I sat there for five minutes with a complete blank. Finally I decided that instead of just sitting there all day like a big dummy, I would just send out an old one as a rerun. I went to the website and brought up the search engine but I could not even think of a keyword to search. Finally I chose a category at random from the drop down box and pressed enter. Several old WFTD came up for that category and I selected one, (again completely at random), and the hair literally stood up on my head when I read what it was about. It was about more often than not satan and not God being the one who throws up the obstacles when we are trying to do something big for God and that we should not get discouraged but hang in there and fight him to the end.

Hmmm. Later in the week I got a letter from a reader responding to this exact same WFTD. The reader told me that he cannot tell me how many times that he reads WFTD and it is the exact message that he needs to hear on that particular day. He went on to tell me that this particular WFTD had helped him with whatever battle he was fighting etc. This one had struck home with both of us.

Isn’t this phenomenon awesome? Yikes this is spooky stuff, but we should not be surprised when God personally reaches out to comfort or inspire us, because God is at work in our lives 24/7 every second of every minute of every day.

The skeptics will no doubt blow it off as being coincidence, happenstance, luck, fluke, quirk, or perhaps fate, but God is God and He is in the business of confounding the “wise” with His awesome power. He hung the moon and the stars and traveling at the speed of light it would take us two million years just to get to the nearest star and just think there are zillions upon zillions of them.

We serve a mighty God and we should praise His holy name for taking time to love us and be mindful of our needs.

Everyone on earth can feel God’s presence up close and personal just like I do on a daily basis. He is there and all we need to do is tap into His love and power through our faith and obedience. Like that great gospel song says, “All things are possible if you only believe”.

Psalms 8:4
What is man that You are
mindful of him.
And the son of man that You
care for him.
For You have made him a little
lower than the angels,
And you have crowned him
with glory and honor.