The Great Exchange

Roots are for taking in --What happens when you and I do slip away to be with God in study and prayer?  We receive.  We take in.  We are nurtured and fed.  We insure our spiritual health and growth.  When we spend time with Christ, He supplies us with strength and encourages us in the pursuit of His way.

I call this time with God, "the great exchange."  Away from the world and hidden from public view, I exchange my weariness for His strength, my weakness for his power, my darkness for His light, my problems for His solutions, my burdens for His freedom, my frustrations for His peace, my turmoil for His calm, my hopes for His promises, my afflictions for His balm of comfort, my questions for His answers, my confusion for His knowledge, my doubt for His assurance, my nothingness for His awesomeness, the temporal for the eternal, and the impossible for the possible.

A Woman After God's Own Heart by Elizabeth George

A Woman and Her God

O God, you are my God,

earnestly I see you;

my soul thirsts for you,

my body longs for you,

in a dry and weary land 

where there is no water.

Psalm 63a

I pray that as you read those words, you saw not only with your eyes, but also with your heart.  This description is the sacred romance that each one of us is meant to encounter with God.  It describes the purpose of our existence.  Consider again the first few words:  "O God, you are my God."  Is that something that you can say?  Have you encountered Him in such a way that He has become your refuge and strength?  "O God of all the universe, who called the worlds into being, You are mine."

This is a Psalm about intimacy and the relationship that we were born to enjoy with God.  It is a Psalm of prayer and devotion, prompted by the heart.  Many people are motivated by discipline.  Discipline is getting up and having a time of prayer and devotion with God when we are weary from exhaustion.  On a daily basis, however, our heart should yearn to be with Him, as well as our soul.  Our longing and thirsting comes as a gift from the Holy Spirit, and we desire it more than life.  The heart of this Psalm says, "Give me a thirst and a hunger for You, God.  Not just a discipline.  Give me an ache and a longing to know You, to be with You, to abide in You always."

A Woman and Her God by Beth Moore   Get your copy today!