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Who is God?
That’s what we’ve been asking the last couple of weeks. And the answer isn’t, “He created everything”, or “He’s omnipotent” or any other such general, overarching descriptive, as true as those statements may be.
What we want to know is, “Who is God…to me?” What is it of this wonderful and awesome Creator & Being that I can grab hold of and make personal to my life, my situations, my destiny? Who is God…to me?
As we look at Nehemiah, we come to verse 12 of Chapter 9 and read the part of the prayer where the people reflected on God’s showing up in a grand, yet very personal way. It says, “By day You led them with a pillar of cloud, and by night with a pillar of fire to give them light on the way they were to take.”
There are 4 very personal things we can take from this and apply to our lives in answering “Who is God…to me?”
I’d like to share with you just the first one in this Faith Notes, and that is “He is the God who guides us”.
Psalm 37:23-24 says, “The Lord makes firm the steps of the one who delights in Him. Though he may stumble, he will not fall, for the Lord upholds him with His hand.”
Listen to this excerpt from a book called, “Silent Giants” –
“Two days after arriving, I departed St. John’s. A low overcast covered the city. As I climbed through the clouds, the ground and sky dissolved into a white glow. All sense of motion, of up and down, were lost. My senses told me I am suspended in an immense milk bottle.
My world shrinks to the single square foot of the control panel as I fly by instruments. The artificial horizon confirms my wings are level. The airspeed indicator is steady at 100 miles per hour. The altimeter shows I have reached 1,000 feet and am climbing. Good.
I pay particularly close attention to the artificial horizon in the middle of the panel. Inside, a tiny gyroscope spins four hundred revolutions a second. Just as a child’s toy gyroscope returns to its original position when nudged, the gyroscope inside this instrument never moves regardless of what the plane around it does. Attached to the gyroscope is the instrument’s face, a symbolic representation of the invisible horizon outside the windows.
As I start a climbing turn to the left, the instrument horizon falls away and drops to the right, just as the real horizon is doing somewhere outside. This tiny instrument has given me a three-inch window into the world outside the clouds.
As I level the wings, my body says the gyroscope is wrong. That it has somehow malfunctioned. I am not level, I am diving to the right. The physical sensation is almost overwhelming. But I believe the instrument, which says all is well. This is vertigo and almost every pilot experiences it at some time.
No pilot can fly by the “seat of the pants” in clouds. Here, your normal senses of feel and balance are useless—and deadly—if believed. You must fly the instruments, not what you feel.”
Our emotional and mental vertigo will tell us that we need to make a correction, adjust course, surely the gyroscope of God’s Word, which never changes and is never impacted by outside circumstances, is off somehow.
But even when things don’t make sense, even when it doesn’t feel right, even when all around us seems like a giant white milk bottle and we’re right in the middle of it, we must rely on the instrument of God’s Word, on the gauge of the Holy Spirit telling us to hold steady, that all is well. Instead of flying by the seat of our pants and taking matters into our own hands which leads to a deadly outcome, we put our faith in God who will lead us along the path of life He has for us, without fail, and with pinpoint accuracy.
We must “fly the instruments”.
If you’d like to hear the rest of this message entitled “The Pillar”, click on the link below and go to the media tab. There you’ll find This and all the messages from Faith by which to be strengthened.
Have a blessed week in Christ and remember to “fly the instruments”. His Word will never fail to guide you with pinpoint accuracy all the days of your life.
