Something I studied in the Bible this week:
Psalm 16 is so deep and rich. The way that David speaks to the Lord and about the Lord speaks of such a level of intimacy and knowing of the heart of God. “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you” (v.2). There are a multitude of verses throughout scripture that speak to the soundness of this theological statement. James 1:17 says every good and perfect gift is from God, with whom there is no shadow of changing. In Genesis 1 we see God creating and declaring the things he made good. David’s acknowledgement that there is no goodness apart from God is not just good because he sees God as good but also because he calls him my Lord, in essence saying that he is choosing the goodness of God continually over any other temporary perceived goodness.
This is even reiterated verses down when David says, “The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot.”(v. 5). He is choosing to be satisfied in the Lord. The word chosen stood out to me here because you can make a choice not to be satisfied with where you find yourself. You can assume you deserve more, that things have not been fair, that God has somehow cheated or tricked you. Ecclesiastes 5:19 actually mentions that accepting your lot, rejoicing in your toil is a gift of God. Choosing God as your portion is placing ultimate satisfaction in him, the Creator over the creation.
I love how this psalm ends: “You reveal the path of life to me; in your presence is abundant joy, at your right hand are eternal pleasures” (v.11). So many of the psalms prophetically speak of who Jesus is and I see the first part of this verse and I can’t help but notice that the verbiage there almost nods to John 14:6 when Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” He then goes on to say that being in the presence of God is abundant joy, at his right hand are eternal pleasures. While the indwelling of the Holy Spirit was temporary prior to the resurrection of Christ, as Christians we have the privilege of the permanent indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The presence of the Spirit is not something we need to search for or beg for, we can be in it simply by abiding in Christ. Abiding in prayer and in worship, being in fellowship with the body, growing in the fruits of the Spirits, one of which is joy (Gal. 5:22-23). And at His right hand, our eternal pleasure, Jesus Christ, sits interceding on on our behalf, because no one can condemn us before God our heavenly Father because we have been ransomed by his blood (Rom. 8:34).
A way I saw the goodness of God:
I have always had some type of journal at every point in my life (RIP the journal that I wrote in elementary school in old English because I read a few too many historical fiction books, looking at you Dear America Voyage on the Titanic). I digress. Thank God I have outgrown writing about my angst and my crushes, but I have kept a few journals/notebooks around the house for different purposes like memories of my kids, sermon notes, and there’s one specific one that is special to me. It’s my prayer book where I keep lists of things I’m praying for, sometimes write out full prayers, sometimes I write out Psalms as prayers when I don’t have words myself. I like to go back through every so often with a highlighter, and highlight and date if I can when a prayer was answered. This week I was sitting with my book flipping through it to see what I could highlight, and not only did I get to highlight a few answered prayers, but I noticed that there was a lot of highlighter in those pages. There are some pages in there that are so painful to read back because they are tear stained and God felt so far, but then I look at those pages in that book as a whole, and those bright green highlighter marks standing out like flare signals that God has never once been far, or his ear too dull to hear as Isaiah 59:1 says. All that evidence that time and time again, God has been good and faithful and true.
A recipe I made:
One of my favorite Romanian dishes is stuffed peppers, but after having kids I had to adapt the way I made it because it was so aggravating to cut a stuffed pepper down to bite size pieces. I already had a recipe I loved for it so instead of trying to find a new recipe for a stuffed pepper soup, I decided to just adjust the one I already used and tweak it to make it not only a soup but also a fast soup that I can make in 30 minutes with the help of my trusty vegetable chopper and using a pack of quick rice. I actually started using a quick blend of brown rice, quinoa and lentils a while back for extra protein and fiber and no one has complained about the change yet. So from something that came out of a need for a faster, easier meal, came one of our tried and true favorites.
Recommendations:
I actually have 2 different types of vegetable choppers I use and it might seem excessive but they both have different uses and I love them both. This chopper with a larger container and uniform dicing sizes is great for when I make things that require a lot of chopping like this soup or even when I cube potatoes to boil for mashing.
This smaller pull string chopper is great for smaller jobs when I need to just do a shallot and a few cloves of garlic to saute, and I find this one actually easier for my kids to safely use because there is no exposed blade and they LOVE the pull string.
Something that brought me joy:
The millennial in me cackled at this when I saw it because I have used this reference about as many times as I have heard it.
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