Friday, November 21, 2008

Thankful, part 1


Thanksgiving day is a week away, so I want to take the week leading up to this American holiday to celebrate a few of the things I'm thankful for. I invite you to share your thoughts as well as we give thanks for all that God is and all he has done. This idea of being thankful is a daily practice for many of us, but with a holiday set aside to be thankful this is a great time to talk about all of God's blessings.
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Part 1- I'm thankful that God is good.
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Psa 73:1 A Psalm of Asaph. Surely God is good to Israel, To those who are pure in heart!
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In his book, Knowledge of the Holy, A.W. Tozer wrote,
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"That God is good is taught or implied on every page of the Bible and must be received as an article of faith as impregnable as the throne of God. It is a foundation stone for all sound thought about God and is necessary to moral sanity. To allow that God could be other than good is to deny the validity of all thought and end ill the negation of every moral judgment. If God is not good, then there can be no distinction between kindness and cruelty, and heaven can be hell and hell, heaven. The goodness of God is the drive behind all the blessings He daily bestows upon us."us."
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For me, this is a foundational truth of Christianity. For us to have a good God is an amazing insight into the very core of our faith. Unlike many religions that put the burden on man to please and appease an angry god, our God is good and loves us. It's his goodness that invites us to approach him. His goodness is at the very core of all our theology- because he is good he made us, because he is good he sustains us, because he is good he saved us, because he is good and is always good I can approach him without fear. To say that God is good brings great peace to fearful hearts and great comfort to the broken and downcast. It's his goodness that engulfs all he has made. It's his goodness that is revealed in all that Jesus did and said. It's his goodness seen in the cross. It's his goodness that raised Jesus from the dead, and ultimately it's his goodness that will oversee the final judgment of each one of us.
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Later in his chapter on the goodness of God, A.W. Tozer wrote, "Always God's goodness is the ground of our expectation." By his own words he has told us he is good and that he never changes. It's his amazing goodness that I'm thankful for today. As many have said, almost to the point that we lose it's importance, God is good....ALL the time. Forever the God who made us demonstrates that at the very heart of his nature is an ultimate goodness that I want to be close to...that I want to emulate....that I want others to experience.
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Today I'm thankful that God is good.
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