I have told all your people about your justice.
I have not been afraid to speak out, as you, O Lord, well know.
I have not kept the good news of your justice hidden in my heart;
I have talked about your faithfulness and saving power.
I have told everyone in the great assembly of your unfailing love and faithfulness.
Psalm 40:9-10 (New Living Translation)
Telling others what God has done for us flows out of a full and grateful heart. For years, I had a vague idea that if I could just get excited enough about God, my love for Him would overflow naturally to other people. But it was just a vague idea. When I did pluck up the courage to mention God in everyday conversation, it was stilted and awkward.
The breakthrough happened when I was ill. Jesus’s presence was so tangible to me during those months I was ill, that He became precious to me. I could no more have denied what Adrian did for me in looking after me physically as deny what Jesus did for me – physically (keeping me safe on the stairs and giving me strength when I literally had none), spiritually, mentally and emotionally. And then when He healed me, I really had something to shout about. As I’d always suspected, geniune passion for God does spill over into everyday conversations in a non-awkward way. Of course, I am still shy and don’t always find talking about someone so special and personal easy, but it certainly comes a lot more naturally than it used to.
What did David in this Psalm get excited about? What words did he use to describe what God had done?
* Justice
* Good news
* Faithfulness
* Saving power
* Unfailing love.
There is a lot of injustice in our world and in our society. I sometimes get angry about unjust and unfair things – war where there are all too many innocent victims, abortion, rapists walking free, a school massacre, paparazzi hounding famous people, etc, etc. But God is just. He is so just that even though we choose to reject Him, ignore Him, even refuse – in some cases – to believe He exists, Jesus died to take the punishment we deserve. A helpful way to think about this is: imagine you’re in a court room. A woman is in the dock and the judge has just pronounced her guilty and passed sentence. But a door opens and a young man comes in, moves the woman out of the dock and takes her place. The guard then puts the handcuffs on the man and leads him away, leaving the woman to go free. In this scenario, the judge is God, the prisoner is us, and the young man taking her place is Jesus. This is a picture of what Jesus has done. This is good news!
God is faithful. He never lets us down, never gets in a mood, will never desert us. We may not always understand what He’s up to, but we can rest assured that He knows what He’s doing, and that He’s faithful.
Because of what Jesus did by dying on the cross and taking God’s punishment for us, He has saving power. There is nothing and no one more powerful than God. He is the only one who has overcome all the evil powers of darkness, and can rescue people from the power of the occult. He put all those powers to shame when He died on the cross, and they have no control over Him at all.
The Bible says God is love. That doesn’t mean He’s wimpy and wishy-washy (who would want a God like that?! Eugh!). His love and justice met at the cross. Because God loves us, Jesus bore the brunt of His justice when He took the punishment we deserve. Without Jesus dying in our place, we could never have a relationship with God because even our best efforts at being good and pleasing Him fall well short of His perfect standards.
Do you know the good news of Jesus’s saving power, love and faithfulness for yourself? Would you like to? If so, please get in touch. I would love to share more about it, and try to answer your questions.
If you do know this good news, are you excited about it? Does your love and passion for Jesus spill out of your life to others? If not, ask the Holy Spirit to make Him more real and more precious to you. It’s a prayer I think He loves to answer with a big, fat YES.
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