Grains of Sand

“ Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak ” —Isaiah 40:28, 29, NIV. If we read what precedes these verses we get the distinct impression that Isaiah is issuing a mild rebuke. Starting back at verse 12, the writer begins to describe the power of God, the One who makes everything and then holds it all together, the One whose wisdom and knowledge surpasses that of all the wise and educated men combined, the One who makes great nations look like nothing great at all. He invites his readers   to look around them and consider the One who made heaven and earth. God’s people were in for a rough time, and the prophet wants them to understand that just because it may seem as though God has walked away or has plugged His ears to their pleadings, it doesn’t mean that He has. He re...

“ Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always ” —1 Chronicles 16:11, NIV The Book of Psalms is perhaps the best-known and best-loved literature read by believers. But not all of David’s psalms—a considerable contribution to the book—are found in it. Here in Chronicles we find a wonderful psalm of praise that David wrote on the occasion of the return of the ark to its rightful home in Jerusalem. The whole psalm, all twenty-eight verses, is filled with admirable material that needs thinking about. But to today has been assigned this small fragment of David’s magnificent, God-inspired, poem. The verse directs us to look to the Lord when we so often look elsewhere. Our minds and hearts are so often captured by other things and other people. We look to ourselves. We dig deep within to find our inner strength, considerable at times, to deal with whatever challenges we are living through at the moment. We vaguely claim that this inner strength is God-given, as it is, but ...