Feb 22, 2022 | Wens Pen
Hello Everyone
God has the panoramic view. Psalm 33:13-15. I recall flying into Sydney one afternoon and from my seat in the air, the earth below looked like a miniature toy play scene. I could see the city grid and the people who looked like miniature figurines. I could see where the roads started and finished, the detours and where they re-joined the main arterial roads, and the varying vehicles driving along like tiny matchbox cars. This panoramic view reminded me that God has the panoramic view of life. He sees all of life from the beginning to the end; He sees us before we were formed in our mother’s womb, all our days on the earth and our dwelling with Him in eternity. Psalm 139:16.
At God’s appointed time we all enter the world, step into the tracks of history and journey through our appointed days, leaving an indelible footprint on life. We live between two posts on God’s Kingdom timeline here on earth: our birth post and the finishing line post. We are gifted with life and invited into God’s story to embrace His will and purpose. It is a sacred space that God has beautifully etched out and uniquely crafted for us to dwell in for a particular span of time. During this time, we can’t see forward, but we can look upwards, knowing that God has the panoramic view, and we can trust Him to engineer all our days in His faithfulness and love. CS Lewis said, “If you picture time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.”[1] God has the panoramic view and marks out all of life and holds it with the span of His hands.
God flawlessly holds the line of our lives in His masterly hands as He directs our steps. He is the only one capable of connecting our past, present, and future, keeping us continually joined to His main arterial Kingdom heart and Kingdom plans. Knowing God has the panoramic view means we can live with assurance in this broken world, and we can trust Him moment by moment for all our days.
So, friends, get your “God view” on today.
Best days to come.
Wen
[1] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity: (London, UK: Geoffrey Bles,1952), 82.
Feb 15, 2022 | Wens Pen
Hello Everyone
Magnify God. I have a very cool magnifying glass that has an inbuilt light. It both magnifies and illuminates everything. When I take my magnifying glass and run it across printed words for example, I both enlarge the print, and shed light on the words which creates a depth of field, sharpening the focus of what I am reading. The magnified view changes the way I see and read the words.
King David penned Psalm 34:3 “magnify the Lord with me and let us exalt His name together” in the shadow of death, having been relentlessly pursued by Saul. David’s expression of praise in magnifying God was, however, a declaration that to magnify God was to embrace a fresh perspective where he knew God was greater than every threat, every fear, and every circumstance of his life. To magnify God was to bring a depth of field that bought God into sharp focus and blurred the distinctiveness and distraction of threat. He made God bigger than everything he was experiencing.
Just as a magnifying glass enlarges things, when we magnify God, or bring God to bear on our circumstances by running God’s truth over anything that threatens our lives, we no longer see things from an earthly perspective; we see all things from God’s angle. We invite God to be God and to be bigger than all we encounter. We take the light of God’s word and illuminate everything through the lens of God magnified.
When we look in the face difficulty, magnify God and stare it down. When life is peachy, magnify God and take another bite of the fruit. No matter what path we walk the only way to go is to magnify God.
So, friends, get your “magnify God” on today.
Best days to come.
Wen
Feb 8, 2022 | Wens Pen
Hello Everyone
God inclines His ear and listens. Psalm 116:1-2. During my counselling course, the first skill we were taught was active listening because one of the greatest needs in every human being is to know they have been heard and understood; that the person they are speaking to is attentively listening. When it comes to God, we can be confident that He does not miss one prayer be it our spoken or silent words. God inclines His ear and listens.
It is quite miraculous to think that the God of the universe, who is beyond time and space actually listens to us. Here is this majestic, incomprehensible, uncontained, transcendent God who holds the cosmos together with precisional perfection, yet He intentionally stoops down and inclines His ear and listens to us. God has given us an open invitation to talk with Him any time we wish and to bring before Him any matter we hold in the prayer house of our hearts.
It’s no small thing to have the ear of our Creator. It must be like a continual rush hour in God’s throne room with millions all praying at once, all needing God to respond. But imagine if God required us to apply to Heaven’s centre management to get a Kingdom security pass to be permitted entry into His presence. Or, if He got out His cosmic-sized clock, gave us a time limit to talk to Him, and if we went one second over our allocated time, His universal autopilot kill switch would simply terminate our time in His throne room. Or imagine if God had some royal protocol for how we addressed Him where we could not laugh, cry, sing, seek, plead, murmur, groan, whine, ask, express love, or talk His ears off. What if God only partially listened to us, secretly yawning when He got bored with us, drifting off into the sunset He just made. God doesn’t put His noise-cancelling headphones on so He can’t hear all the cries coming at Him all at once and nor has He sound proofed heaven’s rooms so our voices only ever hit the outer walls of His courts. No! it is just the opposite. God lovingly and patiently invites us to enter His presence through our great high priest, Jesus, to pour our hearts out in whatever state we find ourselves, whenever we want and for however long we need. God inclines His ear and listens to every single word.
The fact that God inclines His ear and listens is a unique privilege and one we must never take for granted. It’s not like God has to listen to us. The truth is He desires to listen to us, and His hearing heart is always open.
So, friends, get your “God listens” on today.
Best days to come.
Wen
Feb 1, 2022 | Wens Pen
Hello Everyone
The God of new beginnings. As God takes His kingdom key and unlocks the door of a new year, there is a certain hope that comes to us when we dip our toes into the fresh waters of a new chapter. As we begin to inhabit the untrodden journey ahead, we can be very sure that God is the God of new beginnings.
If we take a retrospective glance over the Biblical story, we will see that God is the God of new beginnings. The moment Adam and Eve moved outside of God’s best and broke all of creation, God initiated a new beginning. Thankfully, it was not the final episode in the history of humanity. God didn’t leave the cosmic catastrophe for finite humans to fix. Rather, God did a new thing by laying down a redemptive pathway that He graciously invited humanity to walk on. You and I are on that pathway now. Yet, imagine for a moment if God was not the God of new beginnings and He chose not to do a new thing. We would be trapped in the fallen woods of the groaning creation with no hope of escaping the hungry wolf of sin and brokenness and no chance of being restored to our Maker or our purpose. Think deeply about that for a moment. It is a terrifying predicament! But God is a benevolent Father. There is no other like Him. No other religion has a God who did something new to redeem His broken creatures. In all other religions the onus is on humanity to do something new to attain and retain their acceptance with the God(s). How unique and grand is our God that He would come to the wastelands of those who were His greatest offenders to offer something new. As undeserving as we may be, our God is the God of new beginnings.
When it comes to God, the new is not only limited to His act of salvation. God is the God of new beginnings every day. Today we are under God’s new covenant, living in the truth of 2 Corinthians 5:17 as new creations in Jesus. God removed the old which held us captive and replaced it with the new. So, we enjoy His mercies which are new every day (Lamentations 3:22-23). The thread of “God’s new” keeps unravelling around us as God’s new thing will always supersede the old thing in ways that we can’t imagine (Isaiah 43:19).
But there’s more . . . God is the God of new beginnings, now and until the end of the ages. As we look forward there is a resounding affirmation of God’s intention to finally make all things new, and between the “now and not yet” of God’s new creation, we are privileged to wade in the new and living springs of God’s fresh waters of faith as He washes us clean past, present and future.
So, friends, get your “new thing” on in God today.
Best days to come.
Wen
Nov 30, 2021 | Wens Pen
Best days to come.
As you all know, each week I sign off Thought for the Week with “best days to come”. This little sign-off statement is not only a light-hearted way to finish our words of encouragement, it is also a powerful declaration of truth and faith. Best days to come is about our future in the hands of a trustworthy God. It is embracing the truth that God, the master weaver, knits every thread of our lives into the tapestry of His purposes, past, present, and future. Philippians 2:12-16. He produces a uniquely designed expression of His image in us as He restoratively works with the strands of our best and our worst experiences. When God weaves His ways in us, the end result is always God’s best. He fashions us by His love and goodness, allowing us to experience the blending of both beauty and chaos to produce a distinctive life tapestry that has the extraordinary touch of the master on it. So whatever days are ahead, every thread will be sewn into God’s design to create a strong, resolute, unwavering life of faith that enables us to always know and declare best days to come.
Ultimately, without God, it is impossible to truly declare best days to come. It is one of the privileges of knowing God because we have confidence that God already dwells in our future and will work everything according to His purposes. There is nothing in our future He won’t redeem and transform for our best. At the heart of this is a groundswell of hope. Our best days to come are guaranteed. If we take God out of the picture, life would be like plunging headfirst into a godless abyss where our future days are hit and miss. If we plunge without God, the days to come are thrown to the wind and thrash like an untethered, lost kite, making its way through the realm of chance. It is devoid of hope. Without God those best days can feel like the “norm” without disruption and the worst days come up empty, clutching a search lamp, and restlessly looking for meaning. Only God can enable our best days to come as He works in and through every detail and we can make sense of the best and the not so best days.
God is already moving us forward to better things. Although some of our worst days can be difficult, God designed us to flourish in all our days, best and worst. Yet to flourish is not the work of our own hands. It is placing our trust in the master weaver and knowing He will ensure our best days to come. You can trust Him. He’s the master.
So, friends, get your “best day” on today.
Best days to come.
Wen
Nov 24, 2021 | Wens Pen
God rides across the heavens to help us (Deuteronomy 33:26-27). What a year it has been! Some of us have lost. Some of us feel beat! Some of us feel anxious. Some of us are asking questions. Some of us are still smiling. Most of us feel we need a break and wonder what the heck just happened to us in these long months of confinement. Part of the problem for us humans is that many of us live with a veiled expectation that life should be lived out in the “happy” lane. Inevitably, our lives will periodically cross over into the quadrant of hardship, and we become the casualties of calamity. This year has poured out difficult days on us and being locked away from life as we know it has left us fatigued. The common word on all our lips as we head towards the close of this year is “weariness”. We are all feeling like weary wanderers, walking the tracks of life that have progressively become threadbare after the pandemic has whipped us and left its welt marks on our beings. We are ready to fall in a heap. We need rest, solace, and a helping hand. But our God never leaves us debilitated in the pit of pain. He is a God of rescue and restoration. Our God rides across the heavens to help us.
As we cry out to God to renew us and put our lives back together, God rides across the heavens to help us. In all His majesty and power, God pulls back on the reins of difficulty, slows the pace with His presence and comfort and catches us. He slips His firm hand under our worn-out feet when we can walk no further and envelops us in His everlasting arms. As God rides across the heavens to help us, He also tramples down the enemy who seeks to camp on any circumstance of difficulty, waiting to derail us. God’s intention is to always help us and lead us to a fresh place, restoring our weary souls with the flow of His living water, as He points us north with a renewed sense of hope. God also gathers up the mess that entangles us, circles in behind it and uses it to restore us. When God rides across the heavens to help us, He takes what worked against us and turns it into something that transforms us. The pain becomes the gain.
God has ridden across the heavens to help us more times than we will ever know about. When we cry out to Him, He always rides to us. When we don’t have strength to cry out, He hears the soft whisper in our hearts that faintly calls Him, and He rides towards us. Have you called Him? He’s already riding. Can you see Him coming? He’s already riding. God will always ride across the heavens to help us.
So, friends, get your “God ride” on today.
Best days to come.
Wen
