Day 9: What I Love Most About God

When I woke up this morning, I had a lot of things on my mind. My work schedule. Plans for the week. Tasks to get done around the house. Wondering if my outline submission for a separate writing project was any good (I knew it wasn't). Borrowed fears about things that may never come to pass. So many thoughts criss-crossed the labyrinth of my brain, firing one after another.

But do you know what thought didn't cross my mind this morning - or any other moment of the day?

I didn't wake up wondering if God was in a good mood today.

I didn't wake up wondering if today would finally be the day that God would wash his hands of me, fed up with my faltering, small faith, fed up with my lukewarm affection for his word and his presence. 

It's what I love most about him.

If someone were to ask you what you love most about God, what would you say?

It is this unchangingness, this immutability, that endears him most to me.

Because I know what I fickle soul I am. I know I am everything he is not. I know my own moods and my own ability to waver and waffle in my receptivity toward others. Yet God is not like that, never has been, never will be. He is not like me, like us. As Beth Moore once said, "Those who adore you can just as quickly abhor you." God's affections for me do not fluctuate so.

And that is a comfort to me. Because can you imagine if God changed? Can you imagine if he was moody, swinging from highs to lows, like some sort of manic? What chaos. I would never be able to trust a God who changed because how would I ever know when I was on his 'good side' or not? It would be a state of perpetual fear, never at ease, always on edge.  A.W. Tozer said in his book Knowledge of the Holy, one of my favorite pieces of literature I've ever read, 

In this world where men forget us, change their attitude toward us as their private interests dictate, and revise their opinion of us for the slightest cause, is it not a source of wondrous strength to know that the God with whom we have to do changes not? That His attitude toward us now is the same as it was in eternity past and will be in eternity to come?

Indeed, it is a wondrous strength, one I need to draw upon every day. Does the fact that he never changes mean I can do as I please, knowing that no matter what sins I commit, he will still love me? As the apostle Paul says in Romans 6:1-2, "What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?" 

By no means do I take advantage of this immutability of God and his grace! It is the source of my peace, but it is not to be abused, to be taken for granted (oh, but how often I do!) to be leveraged for my own selfish gain. Tozer goes on to say, 

What peace it brings to the Christian's heart to realize that our Heavenly Father never differs from Himself. In coming to Him at any time we need not wonder whether we shall find Him in a receptive mood. He is always receptive to misery and need, as well as to love and faith. He does not keep office hours not set aside periods when he will see no one. Neither does he change His mind about anything. Today, this moment, He feels toward His creatures, toward babies, toward the sick, the fallen, the sinful, exactly as He did when He sent His only-begotten Son into the world to die for mankind.

Great is his faithfulness, for there is no shadow of turning with him. That truth will ring true when I wake up tomorrow morning, and the morning after that, and every moment from here through all eternity.

"Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not / As Thou hast been, Thou forever will be."