March 7

“It isn’t that [God] was just there in the beginning.  He is the beginning.  ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last.”  Eugenia Price, S.P.S., 3/7

“The moment you are born again you receive the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is the gift.  God doesn’t give you some thing, He gives you Himself.”  H. Blackaby, Experiencing God Day-by-Day, 3/7

Reading both Eugenia’s and Blackaby’s devotionals on the same day puts an emphasis on who I am in a way I’d never stopped to fully realize.  Eugenia’s highlighting of the fact that God wasn’t just IN the beginning but that He WAS the beginning adds even more of a powerful imagery to Blackaby’s point that God has given HIMSELF to us.  The God who IS the beginning and the end lives in US.  This ought to sober us up if we are at all feeling lost and confused.  I keep getting this imagery of a woman carrying a child within her as she awaits the impending birth.  The child preexisted in the form of her egg and the father’s sperm.  The union of the egg and sperm started the formation of this child within her.  God preexisted, but in sending His Son into the world he joined His creation with Himself and we, His children, are awaiting our birth into His kingdom in Heaven.  We are in utero, growing and developing into completed beings.  If we could just see our time here as limited and for a purpose, how much more we would look forward to our real birth experience when we finally emerge into God’s Spiritual Kingdom.

“...but Jesus said, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.’  And he laid his hands on them.....” Matthew 19:14, 15a