Renewing My View of God

At the beginning of the year I began reading The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard. His words on the kingdom of God and what it means to be a follower of Christ or a "Christian" have challenged me to take a look at my own life, and how I view,  interact with, and teach about God's kingdom. He says that to understand the kingdom of God, we must first have the correct view of God himself. He says:

"It is, frankly, hard today to think adequately of God -or perhaps to think of him at all. Out intellectual history works against it, and we certainly do not get much training for it. Frankly, our daily experience, under pressure from many quarters, constantly keeps us from thoughtful living and "dumbs us down," in many ways--especially theologically. But the resulting lack of adequate ideas and terminology does great harm to our faith.  It insulates our real life from what we say we believe. We cannot, even by a miracle, believe  a blank or a blur, much less act on it. There is no "what" for our minds and lives to lay hold of in such a case--or it is the wrong "what."

     To trust in God, we need a rich and accurate way of thinking and speaking about him to guide and support our life vision and our will."

So how do we develop an adequate view of God? We do so by meditating on what he says about himself. And there is no place in the Bible that gives us a better view of who God is than in the Psalms. Willard says of the Psalms:

"We learn from the Psalms how to think and act in reference to God. We drink in God and God's world from them. They provide a vocabulary for living Godward, one inspired by God himself. They show us who God is, and that expands and lifts and directs our minds and hearts."

 So, in order to deepen my view of God, his kingdom, and how to be an active and part in it, I will begin by meditating through the Psalms. My prayer is that this will revolutionize the way I think and act in reference to God, and that it will lead me to see him and his kingdom in a way I have never seen him before. I will be reflecting on one psalm every day and posting what God is teaching me here. This is intended to be a help to me more than anything, but I hope that anyone who happens to read this might gain some new insight into God as well.

So, if you are willing, take this journey through the Psalms with me, that together we may know better the God who, according to Adam Clark, is:

"the eternal, independent, and self-existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his essence; know fully only by himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and right, and kind."