February 8. Are you glad you are not God?

Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples. Ascribe to the Lord, glory and strength.

Psalm 96-7.

Here's at least part of the experience that the psalmist is referring to when he says,

ascribe, give to the Lord's strength.

What are we doing when we ascribe to the Lord strength?

First, by God's grace, we give attention to God and see that He is strong.

We give heed to His strength.

Then we give our approval to the greatness of his strength.

We give due regard to its worth.

We find his strength to be wonderful.

But what makes this wonder that we experience a giving kind of wonder,

give to the Lord's strength strength is that we are especially glad that the greatness

of the strength is his and not ours. We feel a profound fitness in the fact that he is infinitely

strong and we are not. We love the fact that this is so. We do not envy God for his strength.

We are not covetous of His power. We are full of joy that all strength is His.

Everything in us rejoices to go out of ourselves and behold His power,

as if we had arrived at the celebration of the victory of a distance runner who had beaten us in the race,

and we found our greatest joy in admiring his strength

rather than resenting our loss. We find the deepest meaning in life when our hearts freely go out

of ourselves to admire God's power

rather than turning inward to boast in our own

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