A Vessel Containing God's Life

Christians are unique people. God chooses them for His service. He could use His angels, but that was not His will.

Health floods into us as we open our hearts to the Lord. The human being, almost by definition, is a vessel containing God's life. Praise removes the blockages, the evils for which we ourselves are responsible, allowing life to flow in unhindered, filling us with gifts and pleasures and beauties too wonderful to be expressed in thanks.

We cannot develop faith in God by any kind of logic or intellectual effort. It must be an exercise of the heart, not the head. The prophet Habakkuk is the fine example of someone who reached the stage of maturity and development. He lived surrounded by appalling horrors as the Babylonian hordes swept through the land, killing and devouring everything, leaving pestilence and famine behind. To add to the disaster, there was a prolonged drought. Animals and people who survived the Babylonians were dying on every side; the fruit was withering on the trees and the wheat in the fields. It seemed that there was nothing much to praise God would you imagine?

Yet Habakkuk, as he struggled with his inner thoughts, worked his way to the realization that God's love was somehow behind and within even these terrible things that seemed to be bringing life to an end. After the end there would surely be another beginning. Regardless, God was in complete control, and God was good, and God was to be praised.

So the prophet voiced that glorious affirmation which has echoed down through the ages: "Although the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; although the produce of the olive fails, and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet will I rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation!" (Habakkuk 3:17, 18.) He would continue to praise God in spite of all. By this, he achieved a relationship with God, opening his soul to receive a deeper blessing from Him than could have come from the greatest possible worldly prosperity and affluence.

Praise for what God is, in spite of what he may seem to be doing, brings us into that place of holiness that is heaven, and opens up our inward soul to receive untold blessings from Him.