Daily Devotionals

'Every Day Light' with Selwyn Hughes

Devotional: March 19th

For Reading and Meditation:
     Isaiah 55:1-13

After seeing in Genesis 1 that God is all-powerful, the next thing we observe about God is that He is personal.But what does it mean to be a person? What predicates personality? The best definition of personality I know is the one given to me by the tutor who taught me theology: "To be a person we have to be able to think, to reason, to feel, to judge, to choose and to communicate in words that constitute a language." Richard Swinburne, a theologian, observes that people use language not only to communicate and for private thought, but to argue, to raise a consideration, to object to another. Unlike animals which show evidence only of wanting food and drink, people can want not to want something, like a fasting man, for example, wanting not to want food. Now with that in mind - that one of the constituents of personality is the ability to think and speak - read the first chapter of Genesis once again. Notice how many times the words appear: "God said." Count them. God is portrayed to us as a speaking God, and speech being one of the constituent parts of personality this proves that the Deity is a personal Being. We are not long into Genesis before we are brought face to face with the fact that there is more to God than mere power; the Almighty is a Person. This means, among other things, that the Almighty cannot be studied from a "safe" distance. Because He is a Person He is someone who wants and waits to be "known."

Loving heavenly Father, how thankful I am that You made me like Yourself - to know and be known. May my strongest desire be to know You, not merely to know myself. For it is only when I know You that I can most truly know myself. Amen.