The Lord God of the universe is on the move in His creation. Not just on the move, though. God is on the move in redemptive, restoring and reinvigorating ways. God’s chosen, “the chief cornerstone,” of all that God is doing in the world has so powerfully moved in history that the psalmist proclaims, “You have become my salvation” (Ps. 118:22, 21). Salvation isn’t something God gives or distributes. God is our Salvation. Salvation is something God is to us. More than this, salvation is Someone God is to us. No wonder the Psalmist says, “This is the LORD’S doing; it is marvelous in our eyes” (Ps. 118:23). To that end, when the Psalmist speaks of that time in which God is doing something marvelous in His creation, he describes it this way, “This is the day which the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Ps. 118:24).
What Jesus accomplished in His life, death, and resurrection is something marvelous to behold. It staggers the imagination to realize that death is a defeated foe, that life is not without meaning, and that our lives can be stamped with God’s marvelous, redeeming, restoring, reinvigorating, and amazing grace.
As one who lives in the aftermath of what cancer can do in a body, and facing my own mortality in poignant and powerful ways because of it, I can testify that God’s amazing grace is at work. I am banged up, beat up, and somedays, fed up, with my broken body. However, into the damage has come God’s “chief cornerstone,” and because of Him “there’s a deep settled peace in my soul” (a line from the Gospel song, “Hidden Peace,” by John S. Brown, 1899).
Like so many of you I, too, have looked into the realities of my world, and I say with the psalmist, “Open to me the gates of righteousness; I shall enter through them, I shall give thanks to the LORD” (Ps. 118:19). God has so profoundly impacted my life that whether I continue to live or if I die today, “I…will tell of the works of the LORD” (Ps. 118:17).
God’s grace stuns us into a new reality, a new way of being. When the apostle Paul was awakened to God’s grace and explained what it means, he simply said, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). What a great grace. What a great life. What a great God. Hear this prayer of Augustine, 354-430,
Look upon us, O Lord, and let all the darkness of our souls vanish before the beams of thy brightness. Fill us with holy love, and open to us the treasures of thy wisdom. All our desire is known unto thee, therefore perfect what thou hast begun, and what thy Spirit has awakened us to ask in prayer. We seek thy face, turn thy face unto us and show us thy glory. Then shall our longing be satisfied, and our peace shall be perfect.
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