Devotions from Matt Redman – 10,000 ReasonsSample

Holy

“What heart could hold the weight of Your love, Or know the heights of Your great worth?”

Worship must always contain an element of the ‘otherness’ of God. We must be ever mindful that the One we come before is high, holy, and completely off the charts off our comprehension. Grace must never become an excuse to ignore the heights of who it is we are dealing with here. Yes, in this beautiful mystery of the new covenant we have been welcomed in close, and been given the privilege of drawing near to the Almighty God. And yet we must never allow ourselves to think that He is not as holy and fearsome as He was in those days of the old covenant.

God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He shines with holiness and righteousness just as much as He ever did. And yet, here’s the mystery in this wonderful new covenant: He has made a way for us to come gloriously close to Him. If we diminish our view of His holiness, we cheapen the mystery of grace. But when we approach Him as awesome and otherly, our souls won’t take for granted the cost of the cross- and we’ll appreciate more fully the immeasurable value of His mercy.

A big view of God will also inform the details of our everyday lives. If He’s too small to us, we’ll find ourselves weakened in our approach to life. Can a small God strengthen, empower, protect and inspire? We will live a small life if we carry a belittled sense of who Jesus is in our hearts. But a grand view of who God is will lead to some great adventures in the kingdom of God, and infuse power and purpose into our everyday doing and thinking. The company of heaven know that God is holy, and it propels them into a never-ceasing anthem of the highest praise in the heavens:

“Holy, Holy Holy, is the Lord God Almighty who was, and is to come.” (Revelation 4:8)

And as we begin to face up to the holiness of God, our lives resound with that very same anthem, here and now upon the earth.