LOVED OF THE LORD Pt. 1

Hey Folks,

Sorry I haven’t made a post for a while. There aren’t as many Internet café’s as you might expect in the middle of nowhere.

After leaving the conference in So Cal. I headed east through Arizona and New Mexico as I made my way to Cheyenne to see Chloe Elizabeth, our new grand-daughter. She is beautiful, such a huge blessing, Beckie is in 7th heaven.

But the Lord used that solitary time on the road to reveal some thing’s to me regarding my own heart. The open road and the wide open spaces, for me, serve to kind of blow out the cobwebs. That may sound a little hokie, but if you are at all a “road warrior” you may be able to relate.


LOVED OF THE LORD

One thing I did want to share with you was a passage from
II Samuel 12.24-25:
Then David comforted his wife Bathsheba, and went in to her and lay with her; and she gave birth to a son, and he named him Solomon. Now the LORD loved him and sent word through Nathan the prophet, and he named him Jedidiah for the LORD’S sake

His parents named him Solomon which means peace. This proved prophetic as Solomon’s reign was one of peace from end to end. In fact, it is a picture of the millennial reign of Jesus Christ himself; when the lion will lay down with the lamb.

But as wonderful as that name was, God instructed Nathan the prophet to give him another name, a God-given name… Jedidiah, which means LOVED OF THE LORD. And Vs 24 says, “Now the Lord loved him…”

It was that phrase that really struck me. I was kind of jealous of the special place Solomon had in the Lord’s heart. In the context of the stories of I-II Samuel, I-II Kings, etc., that statement really IS unique. It is not even said of King David himself!

How blessed would be the life of one loved by God, what advantage he/she would have over others who did not have that special grace bestowed upon them; what a wonder that the Lord would possess that kind of heart toward any sinful man let alone express it.

And here is the part that is hard really to grasp completely… He loves you and me as well. We are Jedidiah’s as well! We are in that special place of unique blessing because we are the children of the “greater than David”.

Let me end this post by directing you to the first fourteen verses of Ephesians 1. There you will find that God chose you and adopted you and greatly favored you and “lavished” on you his great grace! You have to check it out once again…

We are loved by God! What advantage that gives me in life.

Well more to come on this topic of love in the next couple days.

I miss you all, look forward to seeing you more than you can imagine; but my journey is only about 1/3 done and I am very excited to see what else the Lord has in store.

Pray for me as I am certainly praying for you.