Your steadfast love, O Lord, is better than life. You have told us this in many ways. Your servant David said: “Because Your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise You.” Your apostle Paul, cried out in prison, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.” O Lord, how much better You are than life! Not just “better,” but “far better.” You are so much better than life that Your apostle says death is gain. “To live is Christ, and to die is gain.” To lose everything this world can offer and be left with You alone is gain.
Why is Your love better than life? David gives us the answer. He doesn’t say, “Because Your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise Your love.” He says that he will praise You, not Your love. “Because Your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise You.” The most loving thing about Your love is that it brings us home to You. With Your wrath removed, and our sin forgiven, there is nothing to prevent the pleasure of Your presence. This is divine love defined—the will and work of God gave us undeserving sinners everlasting joy in God. What else could infinite love be! There is no greater prize than Yourself!
O God, I tremble for fear that many of the ones who call You Lord have made themselves the prize and glory of Your Grace. How many have made Your love a witness to their worth! Is their joy resting in Your worth or in their worth? Decades have gone by with the constant message from the world (and even from some ministers) that love means making much of man. And so men ponder Your love and say that God’s love means making much of man. For proof they ask: Don’t you feel loved when someone calls attention to your worth? Now (thanks to Your mighty grace!) I see it is a perversion. It robs our souls of the joy that You designed to satisfy us for eternity and even worse it robs You of Your honored place as Treasure of our lives.
You have a grand design! To make our joy the echo of Your excellence. To make our pleasure proof that You now hold the place of Treasure in our lives. To make the gladness of our souls the essence of our worship, and the mirror of Your worth. To make Yourself glorified in us. How could I be so blind to think that being loved by You means making much of me and not Yourself? How could I put my eye to some great telescope, designed to make me glad with visions of the galaxies, and notice in the glass a dim reflection of my face and say, “Now I am happy, I am loved”? How could I stand before the setting sun, between the mountain range and the vastness of the sea, and think that everlasting joy should come from making much of me?
At great expense You made Yourself my glory and my boast. The cost was beyond imagining. You sent Your Son, the blazing center of Your beauty and Your love. You gave him up to mockery, betrayal, thorns, the whip, the rod, the fists, the nails, the shame, and death. For what? To swallow up Your wrath, and satisfy Your righteousness, and bury all my sins as far as east is from the west. This is Your love, O God, not to make much of me, but do whatever must be done so that I awaken to the joy of making much of You.
You must be my only boast! Every sweet thing I have ever received was purchased by Christ’s blood? I deserve only judgment yet everything is mine in Him and by His sacrifice alone. O God, forbid that I should ever boast save in the cross of Christ, my Lord. We who treasure Christ and know Your love is better than life must not lay up our treasures on this earth.
Protect us, Lord. Cause us to hear and obey Your call: “Lay up your treasure not on earth, but in the place where moth and thief will never come. Make treasures for yourself that cannot fail.” You are my Treasure and great Reward. You are my life and my all-satisfying Joy.”
In this life we may begin to treasure Christ. A greater weight of glory waits to be enjoyed for those who grow in love to Christ. Teach me to cherish Your perfection over all the treasures of the world. Teach me to delight in Your fellowship beyond all family and friends. Teach me to embrace Your promises of more pleasure in Your presence than from all the lying promises of sin. Let me see the truth of the gladness from the present taste of glory and the promise of hope of future fullness when we see You face to face. Give me a quiet peace on the path You choose for me even when it is with pain.
Jesus, You both saved us from our sin and showed us how to love. Your life was both a purchase and a path. You died for us and now call us to die to ourselves. You took our poverty upon Yourself so that we, in You, might have the riches of heaven, and You call us to use our riches for the poor.
Father, give us a love of Your glory that greater than any love of gold. Cause us to cease our love affair with comfort and security. Grant that we seek Your kingdom first and let the other things come as You will. Grant that we move toward need and not toward ease. Grant that the firm finality of our security in Christ will free us to risk our homes and health and money on the earth. Help us to see that if we hoard our wealth rather than using it as You direct then we will waste our lives, however successful the world thinks we are.
Dear Lord, give us great abandon, give us great liberty, give us invincible resolve to walk out our lives in submission to You! Give us a readiness to suffer for Your glory! Give us an eagerness to show the poor that we would gladly spend and be spent to make them glad in God!
Lord let us live with a fear-defeating joy in Jesus Christ. Let our wavering hearts remember that You promised, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So may we say with death-defying confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?”
Forbid it Lord that we would ever come to say of our lives that we’ve wasted them. Grant instead by Your Spirit and piercing Word, that we who name Christ as Lord would treasure Him above our lives and know deep in our souls that Christ is life and death is gain. By our prizing You may You be praised in all the world. May You be magnified in my life and death. May every neighborhood and nation see how joy in Jesus frees His people from the power of greed and fear.
Let love flow from Your saints, and may it, Lord, be this: that even if it costs our lives, the people will be glad in God. “Let the peoples praise You, O God; let all the peoples praise You! Let the nations be glad and sing for joy.” Take Your honored place, O Christ, as the all-satisfying Treasure of the world. With trembling hands before the throne of God, and utterly dependent on Your grace, we lift our voice and make this solemn vow: As God lives, and is all I ever need, I will not waste my life . . . through Jesus Christ, AMEN.
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