To Be

Lately I've been meditating on Isaiah 42:6-7:

"I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness;

I will take you by the hand and keep you;

I will give you as a covenant for the people,

A light for the nations,

To open the eyes that are blind,

To bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,

From the prison those who sit in darkness,

I am the Lord, that is my name;

My glory I give to no other,

nor my praise to carved idols."

     I love this passage for a lot of reasons. For one thing, the poetry: "I will take you by the hand"..."a light for the nations"...."prisoners from the dungeon"...Reading passages like this humbles me, because my God is a writer, a writer who hears the flow of words, who threads them beautifully. A better writer than I will ever be. But really, language is just a shell for the vitalizing truth of these verses. Here God lays out our purpose: we are called to shine, bright white against our soiled world. Radiant. Pure. We are called to descend in the dungeon, to take the hand of those who are mired in the dark stench of sin and lead them into His light. But this purpose is bundled between two blindingly powerful proclamations-"I am the Lord!" "I am the Lord, that is my name!"

We shine, rescue, proclaim, and love because God is Master of the Universe. It would be shameful to subjugate our lives and wills to anything less. But since our God is the very source of existence, existence naturally flows back to Him. The world exists for His glory. Each person exists for His glory. The love God shows us pre-existed within Him; He only chose to manifest it through Christ because of the depths of His grace (Ephesians 2:7). I have a grand purpose, and every trace of it is bound up in His Lordship.