“Lord, you are Lord and I want to live with you”.
Part 6: “The glory of the Lord shone all around”
Some people recognise that they have encountered a person of supreme worth. Let’s put every good quality we can think of in a box: love, compassion, forgiveness, justice, goodness, truth. Now let’s turn those nouns into active, personal verbs: loving, compassionate, merciful, forgiving, just, righteous, good, truthful. Now let’s label that box: “God”. This is what we mean when we talk about God, and because it’s a bit of a mouthful to keep repeating the contents of this box, we just use the word “God” as shorthand, to try and explain what we mean when we say we had an encounter with someone who we perceived as fullness of love, goodness, truth etc.
So, this is the ultimate foundation of faith: a judgement that God – the Lord – is Lord. Initially, this stands entirely alone. The response of faith may follow on immediately, but in terms of sequencing of recognising truth and making judgements, initially, there is simply the recognition that, “The Lord is Lord”. What are we saying here? We are making a judgement, not simply that God is a very, very good person, we are judging that in God we have found someone so good that he is worthy of being called “Lord”. Now, the word, “Lord” can have many connotations, but for now, we can simply say that we judge -again, just a free, personal value judgement – that the person we have met has such good qualities that we recognise that he has authority over us. That is, we don’t want to be unmoved by meeting him. We don’t want to take the attitude, “What a nice person! It was lovely meeting him. Now, what was I going to do next? Ah yes, time for a nice cup of tea”. Instead, we recognise that we want to “come under the wing” of this person, or to come “within his orbit”. He becomes the centre of our attention. We want to draw near to him. We want to please him. We want to become like him. We want to honour who he is by changing our behaviour to be in tune with his nature and will. So, God does not impose his authority on us. We do not become subservient in any sense of losing our freedom or autonomy; instead, the recognition of his worth impels us to make the judgement that we cannot carry on as before, and the best thing we can possibly do is to recognise that God’s nature, and his will, which arises from that nature, are supremely precious. In this sense, the word, “Lord” simply means, “We recognise you as supremely precious”.
Spiritual Devotion 