{"id":1045,"date":"2018-06-07T07:04:55","date_gmt":"2018-06-07T15:04:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.Bob4God.com\/?p=1045"},"modified":"2018-06-07T07:04:55","modified_gmt":"2018-06-07T15:04:55","slug":"devotion-psalm-841-2-10-12-only-place-to-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.Bob4God.com\/?p=1045","title":{"rendered":"Devotion, Psalm 84:1-2, 10-12 Only Place To Be"},"content":{"rendered":"

Psalm 84:1-2, 10-12<\/b>\u00a0\u2013\u00a0How lovely is your dwelling place,\u00a0<\/i><\/span>Lord<\/i><\/span>\u00a0Almighty!\u00a0 2\u00a0My soul yearns,\u00a0even faints, for the courts of the\u00a0<\/i><\/span>Lord<\/i><\/span>; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.\u00a0\u00a0<\/i><\/span>Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper\u00a0in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.\u00a0 11\u00a0For the\u00a0Lord\u00a0God is a sun\u00a0and shield; the\u00a0Lord\u00a0bestows favor and honor; no good thing does he withhold from those whose walk is blameless. 2\u00a0Lord\u00a0Almighty, blessed\u00a0is the one who trusts in you.<\/i><\/p>\n

I remember watching, so many years ago, the TV miniseries Roots.\u00a0 I was enthralled with every episode.\u00a0 It was 1977 and I was nineteen years old.\u00a0 There was a scene in the movie when a West African father, Omoro, held up his son, presenting his son to God and to the world and he shouted \u201cI have a son\u2026Kunta Kinte.\u201d\u00a0 Four years later the Lord blessed my wife and I with a son.\u00a0 The gratitude to God for the birth of my son and the instant and eternal love for my son overwhelmed me.\u00a0 I remembered and now fully understood the thankful and jubilant act of Omoro presenting his son to God and the world.\u00a0 I also held up my son over my head and shouted \u201cI have a son\u2026Robert Julian Lopez II!\u201d\u00a0 With a love for my son pulsing through me and becoming an inseparable and inviolable part of me, I cried.<\/p>\n

Four years after my son was born my wife was about to give birth to our second son.\u00a0 I had prayed and wondered, could I ever love another child how much I loved our first son?\u00a0 As it turns out, I should have never have worried about such a thing.\u00a0 Since his birth I always have and ever will love my second son with all the fire and dedication that I have loved his brother with.\u00a0 In fact, it is hard for me to understand people who have a \u201cfavorite child.\u201d\u00a0 I have always loved my sons equally, thanking God for them both, and enjoying them both.\u00a0 They are wonderfully unique and both bless me equally.\u00a0 And yes, with tears of joy and love flowing down my cheeks, I held up to God and to the world my second son shouted \u201cI have a son\u2026Raymond Paul Lopez!\u201d<\/p>\n

I am a blessed man.<\/p>\n

Yet my greatest blessing is not my wonderful wife or my wonderful sons.\u00a0 My highest blessing is God.\u00a0 He loves me even more than I love my sons.\u00a0 I love my family with all that I is humanly possible, but God loves me as is only possible with God.\u00a0 When times I have been bad, when I have cried so hard my soul bled out of me, He was with me.\u00a0 When I have been ugly, He is with me.\u00a0 When I have hurt others and cried so hard that I could be so mean, He is with me.\u00a0 In fact He takes me in His arms and when He does I am home and with Him.\u00a0 With God, I believe that I am alone with Him who loves all the inhabitants of the world.\u00a0 But when I am in His presence, I am only aware of Him with me.\u00a0 I like it that way!\u00a0 I like His face to shine upon me. \u00a0I love knowing His laugh. \u00a0I want only to be with God!\u00a0 With Him the problems of the world disappear.\u00a0 They don\u2019t go away, but the awareness of them disappear when I am with the Lord.\u00a0 He is my hiding place.\u00a0 He is my joy.\u00a0 He is life refreshed.<\/p>\n

Last week my Tia Lupe went to be with Jesus.\u00a0 Like God, she loved me before I loved her.\u00a0 She always loved me.\u00a0 I remember how she looked at me.\u00a0 She knew many of my faults and she loved me still.\u00a0 And you know what she would do when I would visit her at the senior apartment complex that she lived in, she would make sure that she told everyone we saw there that I was her nephew.\u00a0 She was proud of me.\u00a0 Her love for me helps me to understand God\u2019s love for me.\u00a0 When I knew no reason to be proud of me, she was.\u00a0 When I knew of no reason to love me, she did.\u00a0 So she, just by loving me as she did, taught me a deeper lesson about God\u2019s love for me.\u00a0 She loved me not because I deserved it, but simply because of who she was.\u00a0 I am happy she is with Jesus.\u00a0 She is with the One who loved her before she loved Him.<\/p>\n

A great place to be is to be with the ones who love you.\u00a0\u00a0 There is no greater place to be than with God Almighty who loves you most.\u00a0 Family, \u201cknowing God\u201d is not merely an academic pursuit of His Word.\u00a0 One of the ways He reveals Himself to us is through His Word.\u00a0 Yet let us not be misled or deceived, He put Himself within us so that we could also experience His life and love within us and for us.\u00a0 Let us daily wander the courtyards of God with Him as He explains mysteries that are so far beyond us we don\u2019t even think to ask.\u00a0 We can do that now, while here on earth.\u00a0 There will come the day when He brings us home to be with Him forever.\u00a0 Yet I pray for all of you that you know, or begin to know, that we can be One on one with God even now.\u00a0 Right now.\u00a0 Family, I pray that you not only know that God is with you, but that you unmistakably experience that.\u00a0 Nothing is better than the love we all share with each other\u2026except the love that God wants to share with us.\u00a0 May you walk daily in the awareness in God\u2019s love for you and His presence with you!\u00a0 Praise God!<\/p>\n

Psalm 150:6<\/b>\u00a0–\u00a0Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.\u00a0 Praise the Lord!<\/i><\/p>\n

Micah 7:7<\/b>\u00a0–\u00a0But as for me, I watch\u00a0in hope\u00a0for the\u00a0Lord, I wait for God my Savior; my God will hear\u00a0me.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Micah 6:8<\/b>\u00a0–\u00a0He has shown You, O man, what\u00a0is\u00a0good; And what does the\u00a0Lord\u00a0require of You but to do justly, to love mercy, And to walk humbly with Your God.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Psalm 84:1-2, 10-12\u00a0\u2013\u00a0How lovely is your dwelling place,\u00a0Lord\u00a0Almighty!\u00a0 2\u00a0My soul yearns,\u00a0even faints, for the courts of the\u00a0Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.\u00a0\u00a0Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper\u00a0in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1192],"tags":[94,17],"class_list":["post-1045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-devotion","tag-micah","tag-psalm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.Bob4God.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.Bob4God.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.Bob4God.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.Bob4God.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.Bob4God.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1045"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.Bob4God.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1046,"href":"http:\/\/www.Bob4God.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045\/revisions\/1046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.Bob4God.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.Bob4God.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.Bob4God.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}