God has given His people such glory! First, He gave us Christ. Then He follows up on this glorious Christ with the glorious Holy Spirit.

This Christ who is the Spirit (2 Cor 3:17 & 18) is our Shepherd. “The LORD IS my Shepherd, I shall not want” (Psa 23:1). The LORD, YHVH in the Hebrew which translates, “The One who IS, Who Exists”. Yehovah Ra’ah, the LORD my Shepherd, the LORD who tends to me, who pastures me, who feeds me. Who leads me, protects me, and ensures my well-being. He is my Leader, my Guide, my chief Care-giver, my Protector.

I shall not want. Heb phrase is “Lo eh-sar”. I shall not lack, or fail, be without, or decrease, be in need. Because the LORD IS my Shepherd. The meaning also includes the sense that because the LORD Yehovah Ra’ar, I shall not experience deficiency.

This meditation led me to a place of conviction that I should never ever cease keeping God’s Word in my heart and in my mouth.

God cannot and will not manifest His presence at our beck and call. He appreciates faith in Him and in His Word. And He will still be sovereign when it comes to manifesting His glory by His Spirit through His grace. This is His mercy. Sinful humans though saved by His grace and brought into communion with the Triune God through His Spirit into Christ cannot endure God in His glory. The encounters of God’s first fruit believers post-resurrection with heavenly beings in the book of Acts provides evidence of this.

By faith in Christ, we participate in His sufferings with the sufferings of His people on earth that we may also participate in His glory, the present glory of the present Resurrected and Ascended Christ, seated at the right hand of God, and we His people seated with Him (Eph 1:3, Col 3:1-3).

We (I) cannot allow the current challenges and stresses of life define us. Only Christ in our communion with Him must define us (me) through our our union with the Triune God by faith empowered by the Holy Spirit dressed in God’s Word (Beale).

On this earth in our present Spirit life living in union with Christ by faith, we experience the challenges of existence in this fallen realm. Faith in Christ and in His promises enables us to participate in His resurrected and ascended glory.

This is operationalized chiefly through His Word acted upon, spoken in alignment with faith in our hearts. This is a joyful cycle. We faithfully speak His word that is constantly brewing and abiding in our hearts out through our mouths. We believe therefore we speak (2 Cor 4).

When we are faced with our fleshly limitations, we speak His Word. As I face the challenges of doing my doctoral studies in my 60s, I dare not give in to the frailties of my flesh. Instead, by faith, I face the faithfulness of God and His glorious promises in Christ. This Christ is not outside of me (Calvin ICR, Bk 3). Christ is not only inside of me, but He is also united with me by faith through the power of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:17).

I walk the walk of faith, straddling heaven on earth through Christ’s Spirit abiding and dwelling and living out His life in and through my flesh (Gal 2:20). Like Peter walking towards Jesus during the storm on the Lake of Galilee, the moment, the instant I take my focus off Him and His promises, I sink into despair, fear, anxiety, and the resultant STRESS!

God has explicitly said, in Isa 26:3, “You will keep perfectly peaceful the one whose mind remains focused on you, because he remains in you” (ISV). Yet, because of His glorious grace, it is actually Christ Himself, our Prince of Peace who keeps us in His peace. That in His peace, we may remain focused on Him alone, especially when the going gets tough.