We are His

The heavens are yours; the earth also is yours; the world and all that is in it, you have founded them. Psalm 89:11 ESV

The heavens are His. The earth and all that is in it is His. He made them. He made us. As Christians we'd all acknowledge that intellectually, and yet how easy it is in this self-focused society and Gospel we often hear to shift that around and not even realize we are doing it—to "sell" God like a product based on His benefits, or come to God for what He does for us. Or to look around and to say, "I have this and that and I have God and I have a family and I have a car and I have . . ." lumping Him in with everything else we "have."

But there is a reality that we must come to realize if we are ever going to truly surrender to Him. It begins with realizing—meditating on—that before all "this" around us was, there was God and God alone, perfectly complete and sufficient in the Trinity. Spend some time simply imagining and reflecting on that—God and nothing else. God, completely complete. Perfect. In need of nothing.

To often we ask questions that suppose there is a purpose for God or for the Trinity or that God came to be or took a certain form for a reason. The true place to begin and to realize is that God doesn't exist for a reason, or He is not the Trinity for a reason, He simply is that way and always has been. He is the start of everything. It all begins in Him. There was nothing that created Him, or came before Him, so any question that implies there is a reason for God or for the form God takes is wrong because it presupposes there was cause for God or a decision in how God would be—that God serves a purpose. (For an excellent discussion on this read Chapter 2 of Fred Sanders book The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything.)

God simply is, in the form He is, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, from everlasting to everlasting. He is, and always was, and always will be. EVERYTHING else finds its origin and start and beginning and life and source in Him, from Him. And, realizing that He is totally COMPLETE and WHOLE in and of Himself we realize He needs nothing . . . therefore EVERYTHING He does is from His desire and pleasure, not because He needed something and had to.

Beginning in this place—having had that reality go from our head to our heart through pondering on it—we then realize that the ONLY, the SOLE, the SINGLE reason we exist is that at some point (after He had already existed for eternity without us) He decided and wanted to create us. That is it. There was God, and being God He needed nothing. He didn't have to create us. He wasn't incomplete without us. He was God, perfect, complete, eternal. And from that place, as a free gift, He DECIDED to create us and all that is around us. Every one of us, and everything around us, exists SIMPLY and ONLY because He decided it would, for His own reasons or pleasure. There is not a single tiny thing we offer to God that He needed that obligated Him to make us or left Him imperfect without us. It was 100% His free desire.

When I can reach that point where I realize this—that the only reason I exist is because He decided to create me for His own desire or pleasure—I then realize that, logically, because of that, I am His. He is my Creator and He created me for Him. I am the clay and He is the potter. He made me, formed me, designed me, molded me, breathed life into me. From that realization it is then a tiny step to realize I am not my own, but I am His, and He has all rights to me.

This RIGHT of God to all of us makes perfect sense and takes hold of our heart when we fully and completely realize that there was NOTHING that obligated Him to makes us or that He is indebted to us for. There isn't even a tiny iota of anything that made Him have to make us. We are ENTIRELY His creation of HIS own free gift and choice. And realizing that helps us to internalize at our core that being His entirely—our entire existence depending on and drawing from His gracious free-will gift—we are truly His, for His pleasure and will. To say it again—from that realization comes the realization that He has ALL rights to us. It is not a two way street. We don't also have rights or any basis of leverage or demand on God. Our existence is entirely one way which means we have no claim on it. We are His, and His alone. May we live as surrendered vessels recognizing that right of His over us. It will be the most joyous place we can ever live when we stop kicking against the goads and surrender.