June 14. How much God wants to bless you? The Lord will again take delight in prospering you,

Deuteronomy 30, verse 9. God does not bless us begrudgingly. There is a kind of eagerness

about the beneficence of God. He does not wait for us to come to him. He seeks us out

because it is his pleasure to do us good. God is not waiting for us. He is pursuing us.

That in fact is the literal translation of Psalm 236. Surely goodness and mercy shall

pursue me all the days of my life. God loves to show mercy. Let me say it again. God loves to show

mercy. He is not hesitant or indecisive or tentative in his desires to do good to his people.

His anger must be released by a stiff safety lock, but his mercy has a hair trigger.

That's what he meant. When he came down on Mount Sinai and said to Moses,

the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Exodus 346. It's what he meant when he said in Jeremiah 924,

I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the earth.

For in these things, I delight declares the Lord. God is never irritable or edgy. His anger never

has a short fuse. Instead, he is infinitely energetic with absolutely unbounded and unending

enthusiasm for the fulfillment of his delights. This is hard for us to comprehend because

we have to sleep every day just to cope, not to mention thrive. Our emotions go up and down,

we get bored and discouraged one day and feel hopeful and excited another. We're like little

geysers that gurgle and sputter and pop erratically, but God is like a great Niagara Falls.

You look at 186,000 tons of water crashing over the precipice every minute and think,

surely, this can't keep going at this force, year after year after year, and yet it does.

That's the way God is about doing us good. He never grows weary of it. It never gets boring

to him. The Niagara of his grace has no end.

...