The Community’s Favorite Reading from 2019
Open Your Bible
Deuteronomy 10:14-17, Psalm 145:3-7, Isaiah 40:9-25, John 1:1-5, Revelation 22:13
BY She Reads Truth
For Day 5 of our 2019 Wrapped plan, we asked our marketing team to identify the community’s favorite reading from this year. The winner was Day 1 of our Attributes of God reading plan, which explores God’s infinite and extraordinary nature and the gift that His people get to know Him and experience His love. This reading set us up for three incredible weeks studying different attributes of God.
Attributes of God Day 1 | God Is God
Whatever we think of when we think about God is, at the very least, incomplete. He is infinite, but our imaginations are limited. He is unfathomable, so our thoughts cannot plumb the depths. He is the Creator of everything, yet we are constrained by metaphors that come from the created world. The very idea that we might classify or categorize God is laughable. He cannot be tamed or studied. He is beyond our reach and beyond our understanding.
And yet we can know Him. He has graciously entered our world, time and time again, so that we might be His children and His true image-bearers. He was in the garden with Adam and Eve. He spoke to Noah, Abraham, and Moses. His presence filled the tabernacle and, later, the temple. He put on flesh and became one of us. And He has gifted His Spirit to His people, in order that we might know Him more intimately still. “The LORD had his heart set on your fathers and loved them. He chose their descendants after them—he chose you out of all the peoples, as it is today” (Deuteronomy 10:15).
We can know God because He has chosen to be known. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-present. He is loving and just, merciful and good, and a thousand other things beside. “For the LORD your God is the God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, mighty, and awe-inspiring God” (v.17). Theologians have made many a complicated list of God’s attributes, filling thick volumes on shelves that occupy the libraries of this world. But those books amount to what we can know about God. We have been given an opportunity to go much deeper than that. We have been invited to love Him and be loved by Him—to know Him in a way that defies our limited capacity for knowledge and understanding and, in so doing, bring Him glory.
Whatever measure of knowledge we have about God is granted to us so that we might worship Him, not merely as admirers from afar but as dearly loved children.
66 thoughts on "The Community’s Favorite Reading from 2019"
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This is a a needed reminder and good to start the new year.
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Ashley P, I think you did a great job of presenting the gospel to this man, maybe not with words, although it sounds like they were good too, but mainly with how you interacted with him. That’s an inspiration to me as I frequently feel inadequate to talk to someone with such strong beliefs like that, but like you showed, it is not always about the words we say, but how we say them. I will be praying for this man. Thank you for sharing.
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“ We can know God because he has chosen to be known,” What a great God! He didn’t just create us and leave us to navigate life on our own. Rather, He chooses to reveal Himself to us and to have relationship with us. It’s beautiful. I had a conversation with a guy the other day and he shared with me that he used to be Mormon and is now agnostic. He explained, passionately, how he tried hard and he studied scripture and did all the right things but he just never felt God. He just didn’t believe. He was all ready to defend himself and his family’s religion, quoting scripture to me to convince me that the two religions are really the same and he doesn’t adhere to either, and he was clearly expecting a fight. I mostly listened, disagreed at times but realized he would just try to debate me with all these lofty arguments, so I mostly stayed calm and listened. Honestly, my heart was breaking for him, this man who fought so vehemently against God because he was so frustrated that he never felt God the way others claim. I shared with him that it’s not about church, or doing the right things, or reading scripture—those are important, but it’s about a relationship with God, and while He doesn’t speak audibly to me, I have His grace, peace, and joy and have faith that He’s with me. At the end of our conversation, he admitted that he didn’t usually talk so long or so openly on the subject because Christians get mad at him long before and he stops talking. He also told me I’m “good people” (he said it kindly) so, while I honestly have been worrying that I didn’t say enough or say the right things to explain my faith and want so desperately to have represented Jesus well, I hope that above all, He felt God’s love through me. SRT sisters, will you please join me in prayers for him? He’s moving to a new state and he and I aren’t close, so we’ll likely not stay in much contact, but I will continue praying that God puts others in his path that will show him the love of Jesus and that his thick walls will come down.
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Praying for your friend. May God lead into the truth, dislodge all the confusion and disappointment he likely carries from his past. Put people in his path that point the way to Jesus as it is Jesus and only Jesus who saves. Your time with him is a but a stepping stone to him finding his way. ❣️
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Thank you Cathy for the suggestion of this app. I downloaded it and listened to today’s prayer. Thank you, thank you!
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This is a great reminder for the new year. I love this
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Thank you thank you She Reads Truth! Found this site in time for advent and making it my devotional for the New Year. Loving it! Just read comments and Psalm 104. So grateful for all of you!!!
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A great reminder that He keep us each close, gently leading when we are with our young, and carry when we need carrying. Our hearts need to be open to him, cutting away our own stubbornness and welcome him. Soften your heart to others.
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In the short time I’ve been engaging with you all at SRT, I have come to love how so many of you express such a loving embrace of God’s word and understanding of his unsearchable character. It’s apparent to me that to grasp anything about the Lord we need humble hearts and minds which surrender to the Holy Spirit to bring about revelation. Recently, I’ve been in the presence of conversations in which others are wrestling with the paradoxical truths about God’s character (e.g. his triune nature, his election in salvation). What is common in these strugglers is a desire to use human logic as the end-all of understanding. But, through my own similar wrestling, I’ve come to see that human logic can never be enough; not only because our minds are finite trying to figure out an infinite God, but also because our minds have been tainted by the Fall. Oh how we need his mercy even to let go of holding our reason up to a level of superiority that it cannot achieve! Not that we aren’t to use our reason at all for the Lord does call us to “reason together”. Yet, we need to come to him with child-like faith, believing that he will show us what we need to know in order to grow in his love thus becoming obedient children. May the Lord grant us this humble state today!
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