words

I love words.  I love their power and their meaning and the creative ability to take an abstract thought and form it into a communication, an idea to be shared with others or understood by.  I wonder if this is a tiny piece of how God feels - God who is the Word, who created everything out of the breathe of his mouth, who still holds everything together, and continues to create by his Word.  Just thinking on that, I have been taking one Bible verse every few days and just looking deeply at the words and their meanings.  Here are two that particularly comforted me this week.

John 14:21 “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me... and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”

I looked up the word manifest and as a verb it means: to display or show a quality or feeling by one’s acts or appearance, to demonstrate, to reveal
And as an adjective manifest means: clear or obvious to the eye or mind, plain, apparent, evident, palpable, distinct, definite, glaring, undisguised, unmistakable, perceptive, visible, recognizable

My prayer is that God love me and manifest that nature towards me.  In other words, that God show, demonstrate, reveal, and display his love to me in ways that are very clear, perceptive, visible, and recognizable to my mind and eye, in ways that are obvious, even glaringly obvious or plain as day.  Beginning my day with this expectation, that by keeping God’s commandments in front of me, he will bless me with his visible love manifested before me is such a comfort. And if you keep reading verses 22-27, you see Judas (not Iscariot) question Jesus with “how is it that you will manifest yourself?” And Jesus explains that “the Helper, the Holy Spirit...will teach you all things” and “my peace I give to you.”  God will manifest his love to us in obvious and clear ways, by way of the Holy Spirit guiding us with peace and into peace.  God’s unmistakable appearance and communication with us, his loving manifested manifestation, always arrives as peace to our souls.  I love these words.

The second “word study” I did was with Proverbs 4:7 “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom and whatever you get, get insight.”

At first this seems such a puzzling verse.  I looked up the definitions of wisdom and insight though and love these words.
Wisdom - experience, knowledge, good judgement, wise, soundness of action and decision, body of knowledge, intelligence, common sense, shrewdness, prudence

Insight - deep understanding, intuitive understanding, intuition, discernment, perception, awareness, comprehension, appreciation, judgement, acuity

I read this proverbs verse as the idea that as I receive knowledge, common sense, and intelligent information about God that I not be satisfied with just this head knowledge alone.  But that I seek to obtain deep understanding, an awareness of, and the intuitive feeling of God’s love in my life.  Beautiful words.