I love Psalm 103, and I read it often. A couple of verses near the beginning are what I want to focus on today.

Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits— who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, (Psalms‬ ‭103:2-4‬ ‭NIV, emphasis mine)

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, benefits only benefit us when we need them.

We need forgiveness when we sin.

We need healing when we are sick.

We need redemption from the pit when we are in, wait for it, the pit.

And we need a crown when we fell unworthy because we’ve lived lives in sin, sickness, and the pit.

I don’t know what you need today, but take the Psalmist advice to heart: forget not His benefits!

There’s always space between what God promises and what we experience.

Sometimes the space is short: days, hours, minutes. Other times, it’s long: weeks, months, years.

What that space gets filled with is on us. Some fill it with fear, bitterness, or doubt. Others fill it with faith, expectation, and trust.

How we live between what God promises and what we experience is determined by what we fill it with.

Of all the attributes of God, jealousy is one that doesn’t get a lot of airtime. I totally get it because it’s hard for us to think of jealousy as a good thing, especially if we’ve had a relationship with someone who was jealous out of their insecurity.

But our God is a jealous God. He said so Himself.

Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. (Exodus‬ ‭34:14‬ ‭NIV, emphasis mine)

Not only is He jealous, but He used it as an identifier of Who He is. His name is jealous!

The Hebrew word used there for jealous is only used six times, and it’s reserved only for God. It’s basically saying that He is in a league by Himself, and won’t stop at anything to keep everything else out of His space.

His jealousy doesn’t come from a place of insecurity and fear, but rather from a place of holiness and awe.

Knowing this about God should inspire a healthy blend of love and fear. “Yikes! God is massive — there’s no one like Him!!! And He wants me??”

There’s a song that gets sung in churches a lot about how much this God loves us. Church people tend to fight over the sloppy wet kiss part, but I think the fact that we skip through the beginning lyrics on the way to the love illustrates our uneasiness with the jealousy of God.

“He is jealous for me.”

We want a God who loves us relentlessly and still allows us to love Him half-heartedly. As if the God of the universe should be grateful that we think about Him every now and then? No! He is jealous for me, and that means He will fight for me (and at times, with me) so that He will have all of me.

Until we’re willing to work through the implications of that first line, we aren’t truly in a position to belt out the all-too-familiar chorus. Yes, He loves us, oh, how He loves us! But the question that a jealous God will always ask is, “Do you love Me more than any other loves?”

Until we can say yes, the breath of a jealous God will continue to bend our hearts like a tree in a hurricane.