"Set Apart"

"Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God. Selah." (Psalms 87:3)
Not that families can't have great relationships with the Lord together, because they need to; every family that is in Christ needs to come together daily for prayer and for reading God's word; if anything needs to be ordinary in the Christian home, it should be prayer and fellowship in the word. Yet how many families practice praying together and studying God's word together? If I were to guess, I would say less than 5%. To see a family come together for the purpose of studying the Word is not something you see happening much, not in this modern era of independence and self-awareness. If you might have noticed, I did not use the NLT to close yesterday; the interpretation they had for "green" was not the interpretation that I can agree with; it reads, "the soft grass is our bed." Okay, I guess if you are looking for the meaning of comfort and rest, then that could be your interpretation; but I tend to go in the way of 'fresh' or 'flourishing.' To put it in simpler terms, 'new' is the word I would be looking for; if the Lord were my lover, then nothing seems old or mundane; at least that's how I interpret what is being said. Besides, how can you express laying out on soft green grass, while looking up at your ceiling above the bed? Unless you are thinking of the 23rd Psalm, "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures." Have we come to the place in our relationship where God does not surprise us anymore? I never what to feel like that, where I am not expecting God to surprise me with something that I did not already know, or give me a new experience that I have not already felt. If you really wanted to, you could say that the "green pastures" are also new and fresh; not just a place where you are well feed, but a place where you don't want to wander off from, because it's just way more exciting than anywhere else. I can't help but think of that one article or fixture within the Temple of God that was not measured, it was the basin which held the water for ceremonial cleansing. Everything else was measured; when God instructed Moses how to build it, it had a measurement; all except the water basin, it did not. Interesting...
"In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. He existed in the beginning with God. God created everything through him, and nothing was created except through him. The Word gave life to everything that was created, and his life brought light to everyone. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it." (John 1:1-5) NLT