THIS IS PERSONAL 

• DAY 63
• Fear File: You
• Scripture: Psalm 91:2b

“He is my refuge and my fortress; My God, in Him I will trust.”

Sometimes you read the Scripture and one thing just jumps at you, one word that just makes every single thing make sense. As I read this scripture, the focus for me is the word “my.”

‘MY’ connotes ownership, belonging, or possession. For example, when someone says my bag, my shoes, or my time, it means it belongs to that person. That’s ownership. But not only ownership, but it also implies personalization, that this thing belongs personally to you and not anyone else. So when you hear the word ‘my’, it means that this is personal.

So what I find amazing about this scripture is that this Psalmist was claiming ownership of God as if God belonged to only Him. So I thought, “the audacity,” nobody owns God, rather, we are the ones that belong to Him. It is written there in the scriptures, “For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s (Rom 14:8). 

But God showed me that this scripture wasn’t about ownership in the way I was thinking but about intimacy. All through the bible God has been wooing us into an intimate,  personal relationship with Him. And anyone who is in a relationship can definitely claim “belonging”. So when this Psalmist refers to God with ‘My,’ My refuge, My rock, My king, MY GOD!! It is because he had gotten to a point in his relationship with God where God became personal to him, where he feels like he and God have become intimate, and God was now HIS.  He understood that a relationship is like a two-way street and he embraced the fact and declared quite boldly that God is His. That is the relationship that God is calling us into, a relationship where we are his and he is ours. 

“My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies”. Songs of Solomon 2:16

God is Yours.

In African culture, most of our beliefs or knowledge of God is inherited from our parents. Mine too. I was raised in a family where serving God was not your choice to make, it was not an option. Faith was something you just had to do, whether you knew how. And for a long time, I went to church, but I didn’t have an intimate or personal relationship with God. But thank God that I at least had a little foundation from my parents, because that was what I needed to go from seeing Him as their God to seeing Him as my God. I got to a point in my life where I started to see God as my God, not just as my parents’ God.

It Starts from Somewhere,

As much as God introduces himself as the father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he also comes as your God. When He met Abraham, He introduced Himself as God, but when He met with Isaac, he said to Isaac, I am the God of Your father. He was revealing himself to Isaac on the basis of what Isaac knew, but Isaac’s relationship with Him grew to the point where God was then His God BECAUSE God came to Isaac, Himself. The same can be said for Jacob and for Moses. 

So sometimes God comes to us through the foundation that our parents or some preacher or our pastor built for us, and that opens us up to an opportunity of seeing God as our God. However, something shifts on your inside when God appears to you Himself. Even when he is introducing Himself as the God of Your parents, your pastor, or Your friend, it is different because He appears to you himself. 

Let me say this though, God doesn’t always need a foundation to come to you. He can come to you Himself.

Make it Personal!

So it doesn’t matter that we inherited our religion, we have to get to a point in our walk of faith where we come to know God personally. God introduces Himself to us through the scriptures because He wants intimacy with us. God has introduced Himself and revealed Himself by putting the Holy Spirit inside of us. So you cannot have a faith that’s dependent on somebody else’s experience because you cannot live a victorious life on somebody else’s faith. You have to know the truth and the truth that you know is what will set you free. So God is calling us into a personal relationship. God has to be personal for you.

If he’s not personal to you, you may not be able to overcome the fears or the things that you’re going through. Situations are going to come up where you’re going to have to discover, Is it my God or my parent’s God? Is it my God or my friend’s God? Is it my God or my pastor’s God? So, now is a good time for you to know God for yourself.

A good place to start from,

One of the ways you can know God personally is by studying His Word, fellowshipping with Him daily, and developing a habit and an attitude of prayer, where you show up every day to speak to God. I guarantee that as you do that constantly you’re going to meet with the God of the Bible, you’re going to meet with that God for yourself.

God also reveals himself to us through our experiences. So look to your experiences, those times when there was lack and He became your provider, or when there was danger and He became your safety. I knew God to be a comforter, but until I experienced loss I didn’t know it Personally. God uses experiences to show you practically all the things you’ve heard or read. 

Say this Prayer,

Dear Lord, I want to know you for myself. I don’t want to know you on the basis of what somebody said or what someone did. I know you’re not hiding yourself from me, I’m just asking that you show me who You are and not what I think or have heard about You. Reveal yourself to me as I look into Your word, reveal Yourself to me as I seek you out in prayer and in worship. In Jesus’ name, Amen. 

Shalom.

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