Lord Your glory is so obviously displayed and reflected in the power exhibited within creation. The floods lift up their roaring, the sea cries out Your name, the hills bear prosperity for all of us to enjoy, the lightning lights up the world so as to put on display your infinite power and knowledge. Yet Lord, your glory is displayed in its highest and surest regard in Your intentional pursuit and giving of Yourself to weakness resulting in unfathomable suffering. At the cross we see displayed what it took for you to make us Your own, what it took for our sins to be abolished, along with its due penalty: it took the God of the universe becoming nothing, taking the form of a bondservant, being nailed to a cross along with the record of debt that stood against us and bearing the curse due to us because of our lawlessness. Lord what kind of love is this that would move You to take regard of those who have betrayed your glory? And yet that is Your heart, to make rebels Your own children, to make us Your children. You were willing to be cut off from the land of the living that we might be brought in to paradise, to be cursed that we might be blessed, to be stripped of all that we might be clothed in your pure robe of righteousness. Lord help our unbelief. Heal our pride and our self-inflation by looking to that cross. Help our frail state and weakness, and would you shine forth in it to give us Your strength, the very strength of the Spirit that raised Christ from the dead. Would You give to us the gift of humbly walking in the reality of what we already are: Your justified, accepted, rejoiced-over children, and find our ultimate identity in this over the identities the world presses in and would have for us. Lord may we find our ultimate hope and joy and rejoicing in Your rejoicing over us.