What the World needs Now...

I love the way the 26th chapter of Job ends. Job declares, "Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?"What I love about this statement is its humility. It declares that we know so little about the Lord. What we know is wonderful, but there is so much more that we can and need to know about our Lord.
That's why I'd finish the sentence (What the world needs now....) with the words "to know more of God - to know more of Christ". For when we understand better who God is, we begin to understand better who we are, and it helps us take our place under His reign.
That seems to be what's going on in Exodus 8. God could have chosen to very quickly deliver His people. He could have sent a plague to wipe out all the Egyptians, but He had another agenda. He wanted to make Himself known. In verse 10 we find the words "so that you may know that there is no one like the Lord our God." Later in verse 22 we see "that you may know that I am the Lord in the midst of the earth." All the drama of the ten plagues - a rather drawn out process - was all designed so that God might be known for who He is. That really is what the world needs.
In the prayer that Jesus taught His disciples we see a similar thought. The prayer begins with "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." In offering this as a model prayer Jesus was proclaiming that God's name being hallowed, that His name being set apart as unlike any other name, is a petition of first importance. If more and more people would come to see God for who He is, if the multituldes would come to see Him being like no other, this world would be such a different - yes, better place.
It is interesting as well in 1 Corinthians 11:7 that Paul calls the gifts of the Spirit "manifestations". With this Paul is saying that when we use our gift, or when we give it away in service to others, what we are doing at those times is manifesting or putting on display the character of our God. So even the giving of gifts and their eventual use is a design of God to make Himself known. That really should convince us that what the world needs now is to know the Lord more fully.
If we will accept this as true, then it has ramifications on our lives. Our life should center around making the Lord known. When trials come our way, our first question should not be "why me", but rather, how can I put God on display in the midst of this trial. When we pray we should not just pray "Lord, deliver me from ...." but must add at the end "only if this results in your name being better known throughout the earth". That prayer will always be answered. When it comes to our involvement in church, our first thought will be "how can I display God to those around me? How can I use my gift to put God on display?" Everything changes when we make the glory of God our goal!
May the Lord help us consider this purpose for our lives, and may more of Him be known to more and more people today and into eternity. That's what the world needs now!