Studying the Attributes of God
A few weeks ago, I sat on the couch with an acquaintance I have recently started calling friend. We were grouped together for a prayer exercise, one that turns my hands sweaty and elevates my heart rate. We each held a tiny notecard with our prayer requests for the week, a quiet sharing of burdens that makes me feel off-balance these days. She handed me her card, decorated with her beautiful loopy script, light bouncing off of her week-old engagement ring. Her requests felt light, exciting, joyful even. Wedding planning. House-shopping. Job-hunting. I fought back pinpricks of resentment.
My card was rougher, with choppy handwriting and requests that felt too heavy to place on someone else’s shoulders. I wanted to apologize as I handed it to her. This card was decorated with the words of grief and loss, the words of a person trying to sort through the back-to-back deaths of two people I love. We sat facing each other, our hands clasped and our heads bowed low. I prayed for her, for her upcoming wedding and marriage to a kind man, for the house that would become a home, for the new job filled with passion. We were mirrors of each other, her looking forward at all that was to come and me looking back at all that had happened, the wreckage of the past five months. Unbeknownst to either of us, I think, we prayed the same thing for each other - that we would know the Lord more deeply in this season.
The Fullness of Who God Is
When I was in college, I had a professor challenge me to write down what I knew to be true of God based on scripture and then take time each week to hold my prayers up to the light of that list. I didn’t know it then, but that exercise would become one of the most formative spiritual disciplines in my life. After a few months, I traded in my hodge-podge list for a more polished version from The Village Church in Texas. The list was created with children in mind, explaining sovereignty and compassion in terms that can be easily understood by an eight-year-old. (I reached out to The Village Church for permission to share this list with you and they graciously obliged; you can access the children’s posters here or my copied-down list here.)
One of my greatest weaknesses in my relationship with the Lord is how easily I accept a caricature of him rather than doing the hard work of believing the fullness of who he is. Before this list, I would think of God’s goodness or generosity or compassion in sweeping, abstract terms, and I rarely took the time to think about what those attributes actually meant. Now, when I think about God’s goodness, I think immediately that he is what is best. When I think about God’s generosity, I think immediately that he gives what is best. When I think about God’s compassion, I think immediately that he sees, cares, and acts when his children are in need. By removing that layer of abstraction, this tool has made it easier to look at each attribute and ask myself where I am believing lies, and it also makes it easier to combat those lies with truth.
In my Bible, this list is written out on the very first page, and echoes of it can be seen throughout both my prayers and my study of scripture. Erik Raymond, a pastor and writer from Omaha, Nebraska writes, “When we see God as he presents himself in the Word, we are truly humbled as God is exalted.” After spending years with this list, I find myself unconsciously looking for the threads of God’s character woven into the fabric of the passages of Scripture I read. This has been truly formative in the way I approach the Word of God.
A Structure for Prayer
One of the greatest gifts of this list is that it gives me a structure on which to hang my prayers. When I find myself doubting the character of God, my prayers falling limp as I fail to believe one attribute or another, I pray through this list and remind myself of truth. When I look back through my written prayers over the last few years, I can see that in different seasons, my prayers were heavily focused on one or two different attributes of God. In a season of my life when so much was changing, I often prayed and thanked God that he is unchanging. In a season when I was tempted to believe that God was withholding something from me, I prayed often about his generosity and thanked him for being a Father who gives good gifts to his children. Most recently I have been praying and reminding myself of the goodness of God because that is the attribute I find myself most willing to twist into a lie.
When my friend and I prayed a few weeks ago that we would both come to know the Father more fully, I was struck by the magnitude of God’s character. He is unchanging and wise and loving and good. I think this tool is so useful because in every season, whether it is a season of joy and celebration or sadness and mourning, what we all long for most deeply is to know the Father more fully.
