God Made Even This Day
“This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Psalm 118:24
This was Greystone’s theme verse for the summer in 2012. I was really excited when I found out that we would be spending our time at camp studying and learning about this verse because it’s one of my absolute favorites.
I grew up singing a song about this verse in Sunday school but I never really thought much of it back then. When I got older and started to really think about what it says I learned a lot. What strikes me is that the verse doesn’t just say “all days were made by the Lord,” even though that’s what it means. Instead of being general in reminding us that God made every day, it’s specific.
This is the day the Lord has made. God made this specific day and we should rejoice and be glad in it. I’m sure you have all had days that have been hard. Maybe a day when you got sick or a day when you got a bad grade in school. What this verse is telling us is that God made that day.
God made the day you didn’t make the team and the day you got in a fight with your best friend. He made the day you fell out of a tree and the day your neighborhood friend moved away. He made the good days and He made the bad days. And He asks us to rejoice in them; in every single one of our days. He asks us to be glad on days when those things happen.
What? That’s nuts. And so hard! When bad things happen, we don’t want to be glad. We want them to not happen or to be fixed so we don’t have to feel yucky about them. But the thing is, rejoicing is a choice. It’s not based on what we feel but it’s a choice to have a positive attitude and find joy when we really don’t feel like it. And God asks us to make that choice every day.
But He doesn’t just ask us to make that choice. He helps us to do it too. We can have joy in the bad days because we know that Jesus was sent to earth to make all things new. Our bad days won’t last. And some day, when we’re with God, there won’t be any more bad days at all.
We can have joy because Jesus saved us from our sins and now we have a relationship with God. Another way we find joy even in bad days is to focus on the good things instead of the bad. Yes, something may have happened to make your day a bad day. But ask yourself what about that day is still good. We can find the good things when we look for them.
And the cool thing about that is when we do, our day changes from bad to good. Sometimes it’s easy to find good things in spite of the bad. We might have a day where we say, “I didn’t do well on my Science test but I’m getting really good grades in English,” and then we thank God for that. Other times it might be hard and when that happens, we can ask God to show us what is good and he’ll help us rejoice in them.