There is a quiet line in Psalm 145 that pictures God not as a distant ruler, but as a Father with an open hand, generously stretching it out to every living thing. He is not tightfisted, not calculating, not reluctant. His hand opens, and needs are met; longings are answered according to His wisdom; creation is sustained moment by moment. Today, we’re invited to look at our lives through that picture—every breath, every meal, every joy, every spiritual blessing—as coming from the same steady, generous hand.

God’s Generosity Is Personal

We’re often comfortable believing that God vaguely sustains “the universe,” but this verse presses closer: His open hand satisfies the desire of every living thing—including you. Jesus pointed to birds and lilies as living sermons: “Look at the birds of the air: They do not sow or reap or gather into barns—and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” (Matthew 6:26). If He cares for sparrows, how much more His blood-bought sons and daughters?

God does not dispense blessings like an impersonal vending machine. Scripture calls Him “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow” (James 1:17). Every good gift in your life has fingerprints on it—His. When Abraham discovered God’s provision on the mountain, he named that place “The LORD Will Provide” (Genesis 22:14). That name is still true for you. The same God who provided a ram for Abraham has provided His own Son for you. His open hand is not only about groceries and rent; it is about nail-scarred hands stretched out on a cross for your eternal good.

Satisfied Beyond Survival

God’s open hand does more than keep us alive; it satisfies. Animals are content with food and shelter, but people carry deeper hungers—meaning, forgiveness, belonging, hope. We chase those desires in relationships, achievements, experiences, and still come up empty. Into that vacuum, Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to Me will never hunger, and whoever believes in Me will never thirst” (John 6:35). Your deepest desires are not a problem to be suppressed but a pointer to the only One who can truly fill them.

This means God’s provision is ultimately Himself. He does supply material needs—“my God will supply all your needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19)—but His richest gift is fellowship with Him. When your circumstances feel lean, His hand is still open in a different way: comfort, peace that passes understanding, the presence of the Holy Spirit, the promises of His Word. Sometimes, in seasons of lack, He is weaning us from lesser satisfactions so we can taste the joy of knowing Him as enough.

Living with Open Hands

If God lives toward us with an open hand, we cannot walk through life with clenched fists. The gospel logic is clear: “He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also, along with Him, freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). When you genuinely believe that, anxiety begins to loosen its grip. You don’t have to manipulate, hoard, or control everything. You can seek “first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,” trusting that “all these things will be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33).

Open-handed living also means becoming a channel of the generosity you’ve received. If His hand is open to you, your hand should be open to others. You can give, forgive, share, and serve without fear of ending up empty, because your supply doesn’t start or stop with you. “Delight yourself in the LORD, and He will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4). As your delight shifts toward Him, your desires begin to look like His—and His open hand works through yours to bless the people around you.

Lord, thank You for Your open hand that provides and satisfies. Today, help me trust Your generosity and live with open hands toward others as You lead.

A prophet is one who knows his times and what God is trying to say to the people of his times.

What God says to His Church at any given period depends altogether upon her moral and spiritual condition and upon the spiritual need of the hour. Religious leaders who continue mechanically to expound the Scriptures without regard to the current religious situation are no better than the scribes and lawyers of Jesus? day who faithfully parroted the Law without the remotest notion of what was going on around them spiritually. They fed the same diet to all and seemed wholly unaware that there was such a thing as meat in due season. The prophets never made that mistake nor wasted their efforts in that manner. They invariably spoke to the condition of the people of their times.

Today we need prophetic preachers; not preachers of prophecy merely, but preachers with a gift of prophecy. The word of wisdom is missing. We need the gift of discernment again in our pulpits. It is not ability to predict that we need, but the anointed eye, the power of spiritual penetration and interpretation, the ability to appraise the religious scene as viewed from God's position, and to tell us what is actually going on.

Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone by reason of his speaking with Him. - Exodus 34:29

The experience of Moses teaches us that the loftiest beauty of character comes from communion with God. That is the use that the Apostle makes of this remarkable incident in 2 Corinthians 3:7-18, where he takes the light that shone from Moses’ face as being the symbol of the better lustre that gleams from all those who behold (or reflect) the glory of the Lord with unveiled faces, and, by beholding, are changed into the likeness of that on which they gaze with adoration and longing. The great law to which, almost exclusively, Christianity commits the perfecting of individual character is this: Look at Him till you are like Him, and, in beholding, be changed. There have been in the past, and there are to-day, thousands of simple souls shut out by lowliness of position and other circumstances from all the refining and ennobling influences of which the world makes so much, who yet in character and bearing, aye, and sometimes in the very look of their meek faces, are living witnesses how true and mighty to transform a nature is the power of loving gaze upon Jesus Christ. There is no influence to refine and beautify men like that of living near Jesus Christ, and walking in the light of that beauty which is the effulgence of the Divine glory and the express image of His Person.

But, then, the bearer of the radiance is unconscious of it. In all regions of life the consummate apex and crowning charm of excellence is unconsciousness of excellence. Whenever a man begins to suspect that he is good he begins to be bad; and you rob every virtue and beauty of character of some portion of its attractive fairness when the man who bears it knows, or fancies that he knows, it. The more a man is like Christ, the less he knows it; and the better he is the less he suspects it. Let us try to lose ourselves in Jesus Christ. It is safe for us to leave all thoughts of our miserable selves behind us, if instead of them we have the thought of that great, sweet, dear Lord filling mind and heart.

Think constantly and longingly of the unattained. " Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended." Endless aspiration and a stinging consciousness of present imperfection are the loftiest states of man here below. The people down in the valley, when they look up, may see our figures against the sky-line, and fancy us at the summit; but our loftier elevation reveals untrodden heights beyond, and we have only risen so high in order to discern more clearly how much higher we have to rise. The best way to keep unconscious of present attainments is to set our faces forward, and to make " all experience " as " an arch where through gleams that untraveled world to which we move." Let us cultivate a clear sense of our own imperfections. We do not need to try to learn our goodness that will suggest itself to us only too clearly; but what we do need is to have a very clear sense of our shortcomings and failures, our faults of temper, our faults of desire, our faults in our relations to our fellows. A true man will never be so much ashamed of himself as when he is praised, for it will always send him to look into the deep places of his heart, and there will be plenty of ugly creeping things under the stones there if he will only turn them up and look beneath.