Like palm tree and cedar

Have you ever wondered what it's really like to be righteous? To be righteous is to have right standing before God through Jesus Christ and what He did for us on the cross. But what does it really mean in your and my everyday life?
Psalm 92:13 gives us an answer, and I want to explore that answer today.
"The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon" (Psalm 92:13).
First it says that the righteous shall flourish. What does it mean to flourish? My dictionary says it means to be successful, widespread, prosper, grow healthily, be well and active, be very active and influential.
Wow! That sounds good. But it says more. It not only says the righteous shall flourish, but that the righteous shall flourish like the palm tre and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
If someone says to me that I shall have success like "John Brown", I would try to figure out what "John Brown" does or did that made him a success. And when the Bible says that I shall flourish like the palm tree and like a cedar, I want to find out what that really means. What is it about the palm tree and the cedar that make them flourish?
My source of information about this is Dake's Annotated Reference Bible. And it says on page 1046 about Psalm 92:13:

The fruit of the palm provides a great part of the diet of the East. The stones are ground down for the camels; the leaves are made into baskets; the hard boughs or the strong leaves, 6 to 7 ft. in length, are used to make fences; the juice makes arrack, a very strong Oriental liquor; the threads of the leaves make ropes; and the wood makes building material or firewood.

Another WOW!

And the cedar?

The cedars of Lebanon are extremely long-lived. Some are supposed to be as old as 1,000 years. They grow 80 to 100 ft. tall and 40 ft. around the trunk. They express the ideas of majesty, durability, incorruptibility, and stability.

Are you righteous? If you've accepted Jesus Christ into your life and been born again, you are. And all the good characteristics listed above are yours. Don't settle for less! Jesus died for you and paid the price for you so you could have everything of the above.

Don't settle for less!

Don't frame God

Do you have grandkids? I do, five of them! And all five are a joy to me. I love and cherish each one of them. And I have pictures of them in my livingroom, pictures taken when they were around two years old. I look at the pictures every day and thank God for each one of my grandkids.
However, they're not two years old any more, not the four oldest, anyway. So what is the fact about the pictures? Are they lying? No, they tell me the truth about each child at the time the picture was taken. But now, 8, 9 or 10 years later, they don't look that way any more. They resemble the person they were at two-years-old, but they have grown and changed.
What does this have to do with God? Everything!
Many people "frame and glaze" a picture of God in their mind. And every day, they look at the picture and think about what happened when the picture was taken. And thirty years after the picture was taken, they still look at the same picture and believe that God is still the same way.
Don't misunderstand me. God never changes. He IS the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. But what I'm talking about is our perception of God. If "your" God hasn't changed in your perception since you were a child, there's something wrong with you "picture" of God, not with God Himself. If something bad happened 25 years ago, and you blamed God for it (in an unlawful manner, of course, because God never causes bad things to happen), and you still keep the picture of a God who causes bad things to happen in you mind, you have framed God as the author of evil, and that's the picture you look at every day. Then you need to get a new picture of God.
How do you do it?
Exactly the same way I would go about getting new pictures of my grandkids. I would look at them as they are now, take a picture, frame and glaze it, and hang it on the wall. But to take that new picture, I need to be with them. I need to see them as a teenager in stead of as a two-year-old. And to get a new picture of God, I need to know Him, (which I do by reading His Word), spend time with Him, (which I do in prayer and time spent before His face), and thus let Him form His picture in me.
How's your picture of God? The best way to see and know how God is, is to look at Jesus. You can see Him in the Bible, from beginning to end. The more time you spend with Him, the clearer and more correct your picture will be of Him. Don't hang an old picture of God on the wall of your heart, get a new picture each day, because God's love is new every morning.
"Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness" (Lamentations 3:21-23).