For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are…My thoughts than your thoughts.
—Isaiah 55:9
In giving us His promises of what He will work in us, God reminds us that, as high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are His thoughts above ours—altogether beyond our power of spiritual understanding.
When He tells us that we are made in His image, that by grace we are renewed again into that image, and that as we gaze upon God’s glory in Christ we are changed into the same image, these are indeed thoughts higher than the heavens. When He told Abraham of all the mighty work He would do in him and his descendants, this again is a thought higher than the heavens. Our human minds cannot take it in. When God calls us to love Him with all our hearts and promises to renew our hearts so that we will love Him with all our strength, here again is a thought out of the very heights of heaven. And when the Father calls us to a life in the light of His countenance and rejoicing in His name all day long, this is a gift out of the very depths of God’s heart of love.
We ought to have deep reverence, humility, and patience while we are waiting for God to impart to our hearts, by His Holy Spirit, the life and light that can make us feel at home with these thoughts. We need daily, abiding fellowship with God if we are ever to enter into His mind and have His thoughts make their home in us. What great faith is needed to believe that God not only will reveal the glory of these thoughts, but also will so mightily work in us that their divine reality and blessing will fill our inmost beings!
Think of what Isaiah said, as quoted by Paul: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:9–10). When Christ promised His disciples that the Holy Spirit would come from heaven to dwell with them, He said that the Spirit would fill us with the light and life of the heavenly world. In this way, Christ and the purposes of God—which are higher than the heavens are above the earth—were made their abiding experience. Dear reader, seek to realize that every day the Holy Spirit will fill your heart with the thoughts of God in all their heavenly power and glory.