If you were to express in a sentence or two what you believe about God, what do you think you would say? Is it possible your statements would reflect the typical canned sentiments that are passed around the Church without a great deal of thought? Allow me to rephrase the question. If God were to strip away all of the religious jargon that clutters our thinking on such issues and were to look deep in your heart, what would He discover about your opinion of Him? I offer this as a theoretical question, but it is actually what the Lord sees when He looks at you and me every minute of every day.
Most of us would make some grand statement such as: “God is full of love and possesses omnipotent power.” Do you really believe that? Really? The fact is that the reality of what we think of God is shown in the way we live our lives. If we think He is full of love for us and has all the needed power to care for us, then we would live in great faith.
The truth is that, deep down in the recesses of our hearts, most of us have very low perspectives of God. A friend of mine sums up the attitude many have by saying, “God is like me, just a little bigger.” Since our comprehension of His love is rather superficial, we can easily think of it on our own, human terms: “Like me; just a little bigger, or just a little better.”
People don’t tend to magnify the Lord, they tend to minimize Him. To magnify something means either to use a lens that makes something bigger than it really is (such as a microscope would do) or to see something far away in its actual size (which is what binoculars do). When it comes to seeing God, what we need are spiritual binoculars.
A minister once said that many people look through the wrong end of the binoculars of life. Those things that should be seen as big are minimized while unimportant things are made to seem huge.
When God is given His rightful position in a person’s heart, the person tends to see life in its proper proportions. So when the psalmist exhorts us to magnify the Lord, he is telling us that if we will do this, we will give the important matters of life their proper due and we will not allow petty things to distort our vision.
How exactly do we magnify the Lord? God is so overwhelming in every one of His attributes that all we have to do is to think about Him. For instance, consider His infinitude. The next time you have a clear sky and a dark night, spend some time looking up into the heavenlies and meditate upon the great Being who holds it all in the palm of His hand. Just doing little exercises like this will magnify the Lord in your mind’s eye.