Continuing to venture into my reading plan with a new translation this year. And this morning the CSB puts before me another change that I’ll need to get used to.

But I enter Your house
by the abundance of Your faithful love;
I bow down toward Your holy temple
in reverential awe of You.

(Psalm 5:7 CSB)

Your faithful love. That’s new. The ESV I’ve read for years renders it, Your steadfast love. Before that, the NKJV used Your mercies or Your lovingkindness. The NIV often translates it Your unfailing love.

Shouldn’t be surprising that translators scramble to find just the right words to define the undefinable. To express the inexpressible. To encapsulate the uncontainable. God is love. He is it. It is Him. He perfectly, eternally, effectually defines love. Capture God in a phrase and you’ll be able nail down His love. But trying to do that, as one of my favorite songs from years ago puts it, is like “trying to fit the ocean in a cup” (3 Minute Song by Josh Wilson).

So, seems the CSB translators are going to go with Your faithful love. I can work with that.

Faithful to Himself. Always in line with His nature and His purposes. Always informing what He does and why He does it. Without changing. Reliable. Some might even say “steadfast”, as do the ESV translators. God’s love is faithful, faithful to Himself and thus unfailing, maybe that’s what the NIV translators were thinking.

So, because love is who God is, and because He is faithful to Himself, His faithful love can be counted on by those to whom He has chosen to love. Faithful to me. Not because I deserve it, but because He is faithful to what He has determined — and that is to love His own.

Ever loving. Always loving. Whether in blessing or discipline, kindness or anger, God never acts apart from His faithful love.

And so, David could sing that even when he did what God invited Him to do (enter Your house), even when he worshiped God as God commanded Him to worship (in reverential awe), that it was by the abundance of Your faithful love.

Faithful love sourced in the abundance of a God who is without limit. A God who is not bound by time and space. Thus, a God who is always loving without limit, unbound by time and space. Isn’t that the wellspring of grace, the abundance of His faithful love? I’m thinking.

Your faithful love. Will need to get used it. Easy! Bring it on!

Let’s get used to it as if for the first time all over again.

By Your grace, Lord. For Your glory.