Tag Prayer

Cleaning the Conscience

Todd R 1 Comment

A great thing about Psalms is that they are written general enough to be used by different people in different ways.  Psalm 19 makes a great prayer for anyone and is one of my favorite Psalms.  In it, David writes about how creation proclaims the glory of God in ways that everyone everywhere can see and understand.  This is what we’d call “general revelation.”  Next David writes about the law of God, how it is “perfect,” “pure,” “true,” and several other things.  This law also glorifies God, in what we’d call “special revelation,” or things revealed about God mostly through His word.

Then, after a brief interlude, the Psalm ends with verse 14, which says:

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
            be acceptable in your sight,
            O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.”

What a closing to a prayer!

The Lord, as “my rock and my redeemer,” rules nature (the literal rocks, etc.) and His Word redeems His people.  How can our “words” and “meditation” be acceptable to such a God?  The answer is first, because He loves us enough to redeem us, and second, because He is transforming us into people who are like Him.  In fact, the “interlude” I referred to before (verses 12 and 13) are David’s prayer that God would keep him from sin and make him acceptable in God’s sight.  Those verses say:

“Who can discern his errors?
            Declare me innocent from hidden faults.
Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins;
            let them not have dominion over me!
Then I shall be blameless,
            and innocent of great transgression.

David first points out that we can’t find any errors in God, either in what’s revealed by nature or in His law, but on the other hand God knows all of our faults.  David knows better than to ask God to show him all of his flaws – that may be overwhelming – but instead David asks for a clear conscience.  To get there, David needs a solution for both his “presumptuous sins” – the outward actions that he’s probably aware of – and his “hidden faults” – the inner attitudes and sins that he may not be aware of.  To be declared innocent and blameless by God requires being forgiven for sins that we don’t even know about!

Photo by Nicole Queiroz on Unsplash

Which brings us back to the final verse:

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
            be acceptable in your sight,
            O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.”

In my reading of this, “the words of my mouth” correspond to the “presumptuous sins,” the sinful outer actions taken in defiance of God, and “the meditation of my heart” corresponds to David’s (and our) “hidden faults.” These sins may be secret to everyone but God but we may feel guilty about them anyway.  When praying this prayer, David knows only God can cleanse him (or anyone) beyond just skin deep, and beyond skin deep is what we really need to deal with because Jesus told us “every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.”[1]  Only by healing the inside can we heal the outside.  David asks for relief from guilt so he can live acceptably in both public and private ways, before both men and before God.

We all need routine cleaning of our inner self on a regular basis.  A redirection of our conscience toward right and wrong as defined by God.  If you feel in need of this, try praying Psalm 19 today.

[1] Matthew 7:17

When All You Have is God

Todd R 1 Comment
Photo by Greg Willson on Unsplash

Near the end of Book 3 in the Psalms (43-89), several Psalms read like cries for help by writers at the end of their rope.  In Psalm 86:14, for example, David writes: “O God, insolent men have risen up against me; a band of ruthless men seeks my life, and they do not set you before them.”  While the exact circumstance is unclear, David knows there is a wide conspiracy against him, and his only hope is to turn to God.  The Psalm opens with “Incline your ear, O LORD, and answer me, for I am poor and needy.”

Likewise, when we feel desperate and don’t know where to turn, these Psalms remind us that God will never turn us away.  On Psalm 86 John Calvin comments that “the more severely any one is oppressed, and the more destitute he is of the resources of human aid, the more inclined is God graciously to help him. That despair therefore may not overwhelm our minds under our greatest afflictions, let us support ourselves from the consideration that the Holy Spirit has dictated this prayer for the poor and the afflicted.”  In other words, because these Psalms are in the Bible, we can be sure that, no matter the mess our own choices or the actions of others have put us in, God in His steadfast love will listen.

Throughout the Psalm, David writes reminders of the character and works of God as a contrast to both his circumstances and his feelings of futility.  Like him we must always remember that our character is never so bad that God loving us is inconsistent with His character, and that our circumstances are never so bad that loving us is beyond His power to achieve.

When all you have is God, He is enough.

Even for the most desperate, there is always a way out, as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 10:13 – “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” In Psalm 86, David does not just pray for a miraculous deliverance, but in verse 11, David looks for the way of escape: “Teach me your way, O LORD, that I may walk in your truth; unite my heart to fear your name.”  A united heart is one that feels no anxiety because it knows it is seeking God’s will and willing to act on it based on reverence for Him.  God may urge us to merely wait for His deliverance, or prod us to actions we may not expect, but in all cases, He knows the way, because He is the Way. Only He can unite our hearts.

Bring your desperate anxiety to Him and let Him show you the way forward.  When all you have is God, He is enough.  When you feel your faith is weak because you can’t see or feel God in your life or the world around you, begin with “Incline your ear, O LORD, and answer me, for I am poor and needy,” and He will listen.

Thanksgiving is a Habit

Todd R 1 Comment

“Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.” – Colossians 4:2

The purpose of celebrating Thanksgiving yesterday was to remind us to be thankful today and every day. What was worth being thankful for yesterday is still with you today!

If Christianity is true, this is not “being a Pollyanna” or seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. Live like it is true by making thanksgiving a habit, not a holiday.

Courage to Change: A Quint of Quotes

Todd R 2 Comments

Fellow travelers,

Here is another “Quint of Quotes” from my collection, on the theme of personal responsibility and development.  Please don’t take the last one literally.

“When a man’s folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the LORD.” – Proverbs 19:3

“People could survive their natural trouble all right if it weren’t for the trouble they make for themselves.” – Ogden Nash

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.” – Common prayer adapted from Reinhold Niebuhr

“Millions of people die every year of something they could cure themselves: lack of wisdom and lack of ability to control their impulses.” -Irving Kahn, investor who died at 109 of natural causes in 2015

“And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire.” – Matthew 18:8

Learning Godly Fear

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Does being forgiven by God cause us to fear Him less, or to fear Him more?  Perhaps it’s both.

Psalm 130:4 tells us this about God: “But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.”  To one way of thinking, this seems backwards: why does knowing that God has forgiven us make us fear Him more?  Shouldn’t we fear Him less when forgiven?  It depends on what we mean by fear.

For me, getting Psalm 130:4 to make sense with the order of forgiveness and fear required a re-thinking of repentance.  My conclusion was: the one who has not been forgiven has not repented, and the reason they did not repent was that they did not fear God.  They did not understand Him properly.  They might be afraid of God, but that’s not the kind of fear referred to in Psalm 130.

In contrast, the one who has been forgiven has repented, and they repented because they understood it was the best thing for them to do, out of a fearful respect for God.  A proper understanding of God’s character makes us turn to Him with our guilt, rather than run away from Him.  We should not be afraid of God, where we are motivated to be passive – avoiding mistakes that would anger the one we fear.  We should fear God in that we revere Him and respect His authority, and therefore actively seek to please Him.

A lot goes into repentance.  When we pray and ask for forgiveness, it’s often a simple prayer made with the proverbial faith of a child, but there are a lot of assumptions we make when we say that prayer.  Every prayer of repentance directly or indirectly acknowledges some or all of these things:

1) God as the source of the law, the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong
2) Him as the righteous judge who is personally offended by our sin
3) His omniscience, knowing we cannot hide our sin
4) His uniqueness, as there is no other God to turn to
5) His steadfast love for us, knowing He bore the cost of our sin, therefore enabling us to approach Him
6) His compassion for us, since He lived as a man
7) His power and willingness to heal us of sin
8) His consistency of character: that He is not arbitrary

If we don’t implicitly or explicitly believe these things, why would we repent and ask forgiveness from God?  Why would we expect to get it?  Exploring that set of statements could fill multiple volumes of theology books, but we don’t need that knowledge.  In His grace, He honors our simple, heartfelt confessions.  He paid the price for all our inadequacies – even when we don’t fully understand our own prayers or who we’re praying to.  The Spirit pleads with the Father on our behalf[1].  Mercifully, our forgiveness is based on His faithfulness to us, not on our detailed theological knowledge.  1 John 1:9 tells us: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

Even our faith is imperfect, but His faithfulness bridges the gap between our childlike faith and His omniscience.  He knows all our doubts and all their answers.  We come as we are, but with fearful respect, and are forgiven.

Only through acceptance of the cross, where Christ’s atoning blood was shed for us, can God in His Holiness commune with us.  Only through forgiveness will the Holy Spirit come and live in us.  Only by tasting of His goodness do we really know what He is like, not before.  And if we never repent, we don’t learn what it tastes like, we only know what you’ve been told about God, and we might not have been told the truth.

Psalm 130:4 shows us that genuine repentance leads to forgiveness and gives us a better appreciation of who God is.  As we experience Him more, we live Psalm 34:8 for ourselves:

“Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!
                        Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!”

[1] Romans 8:26-27