His Light and Truth lead us to Worship

Read Psalm 43

Do you ever have that mental and spiritual wrestling match when you know you are doing what God has called you to do and you get backlash?  You just wish that God would throw a lightning bolt or two at some selected targets.  Maybe we already have a target list ready to go.

Do you ever just wrestle with thoughts of why isn’t God doing something?  Did he not get my memos?

Most of the time I don’t have time to jump in the fray of online Christian discussions which usually end up in arguments, but sometimes, I start them.

Never in my life have I had 10,000 hits on a post until I posted that I had broken the vending machine.  Most of those 10,000 had the mean face along with many hateful comments.  I’m thinking that we are people of God and he is not all about stuff and transactions but about blessing and transformation. 

I even noted a post that said, “Buy a new vending machine.”  I actually knew that person.  The recurring message was bring back transactional and kick transformation to the curb.  Get in line with the world was heart of the salvos launched my way.

The first salvo was motivation for me to write three more posts and eventually publish a short book noting how the people being most deprived by the vending machine model were the body of Christ as we distanced ourselves from connecting with those who need help in our communities by just throwing stuff and money their way.

In the course of all of this, I had some thoughts along the lines of several of the psalms.  God, those people need some smotin’.  I didn’t spend much prayer time in search of smotin’ but the thoughts crossed my mind from time to time.

I’m thinking, I could sure use an Ezekiel and the prophets of  Baal moment.  Enough for that.

I hope that you have noticed that we take many opportunities in our ministries to reduce the transactional and increase the transformational.  We are about making personal connections.  We use stuff—school supplies, candy, and electric bills to make contact, but it’s not about the crayons.

Yes, it’s wonderful to bless people, but these physical blessings without words of life are just the crayons.  Soon they will be used up.

We look at a scholarly or contemplative psalm.  We are looking at a psalm that likely was attached to its predecessor as a single psalm for a time. We are looking at a psalm that was probably not written by David and may have even had its basis in the period of and after the exile.

But we see and hear a psalm that perhaps we have lived.  We see and hear struggle in this psalm.  The struggle between a godly person and an ungodly world on one hand and the struggle within ourselves wondering if God will affirm us as we seek him and his righteousness.

The psalmist cries out, “Vindicate me, O God.”  He asked God to take up his cause against the ungodly.  Rescue me from deceitful and wicked men. 

At the end of the beatitudes, Jesus told all who were present and through the written word, all of us, that we are blessed when we are persecuted for his name.  When the world sees Jesus in us instead of a reflection of itself and starts tearing us down then we know we are blessed.  We will have reward in heaven and we can count ourselves in good company as the prophets were attacked in the same way.

But our nature says, “That sound great, but God would you smote a couple of these yahoos now just for good measure?”

God, you are my stronghold.  Why have you rejected me?

Why do you leave me this way?

But in a stroke of divine genius, the psalmist petitions God to send forth his light and his truth, not to do some smoting of enemies, but to guide him to a place of worship.

Send Your light and Your truth; let them lead me.

Let them bring me to Your holy mountain,

to Your dwelling place.

In the middle of this psalm comes the heart of resolving our struggles.  Let your light and your truth—God’s light and his truth—bring me to you.  Your truth will bring me to worship you.

The psalmist leaves the battlefield of vindication that consumed him so much for the victory of worship.

The psalmist leaves the things that have left his soul so downcast and receives the hope of the Lord and praises God as Savior.

God’s light and his truth will lead us to worship and praise and manifest hope within us.

There may still be a lot of folks out there that need some smotin’ but that’s not my monkey and not my circus any more.  I am not the one to condemn when Jesus came to save.

I will follow God’s truth and his light to the place where he dwells.  His light and his truth lead me to worship.

Jesus said if you walk in the light, you won’t stumble.

Jesus said he is the light of the world.

Jesus told us that we are the light of the world.

Jesus said that he is the way, the truth, and the life.

The psalmist petitions God:

Send Your light and Your truth; let them lead me.

Let them bring me to Your holy mountain,

to Your dwelling place.

Today, I tell you that the light and the truth have come.  We know them as Jesus.  We should reflect his light into this world.  We are to bring his truth to this world.

More than that, his light and his truth bring us to praise and worship our Lord.  We are on a mission from God to take his love into the world, but first his light and his truth bring us to praise his name and worship him.

First, we worship.

Both Psalm 42 and Psalm 43 end the same way.

Why, my soul, are you downcast?

Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God,

for I will yet praise him,

my Savior and my God.

Both psalms wrap up with a summation of our internal struggle and its resolution. 

Our purpose here is not to give God a list of targets that need smotin’.  We are to let God’s light and truth spur us on to hope and praise and acknowledgement of our risen Savior.  They lead us to worship.

We are not going to defeat all of our accusers on our own.  God will fight for us but he does not need our battleplan or target list.

He has set a table before us in the presence of our enemies and his light and his truth bring us to worship him.

His light and his truth bring us to worship.

If you are wrestling with something inside of you, stop fighting the battle with the weapons of the world.  Walk in God’s light and seek his truth.  Your victory comes in worshiping and praising God in the midst of the world’s turmoil.

The psalmist petitions, Lord, send forth your light and your truth and let them guide me.

I tell you that he has fulfilled this request.  We just need to walk in the light and seek his truth and we will respond in praise and worship.

Our topic for a few weeks is truth.  We understand that Jesus is light and the darkness cannot overcome him, so let’s think about truth.  Consider this thought in the week ahead.

Truth leads us to worship.

We worship here together and we worship with our very lives in everything we do when we go back into the world.

Truth leads to worship.

Amen.