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.
