Therapeutic worship
Psalm 103:1-13
Get the Word file here, print it out and read at leisure
If you feel that things are getting you down, work colleagues are irritating you and you just want to shout "STOP!!" at the top of your voice, then try this relaxing excercise...
Close your eyes and breathe deeply. Picture yourself near a stream. Birds are singing in the crisp, cool mountain air. This is your own personal, secret place - nobody can bother you here. Continue to breathe deeply, feeling all the tensions evaporating in the crystal clear sky. You are in total seclusion from that place called the world. The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall, trickling into a pond next to you, fills the air with a cascade of serenity. Gaze into the clear, cool depths of the pond. Notice the sparkle of sunbeams on its surface. Still gazing into the water, continue to breathe deeply and slowly. The water is clear - focus your attention. You can easily see the face of your boss, whose head you are holding under the water…
There... feeling better?
All of us need some kind of therapy from time to time. Therapy is something you do that will bring you a degree of healing in body, mind or spirit. It may involve taking medication, getting more exercise or just taking time to think and reflect. This morning I want to help you to discover the therapeutic qualities of worship – worship that can get you out of the dumps and set you up for the day.
From a whisper to a shout
Most experts reckon that Psalm 103 (a praise song written by king David almost 3000 years ago) starts with a whisper and ends with a shout. “Praise the Lord, O my soul, all my inmost being praise his holy name” (1), is the whisper. Almost as though David is trying to get himself going. The last three verses (20-22) is the shout, as David tries to recruit the universe to worship God. Between the whisper and the shout are the reasons; anyone who ever asked the question, “What has God ever done for me?” will find the answer in the core of this song.
If you never understood how to worship God, or why you should, this song will tell you. If you used to know, but have forgotten, this song will remind you. Let the words of this song get into your heart and soul and you will have fuel for worship stored in your heart for use anytime and anywhere.
This is important because worship is therapy – if you don’t worship your soul shrinks – one of the reasons so many people are so miserable is that they have lost contact with God, they have forgotten how to worship. This was a skill that David never lost.
He began by talking to himself and ends up shouting his praise to the universe, angels, supernatural armies, the entire creation (20-22). In between you hear him singing through the things he knows about God. The truth worked its way into his heart, each reality adding heat to the fire until he reached the flashpoint in verse 20; after that he is away with the angels!
What was it that moved his whole being so powerfully? It was the truth about God; if worship is a fire then theological truth is the fuel we pour onto it to make it blaze. This is an essential process in Christian spirituality; the mind teaching the truth to the heart so that the emotions can bubble over with praise. This is the purpose of preaching and the goal of private reading and meditation, the heartfelt worship of Almighty God – “…all my inmost being praise his holy name”.
Remembering the good things
Amnesia is the enemy of worship. When we forget what God has done and how much we owe him we cannot be swept off our feet with him, so the key to praise is to remember (2), “… do not forget the good things he does for me”.
We are going to try that now; remembering what God has done and why he needed to do it.
He forgives all your sins (3a) -
Christians have a bit of a reputation for harping on about sin, and I agree it can get a little depressing. But what would you think of a building surveyor who wasn’t honest with you about the dry rot in you floorboards? Or the aero-engineer who didn’t bother to mention the metal fatigue in your holiday jet? Or the doctor who didn’t point out that your heart was not pumping correctly in case he upset you?
Sin is the Bible’s word for the weakness that is destroying us, the poison that is killing us. God forgives our sins.
In the TV programme Shameless we are entertained by the antics of a skanky family living in the Chatsworth estate – a huge council housing project just outside of Manchester. Frank Gallagher and his family are amoral, shifty, parasitic and completely dysfunctional. I was watching this recently and a thought struck me – “Is God as appalled by my life as I am appalled by Frank Gallagher’s?”
I think that he is.
Of course, we love to watch the antics of people we think are worse than us – it gives us a smug feeling of being better than them. Well, even that smugness is a symptom of the fact that our spiritual systems are poisoned by sin. We need help.
Sin disfigures what God has made beautiful, and he forgives all our sins.
As if to prove this, the songwriter tells a story; a story is hidden in the words of the psalm, like a riddle in an Indiana Jones movie – so we are going to have to de-code this in the lines:
The lord is merciful and gracious,
he is slow to get angry and full of unfailing love,
He will not constantly accuse us,
nor remain angry forever…
Psalm 103:8-9
David did not write the first couple of lines, they were written by Moses himself centuries before. Look up the story of those words and you crack the riddle:
When God rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt he led them over the Red Sea, through the desert, he guided and protected them, and he fed and watered them. When they reached Sinai God gave Moses the law and the promise of his blessing if they kept his commandments and obeyed his covenant. When Moses descended the mountain he found the Israelites expressing their gratitude to the Lord by worshipping a golden calf they had made! In his frustration and fury, Moses smashed the stone slabs on which the law was inscribed.
So what does God do? He makes two more stone slabs, gives them to Moses and starts again. As Moses held the two stone slabs, the Lord passed infront of him saying:
I am the Lord, I am the Lord,
The merciful and gracious God.
I am slow to anger and rich in unfailing love and faithfulness.
Exodus 34:6
This is what God is like. He loves to show mercy and to start again with us even when we have been utterly wicked. This is David’s song again:
He does not punish us for all our sins;
he does not deal harshly with us, as we deserve.
For his unfailing love toward those who fear him
is as great as the height of the heavens above the earth.
He has removed our sins as far from us
as the east is from the west.
The Lord is like a father to his children,
tender and compassionate to those who fear him
Psalm 103:10-13
Now we have cracked David’s riddle, let’s express it in plain text; if God can forgive Israel’s wickedness under those circumstances then this merciful and gracious God will forgive you, whatever you have done!
He heals all your diseases (3b) -
Forgiveness is immediate and guaranteed, but what about healing, why is not this always as instant and as complete?
David had his own experience of this; he slept with Bathsheba, another man’s wife, and had her husband killed. Bathsheba fell pregnant, but the newborn child became very ill. The sin of adultery and murder were forgiven but the child died in spite of seven days of prayer and fasting [1] .
There are those who insist that that when we do not receive immediate healing of our illnesses it is because there is something wrong with us; we lack faith, or we are praying in the wrong way.
People who have prayed for healing but not yet received it are often tortured by the thought that they lack faith, other Christians frequently make things worse with insensitive and ignorant comments. How many people do you know who have been hurt by other’s attempts at healing? If we are going to care for people and help them through their illnesses we need to understand what we are doing.
First, the Bible encourages us to pray big prayers and expect big answers; this is our immediate response to learning about illness.
But second, we must never insist on teaching God his business. He is Lord, after all. Real faith is being able to rest secure in the knowledge that God holds the future. God can heal me here and now, or later when his kingdom comes and all things are restored. He can heal me inwardly so that my fears and anxieties are calmed, he can heal me outwardly so that me body is restored. When we pray, we also trust him to do what he knows is best, and he knows more than we do; he is God and I am not! The goal of Christian healing is a secure heart, close enough to God to be content with whatever the future holds.
It is a strange thing, ans I have seen it again and again in my ministry, physical affliction can actually deepen my walk with God, and enable me to grow in ways that never would have been possible without the challenge of suffering. This is the clue we need to understand those times when our prayers for healing go unanswered. On the other hand, because sin shatters my relationship with God it must be forgiven immediately. So forgiveness is instant though healing may take time.
This remains true; “He forgives all your sins and he will heal all your diseases.
He rescues you from the pit of death (4a) -
There is a great story about the Anglo-Saxon King, Harold. The Vikings had invaded northern England and were massing near York to march south. Harold and his army intercepted them at Stamford Bridge. As the two armies faced each other Harald Hadrada, the Viking leader demanded that Harold give him a piece of his kingdom. Harold agreed, “I will give you exactly six feet of it”, he said.
That is where life ends – in a six foot pit, or a little urn on the mantelpiece that no-one knows what to do with. Beyond that, the Old Testament writers had the notion that the dead went down to a spiritual pit and stayed there – they called the place Sheol. They did not know much about Sheol, they just knew that it wasn’t very much fun.
But David had a notion that this is not the end of the story (4) – that God could rescue him from the pit of death. Some of his other songs drop some bunker-busting hints about this. [2]
David had a notion, but he couldn’t be sure. Those who followed him in the great unfolding saga of the Bible could not quite believe that death was the end, but they couldn’t be sure. Jesus disciples heard him teach about eternal life and the resurrection, but they couldn’t be sure. Then one day a group of women ran back into the city of Jerusalem, they were on a mission. They made straight for the safe-house where Jesus’ disciples were hiding. Their friend had been executed on a cross and they were terrified that the same thing might happen to them. The women banged on the door and it opened just enough for them to see the face of a man, the tired face of a very worried man, peering out. Then one of the women spoke, “He is not there”, she said, “He is risen!”
Ever since that moment, Christians have not been guessing, we have been certain. He does rescue people from the pit of death.
He is full of love and compassion for you (4b) -
None of this is dispensed with cold charity or a parsimonious mercy. We are not dealing with a government department here – where we may get what we need but no more… compassion is passionate!
The word we read as love [3] in our translation is not easy to translate at all. When Miles Coverdale published the first complete printed English Bible he used the word ‘loving-kindness’ in each instance in this Psalm translating the Hebrew word for love. What is this love?
Technical stuff about words is pretty tedious, and this is where poetry helps us through the difficulties. Hessed is the ‘love that will not let me go’ in George Matheson’s lovely old hymn:
O Love that wilt not let me go
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give Thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths it’s flow
may richer, fuller, be.
This is hessed, the love that will not let me go and that drives God to extremes; like Bethlehem, like Gethsemane, like Calvary. This is Love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins [4] .
He fills you with good things and renews you day-by-day (5) -
This is a very difficult verse for the experts to translate, so each of our Bibles has a different way of expressing it. If you take the words literally it says, “Who fills your mouth with good things so that your youth is renewed…” Now, if nothing else, this is good advice for people who are trying to loose weight; fill your mouth with good things and your body will be well, fill it with bad things and you will fall to bits!
This is a great metaphor for living your whole life. Satisfy your desires with good things and you will be renewed, let those dark desires overcome you and fill your life with bad things and you will suffer an inevitable physical kick-back as a result.
That is good advice and we ought to listen to it.
One thing that is clear about this verse is that makes an astounding promise; if we live faithfully, we will be renewed inwardly. You may reach a ripe old age but you will retain aninner youth that will surprise and delight those who know you! This idea keeps recurring in the Bible.
Isaiah promised it:
Even youths will become weak and tired,
and young men will fall in exhaustion.
But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength.
They will soar high on wings like eagles.
They will run and not grow weary.
They will walk and not faint.
Isaiah 40:30-31
David and the other Old Testament writers were fascinated by the soaring flight of eagles that can stay aloft for hours with little effort. Staring at an eagle made them think of God. “If God is like that”, they thought, “Maybe we can learn to do the same!” [5]
It is a wonderful thought to anyone whose life is full of relentless activity and constant challenges. We are not soaring like eagles; we are flapping crazily like a turkey desperately trying to leave the ground. So here is a question, how can we minimise flapping and maximise soaring?
A few suggestions:
You could try killing a few turkeys. Those high energy, low yield activities that clog up your diary and exhaust you. Christians are good at keeping turkeys going long after their sell-by date. Can I suggest that you kill them for Christmas?
Then you could take time to enjoy the good things of God. Much of our high energy expenditure is due to our low spiritual temperature. We need to listen to some good spiritual horse-sense. This is Duncan Campbell:
“These are days of much activity in the field of Church and mission work, but we do well to remember that no amount of activity in the king’s service will make up for neglect of the king himself. I do not believe that the devil is greatly concerned about getting between us and work: his great concern is getting between us and God. Many a Christian worker has buried his spirituality in the grave of his activity.”
What we need it to take the time to “Be still and know that he is God” [6] , to seek him, find him and enjoy his presence.
I suspect that David was flapping like a turkey when he first had the idea for this song, a mighty hymn that poured the fuel of the truth onto the fire of his heart until he was overwhelmed with his passion for God. If you don’t worship you soul shrinks – but if you do it can soar – you can rise above everything!
Next time you want to hold the boss’ head underwater until he stops breathing I have a better idea – rise above it with Psalm 103!
[1] II Samuel 12:13-23
[2] Psalm 16:8-11 is the clearest example
[3] Hessed in Hebrew – God’s special love for those drawn into a covenant relationship with him
[4] I John 4:10
[5] Isaiah 40:28-31 has a simple logic to it; God will not grow tired or weary and if you hope in him neither will you! Look at Psalm 104:3 where God is said to ‘ride on the wings of the wind’, the writer is thinking of an eagle.
[6] Follow this thought through. You could reflect upon, Psalm 37:1-7 and Psalm 46