What has God ever done for me?
Psalm 103:1-5
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Introduction
If I were to make the claim that to be a pastor of a church in early twenty-first century Britain is one of the most demanding callings you can follow, would I be exaggerating? Consider these factors:
- The spiritual tide is running out in western Europe; churches are shrinking
- Professional people are confidently challenged by people who know way less than we do
- The pastor is only one voice being heard by the congregation, some of whom regard him as spiritual pond life
- Our friends and family have structured careers and work practices, we muddle along; professionals whose working life is governed by amateurs.
- If you are married and your wife works you hardly ever see each other
The emotions are finely calibrated – very inclined to wobble. They are also very predominant… when aroused they wrest control. So what is to be done?
The mind teaches the heart
Psalm 103 is an extraordinary poem. “Praise the Lord O my soul…” Most commentators detect a certain hesitancy in that opening line. This is a leap of imagination but then this is a poem, and that is how you interpret poetry. But it is a poem saturated with the truth about God. Almost as though David is answering the question, why should I praise God, what has God ever done for me?
So many of the Psalms are problematic. CS Lewis describes the song-writers as whining vindictive children only praising God to get him to destroy their enemies!
Imagine falling down a well, or being pushed as Joseph was. There you are at the bottom, treading water to stay alive. Life-threatening moments like this are wonderful occasions for prayer, “O Lord, get me out of here!” But then your thoughts go to the rotters who dumped you in there and, if you are anything like me, you start to curse them. Someone listening on the surface hears loud prayers for rescue mingled with angry cussing and swearing. That mixture of prayer and cussing is pretty much what you get in many of the Psalms!
But David has passed that stage in this song. It is as though he has noticed a ladder going up the side of the well. He has to kick hard to catch hold of the first rung, but then up he goes, rung by rung until he is out. Think of the truth as a ladder to get you out of the pit and you have the picture.
Psalm 103 would seem to be an example of the mind teaching the heart – this is an essential skill for those in Christian ministry.
Living on benefits
Shameless is a TV drama about a skanky dysfunctional family on a council estate in northern England. It’s revolting, my wife cannot bring herself to watch it. When I asked her why not she replied, “Because it repels me, it is the worst in human beings presented as entertainment”. I agree with her but cannot get rid of the suspicion that her feelings about Shameless are the same as God’s feelings about our behaviour. Is that how God sees us?
We are sinful and dysfunctional and living on benefits…
So here are the benefits we are living on, think of them as rungs on the ladder.
First rung - forgiveness and healing
Perhaps the easiest thing to forget is our need of forgiveness, are we so bad? There is a helpful sidelight on this in the next Psalm. This is a gorgeous hymn to the God of creation, and it seems to be another one of those songs that don’t have any ‘problem’ verses. Yet almost at the end it has an ugly sting in the tail, all the sharper for the beauty of what comes before it, “But may sinners vanish from the earth, and the wicked be no more” (Psalm 104:35). That one verse spoiled this Psalm for me until I saw its significance; in a beautiful and orderly world like God’s, what place has one who rebels against him?
Sin disfigures what God has made beautiful, and he forgives all our sins.
Peter felt this after Jesus had helped him land the miraculous catch of fish. In a moment the fisherman saw whom he was dealing with. He knelt on the deck of his own boat and said, “Depart from me Lord, I am a sinful man” [1] . Think about this, Peter was a good bloke, a man with a generous heart and a deep respect for Jesus. But as he realized that he was face to face with God he was overwhelmed with one thought; in a beautiful and orderly world like God’s, what place has Peter?
Even nice people are separated form their creator by their sin, and he forgives all our sins.
As simple as that! “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves that the truth is not in us, but if we confess our sins he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness [2] .” Forgiveness is instant, but healing usually isn’t.
There is an example of this in David’s own experience; witness the Bathsheba affair. The sin of adultery and murder are forgiven but the child dies in spite of seven days of prayer and fasting [3] .
There are those who insist that that when we do not receive immediate healing of our illnesses it is because we lack faith. Imagine that you have prayed for healing but not yet received it. You have a choice - torture yourself (or let others torture you) over your lack of faith, or you can trust God for the healing of the whole of your being in glory. The latter course leads to a peaceful heart and a settled mind, the former leads to tragedy. How many people do you know who have been hurt by others attempts at healing?
Sin shatters my relationship with God and it must be forgiven immediately, affliction may well deepen my walk with God and it might not be dealt with until later. But one thing is for sure, he will heal all my diseases.
Rung 2 - redemption and compassion
When I first started to read the Old Testament I was very puzzled by the lack of a clear idea of the afterlife. In the Old Testament, the dead guys always wound up in a place called Sheol which didn’t correspond to what I had learned about Heaven and Hell in the New. So when David sings of being redeemed from the pit (4) what does he think he means?
He may be thinking about the grave (“No-one remembers you when he is dead, who praises you from the grave?” Psalm 6:5). But though the question of eternal life is not thoroughly explored in the OT, some bunker-busting hints are dropped (Psalm 49:7-9 & 13-15; Psalm 16:9-11 is equally strong). So we ought to take ‘the pit’ in its strongest sense as resurrection to eternal life. The pit is a deep one, and the resurrection is a lofty one! As one black preacher once put it, “We is not waiting for the undertaker, we is waiting for the upper-taker!”
None of this is dispensed with cold charity or a parsimonious mercy. We are not dealing with a government department here – we get what we need but no more… compassion is passionate!
Love is such a weedy word! In our culture, it is almost always to do with feelings. God is not short of feelings for us (he crowns you with compassion, right?), but love is more than feelings. John Cleese, the British comic, once defined love as “The ability to see someone else’s need and then meet that need” [4] – that is a brilliant definition of what the Bible means by love. Love is compassion in action.
God sees our needs and sets out to meet our needs. His love is dynamic; he does not hang about, he gats moving. His love is focused; you and I are the objects of his attention, he is up close and personal. His love is fruitful; it changes us deeply, from the inside out. His love is passionate; it drove him to extremes… think of Bethlehem, of Gethsemane, of Calvary.
Rung 3 - satisfaction guaranteed!
This is a difficult verse to translate [5] – just what is it that gets satisfied? Well, whatever it is it is a good thing, because your youth ends up being renewed like the eagles! (In an ancient midrash the eagle was supposed to return to youth in its old age). This is a familiar idea from another famous Old Testament passage – Isaiah chapter 40.
Jerusalem lies in ruins, the dream of the covenant is in tatters, the sword of judgment has fallen. “Go and comfort, comfort my people says your God… tell her that her sin is paid for…” Inundated with disaster, Isaiah is given the words that will comfort the refugees as they crowd the road to Babylon:
Why do you say, O Jacob,
and complain, O Israel,
"My way is hidden from the LORD;
my cause is disregarded by my God"?
Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.
He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.
Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the LORD
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.
Isaiah 40:27-31.
Paul raids from the same image-bank to describe his own experience on a mission trip to Asia. He and his team were almost killed, Paul was by no means sure that they were going to survive. Then he heard that the Corinthian church were being taken to the cleaners by the super slick ‘super-apostles’. Only recently, he had sent Titus with a very critical letter to Corinth, it was a risky strategy, and Paul was worried sick that he had been over the top. Desperate to find out how the Corinthians had reacted to the letter he hiked through Greece in a frantic search for Titus. But his team member had gone missing… by the time Paul wrote II Corinthians he was a psychological basket case!
This is what he wrote:
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
II Corinthians 4:16-18
As a zoologist, with a bit of an interest in birds, I think that you can speak of different periods of Christian ministry as times of flapping flight and periods of soaring flight.
Soaring versus flapping
Bird flight can be graceful or clumsy, soaring or flapping. So can living! Part of the art of surviving in Christian ministry is learning to fly more efficiently. Business people speak about ‘working smarter, not harder’. It will help if we can learn some of their tricks for smart working.
But there is a spiritual pressure here, too. Listen to some Christians and it is clear that the normal Christian life is soaring – leave everything to the Holy Spirit and just float through life. Other Christians love to think of themselves as up against it all the time – life is tough, just keep on flapping! The reality is that both kinds of flight reflect different experiences of the normal Christian life – we flap and we soar as circumstances demand, keeping an eye open for the spiritual thermals that will take us upwards.
There is an interesting contrast between the eagle of Psalm 103, enjoying the overview that soaring flight gives, and the owl of Psalm 102:6-8, sitting on the roof of the shack in the desert, peering ‘round in the darkness wondering what is going to gobble him up! I know what both birds must feel like, and I guess you do too!
Can we draw some help from these texts? I think so.
First, whatever is satisfied in Psalm 103:5 it is satisfied with good things. Nothing causes us to crash more painfully than satisfying our desires with bad things.
Second, those who hope/wait in the Lord will renew their strength, according to Isaiah. Modern leadership and management is a very driven thing, and as we transfer management practice into our church activities life gets tougher. We seem to be chasing our tails all the time! We need to balance all the good things we learn from business practice with some solid spiritual horse sense. Stuff like this:
“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.”
Duncan Campbell
Those who wait on, or hope in, the Lord are staring at him – they are focused on him. Isaiah says that you can’t crash and burn if that is what you are doing. There is a lovely little Psalm which says almost the same thing in a slightly different way:
I lift up my eyes to you,
to you whose throne is in heaven.
As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master,
as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress,
so our eyes look to the LORD our God,
till he shows us his mercy.
Psalm 123
Thirdly, Paul echoes this; we fix our eyes not on what is seen but on what is unseen. Inner renewal flows from a gaze which is directed at God.
Old age is assumed to be the end of possibilities – you are just waiting for the end. But here, old age brings with it the potential of youth with all the possibilities that lie before it. Those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength – a spiritual old age is pregnant with possibility!
[1] Luke 5:1-11
[2] I John 1:8-9
[3] II Samuel 12:13-23
[4] Families and how to survive them , John Cleese and Robyn Skinner
[5] The NASB has “who satisfies your years…”, the Hebrew is “who satiates your mouth/ornament with goodness”. Most solutions are precarious, according to Kidner.