6th Sunday After Pentecost, 2013
Shiloh Lutheran Church
Americans talk a lot about freedom. We talk about living in a free society, and we react when we sense that someone is trying to take away, or restrict, our freedom. Freedom is at the very center of what America is about. And, for the most part, modern Americans understand freedom as a lack of restraint, the liberty to do whatever I want with my life. Supporters of the “right to die” often make their argument along these lines: “it’s my life, and I should be free to end it whenever I choose.” Freedom is negative, nothing more than a lack of restraint. But listen to this description by Richard John Neuhaus: “Nothing good can be done without freedom, but freedom is not the highest value in itself. Freedom is given to man in order to make possible the free obedience to truth and free gift of oneself in love” (Doing Well and Doing Good, p. 169). Freedom is a gift of God, but it’s not an end in itself. It’s not the main thing. God has given us freedom, not so we can do whatever we feel like doing, but so we can live in loving obedience under His lordship.
Paul is concerned, in this letter, about freedom. Following Jesus Christ means being free from the Law. The Galatians were in the process of turning away from the gospel of grace and were hoping to please God by obeying the Old Testament Law. He begins the letter, after a brief introduction, with these words: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel–which is really no gospel at all” (Galatians 1:6). Over and over again throughout this letter, Paul shows the Galatians that by turning to the Law they are defecting from Jesus Chist. Rather than bringing them closer to God, this new direction is leading them away from Him.
Having made all his theological arguments in the earlier chapters, he says this at the beginning of chapter 5: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (5:1). The Galatians had been set free to follow Jesus Christ, and now they were bringing themselves into bondage to the Law. Paul wants them to hold firmly to the freedom God has given them in Christ. But that raises a question: what does a free life in Christ look like? Is the freedom we’ve been given a simple lack of restraint, a lack of boundaries so that we can fulfill our dreams by doing whatever we feel like doing? In this passage in the last half of chapter 5, Paul gives us a picture of what the free life in Christ looks like.
Paul wants the Galatians to be living in the freedom of the Spirit. But there’s always a danger in preaching this message. Paul had been accused, over and over again, of lowering the standards of godly living by preaching the message of free grace: “It’s simply perverse to say, ‘If my lies serve to show off God’s truth all the more gloriously, why blame me? I’m doing God a favor.’ Some people are actually trying to put such words in our mouths, claiming that we go around saying, ‘The more evil we do, the more good God does, so let’s just do it!’ That’s pure slander” (Romans 3:8, The Message).
There are two opposite dangers in responding to the gospel of free grace. The first danger, and this is the one Paul is most concerned with in this letter, is legalism. We see the potential for abusing the message, so we try to guard against this danger by introducing stricter standards. Several years ago I read an article by a Mennonite scholar who was unhappy with the direction some Mennonite churches were taking. They had been influenced by the doctrine of free grace, he said, and as a result the centrality of the peace position had been weakened. In his view, a more legalistic approach to the gospel would make it easier to safeguard some of the Anabaptist distinctives which were being lost. Legalism is safer. It enables us to stay in control. The opposite danger is antinomianism, living as if our actions don’t matter, because God is going to forgive us anyway. This is what Paul is concerned about when he says: “do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature.” If we’re really worried about morality, we’ll be tempted to some form of legalism. And if we’re especially concerned about freedom, we’ll be tempted by antinomianism.
But what does Paul mean when he talks about freedom? Clearly it’s not the freedom to do whatever we feel like. That’s the way people in our society often use the word, but Paul has something else in mind. When we do whatever we feel like doing, it destroys us, because we’re going against the grain of our nature. We’re not capable of exercising absolute freedom, and when we try it leads only to bondage. Our freedom is defined by our nature as creatures made in God’s image. When Paul says “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free,” he’s saying that we’ve been set free to live in obedience to God by the power of the Holy Spirit. We’re created to be servants. We can’t help it. We can’t escape it. When we refuse to serve God our Creator, we just end up serving something else. True freedom is found in obedience to God our Creator and Lord, not in obedience to our selfish whims.
Here’s how The Message translates vv. 19-21, describing a life seeking freedom from God’s Lordship: “It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community; I could go on.” When we try to grasp for absolute freedom, the freedom to do whatever we want, whatever we feel like doing, we dehumanize ourselves and we end up living in bondage to our impulses. We set out trying to be free, and we find ourselves enslaved.
Paul only presents us with two options in these verses. Either we are living by the flesh, with the kinds of results he lists in verses 19-21, or we are living by the Spirit. There’s no neutral position between these two. The flesh, or sinful nature, as it reads in the NIV, refers to the whole person in rebellion against God. The NIV uses the term sinful nature because it’s easy to misunderstand Paul’s use of the word flesh. He’s not talking about our bodies. Some of the works of the flesh include things that result from the misuse of our bodies: sexual immorality, impurity, drunkenness, orgies, etc. But the works of the flesh also include spiritual sins: idolatry and witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, selfish ambition, envy. So the flesh doesn’t refer to our bodies, but to the kind of life that results from the Fall, a life lived in the corruption of sin and rebellion. Living in the flesh is living within the limited perspective of a world that is alienated from the life of God. Here’s what one Bible dictionary says: “The man whose horizon is limited by the flesh is by that very fact opposed to God.... The flesh in this sense denotes the whole personality of man as organized in the wrong direction, as directed to earthly pursuits rather than the service of God” (New Bible Dictionary, p. 371). When we become swallowed up by the values of our culture and live for ourselves, grasping for everything we can, we’re living by the flesh. When we’re living according to the flesh, we are at the center, and everything revolves around our own desires. When we’re living this way, our own needs and desires seem to be the only thing that matters, and if we think about God at all it’s only because we’re hoping we can use Him to get the things we want. Living by the Spirit is living under God’s lordship, with Him at the center of our lives, and living by the flesh is living for ourselves.
It’s important to notice Paul’s terminology in verse 22. He speaks, in verse 19, of the works of the flesh. These are the things that are produced naturally from our fallen nature. When we’re living on our own, apart from God, this is the natural result. These are the kinds of things the flesh is capable of producing. He says the same thing in Romans 8: “Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires, but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God” (vv. 5-8).
In verse 22, Paul speaks about the fruit of the Spirit. These 9 qualities he lists in verses 22-23 are things that result from the Spirit’s transforming power in our lives. Here’s how it reads in The Message: “But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard.” The works of the flesh flow from us, but the fruit of the Spirit comes about through influences outside ourselves. We can’t produce the fruit of the Spirit through determined self-effort. It’s no use writing these things down in your day-timer and determining that you’re going to learn to live like this no matter what. We can’t do it, and when we try, we only end up with counterfeits. We can produce qualities that look like the real thing. But the similarities are only on the surface. The real thing can only appear in our lives through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. The free life in Christ is a life that leads to the kinds of qualities Paul lists in these verses.
So how do we get the fruit of the Spirit in our lives? Do we just wait passively and say, “oh well, there’s nothing I can do about it; I guess if God wants these things to appear in my life it’s up to Him to do the work”? No. It’s true that we can’t produce these things, any more than we can make fruit grow without those things God provides, like sun, water and the right temperatures. But just as we cultivate gardens and orchards, there are things we can do to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit.
The first thing is to ask whether the Spirit is part of our lives. Paul says in Romans 8, “if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ” (v. 19). He says, in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” Is this true of you? Is there evidence in your life of this new creation? The Church easily becomes just a sub-culture. We learn all the rules and say the right things, and as long as we don’t get caught up in certain behaviors, we can assume that everything is fine. But it’s possible to spend a lifetime in the Church without ever becoming a new creature. It’s possible to spend a lifetime in the Church without ever knowing anything of the transforming power of the Spirit in our lives. We can be good moral people, who fit very nicely into the Christian sub-culture, without ever being reconciled to God. We may avoid the more blatant things, like “sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft.” But what about “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy”? Paul is also speaking about these things when he says “those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Do you have evidence of the presence of the Spirit in your life? Many people who’ve spent a lifetime in the church will one day hear Jesus say “Depart from me; I never knew you.”
But, having become new creatures in Christ, knowing the power of the Spirit in our lives, the fruit of the Spirit still doesn’t appear automatically. Paul says, in verse 24: “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.” John Stott does a good job of explaining this verse: “What does it mean? Paul borrows the image of crucifixion, of course, from Christ Himself who said: ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Mk. 8:34). To ‘take up the cross’ was our Lord’s vivid figure of speech for self-denial. Every follower of Christ is to behave like a condemned criminal and carry his cross to the place of execution. Now Paul takes the metaphor to its logical conclusion. We must not only take up our cross and walk with it, but actually see that the execution takes place. We are actually to take the flesh, our wilful and wayward self, and (metaphorically speaking) nail it to the cross. This is Paul’s graphic description of repentance, of turning our back on the old life of selfishness and sin, repudiating it finally and utterly” (Only One Way: The Message of Galatians, p. 150). Remember this definition I read a few minutes ago: “the flesh denotes the whole personality... organized in the wrong direction.” Repentance is turning around and going the other way.
What he’s describing has often been referred to as the mortification of sin, putting to death those old habits that lead us into sin. It’s what Jesus was talking about when He said: “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29). When our sinful, self-centered tendencies begin to assert themselves, we refuse to submit. It may even help to visualize our old selves on the cross, having died to our old way of life. John Stott goes on to say this: “The first great secret of holiness lies in the degree and the decisiveness of our repentance. If besetting sins persistently plague us, it is either because we have never truly repented, or because, having repented, we have not maintained our repentance. It is as if, having nailed our old nature to the cross, we keep wistfully returning to the scene of its execution. We begin to fondle it, to caress it, to long for its release, even to try to take it down again from the cross. We need to learn to leave it there. When some jealous, or proud, or malicious, or impure thought invades our mind we must kick it out at once. It is fatal to begin to examine it and consider whether we are going to give in or not. We have declared war on it; we are not going to resume negotiations. We have settled the issue for good; we are not going to re-open it. We have crucified the flesh; we are never going to draw the nails” (pp. 151-52). “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.” Crucify the sinful nature, and then leave it there on the cross.
But that’s only the first step. We deny ourselves–we say “no” to our old, selfish way of life–and then we go on to walk with the Spirit: “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” We walk in the Spirit by looking to Him, inviting Him into every area of our lives and seeking to live under His Lordship. Here’s John Stott once more: “This will be seen in our whole way of life–in the leisure occupations we pursue, the books we read, the friendships we make. Above all in what older authors called ‘a diligent use of the means of grace’, that is, in a disciplined practice of prayer and Scripture meditation, in fellowship with believers who provoke us to love and good works, in keeping the Lord’s day as the Lord’s day, and in attending public worship and the Lord’s Supper. In all these ways we occupy ourselves in spiritual things. It is not enough to yield passively to the Spirit’s control; we must also walk actively in the Spirit’s way. Only so will the fruit of the Spirit appear” (p. 154). We cultivate the fruit of the Spirit by refusing to allow the weeds of the flesh to grow in our lives and by seeking to walk daily in active obedience to God’s Word, trusting in His power to transform us into the image of His Son.
Here’s a good description of what Paul is saying in these verses: “Christian spirituality forces a primary question: Is growth of the person totally open, as if we were clay to be formed? [In other words, is freedom in Christ open-ended, nothing more than a lack of restraint enabling us to do what we want?] Christianity firmly insists that the answer is no. The apt analogy is the relationship of acorn to oak. If an acorn were given ‘freedom,’ it could not become a maple. Instead, the options would be to become a healthy oak or a contorted self-contradiction. So with humans, for the ‘image of God’ is so structured within each person that the options are (1) to love God with all our hearts, souls, strength, and minds, or (2) to become twisted, tortured, and frustrated creatures” (W. Paul Jones, The Art of Spiritual Direction, p. 31). So these are the choices: “to become twisted, tortured, and frustrated creatures,” the kind of people described in the works of the flesh. Both legalism and antinomianism lead in this direction. The other choice is “to love God with all our hearts, souls, strength, and minds,” to become the kind of people God created us to be, the kind of people who increasingly bear the fruit of the Spirit. The message of free grace sets us free to be truly and fully human.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Living in the Presence of the Eternal God, Psalm 90 (Knowing God Series)
We live in a world of constant change, but God has created us with a longing for permanence and stability. At the beginning of this series, I quoted from the book of Ecclesiastes, which describes the futility of life in this fallen world: “Smoke, nothing but smoke.... There’s nothing to anything–it’s all smoke. What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone? One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes–it’s business as usual for old planet earth. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, then does it again, and again–the same old round.... Everything’s boring, utterly boring–no one can find any meaning in it. Boring to the eye, boring to the ear. What was will be again, what happened will happen again. There’s nothing new on this earth. Year after year it’s the same old thing” (1:2-5, 8, The Message). Generations come and go, people live and die, empires rise and fall. Later in the book, the author points to the hopelessness of living in a world where both good and evil people face death: “The same destiny ultimately awaits everyone, whether they are righteous or wicked, good or bad, ceremonially clean or unclean, religious or irreligious. Good people receive the same treatment as sinners, and people who take oaths are treated like people who don’t. It seems so tragic that one fate comes to all. That is why people are not more careful to do good. Instead, they choose their own mad course, for they have no hope. There is nothing ahead but death anyway” (9:2-3, NLT).
The author of this psalm is aware of the futility of life in this fallen world. We don’t know who he was. In most Bibles there’s a superscription at the beginning of many psalms. The superscription for Psalm 90 reads, “A prayer of Moses the man of God.” But these superscriptions were added hundreds of years after the text was written. They’re often helpful, but they are not part of the Scripture. This prayer could have come from Moses, or it could have been written by someone else with Moses in mind. Or the tradition tying this psalm to Moses could have developed long after the psalm was written. In any case, this prayer fits well with what we know about Moses.
He grew up as an adopted member of a royal family, then had to flee into the wilderness after he killed an Egyptian who was mistreating an Israelite. For the next 40 years, he lived in the desert as a shepherd, this man who had grown up in Pharaoh’s court. Moses was “educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action,” (Acts 7:22), but as year after year went by in the desert, he must have wondered about the meaning of it all. He then served faithfully, leading God’s people out of Egypt, but he wasn’t allowed to enter the promised land because he lost his temper and dishonored God in front of the nation. In Deuteronomy 34, we see him at the very end of his life: “Then Moses went to Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab and climbed Pisgah Peak, which is across from Jericho. And the Lord showed him the whole land.... Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I told them I would give it to their descendants. I have now allowed you to see it, but you will not enter the land” (34:1-4). The people of Israel had been in captivity in Egypt for over 400 years, and Moses, at God’s direction, had led them out with the intention of bringing them into their own land. But now he himself was not permitted to enter. And immediately after seeing the land from the top of Mt. Pisgah, Moses died. God allowed him to be part of an amazing work of deliverance, but then he died before the work was finished. He spent 40 years as a member of the royal family in Egypt, 40 years as a shepherd in the desert, and 40 years leading God’s people around in the wilderness, dying just before they reached the promised land. He didn’t live to see the real fruit of his life work.
We were created in God’s image, with the ability to worship Him and have fellowship with Him, and part of what this means is that we are created with a desire for permanence and stability. I often speak positively about my experience with OM India. It was one of the real formative times in my Christian life. But it wasn’t always easy. When we first arrived in north India, in the fall of 1977, I was overwhelmed by the culture. I felt like I’d been dropped into a completely different world. Everything looked different; the food was different; I didn’t speak the local language; people thought and acted differently than I did. My main job was to drive a truck, transporting an evangelistic team, but I found driving there incredibly stressful. There were people, bicycles, and animals all over the road, and I’d heard stories about mobs killing truck drivers who hit someone–even when it wasn’t the driver’s fault. For the first few months, I was afraid every time I got behind the wheel. And on top of all that, everyone could tell, just by looking at me, that I didn’t belong in India. I was a foreigner, and people in the villages stared at me wherever I went. After a few months, it all got to me and I went off by myself to spend some time in prayer. And as I was singing a hymn I was gripped with a new realization that in the midst of all the changes I was experiencing, God was still the same. Every area of my life was in upheaval because of the sheer amount of cultural change I had experienced, but God was still there and I could find refuge and rest in Him. That realization was a turning point for me. That’s what the author of this psalm has found. In this world of constant change–where so much of our effort seems futile, where we don’t live to experience the fruit of our labor, where those we love are taken from us in death, where our bodies decline no matter how hard we work at physical fitness, and where we face the certainty of death in the end–we can find hope by taking refuge in our eternal, unchanging God.
The psalmist begins, in verses 1&2, with a description of God. God is eternal. He is a constant, secure dwelling place for His people. The letter to the Hebrews was written to Christians who had suffered for their faith and were now ready to give up. The author of the letter urges them: “Remember those earlier days after you had received the light, when you stood your ground in a great contest in the face of suffering. Sometimes you were publicly exposed to insult and persecution; at other times you stood side by side with those who were so treated” (10:32-33). They had joyfully endured suffering for Christ, but now they were on the verge of turning away from the gospel. They’d become worn down by the pressure, so the author reminds them of the truth. In chapter 13, near the end of the letter, he says this: “Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (13:7-8). These may have been leaders who died during a time of persecution. In any case, they were leaders who taught them at the beginning of their Christian lives, and whose lives had ended well. They hadn’t turned away. They had persevered faithfully to the end, and the author wants his readers to imitate their example: “Consider the outcome of their way of life.” So he reminds them: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” In the midst of all the turmoil and pressure of enduring persecution, they can find rest and refuge in their unchanging God.
The psalmist isn’t just saying that he finds temporary refuge in God. He says God is the permanent dwelling place of His people. This implies two things: 1) We’re not homeless. We’re not adrift, on our own in this lost world. We may feel disconnected and alienated at times. But the reality is that God is our dwelling place. T.S. Eliot, before his conversion to Christianity, wrote a very pessimistic poem entitled “The Waste Land.” He says this, early in the poem (he’s looking at the world around him): “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,/ You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,/ And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/ And the dry stone no sound of water.” His experience, looking at the world, is alienation. He can’t make sense of it, because there’s nothing solid to hold onto. He sees only “a heap of broken images,” fragments that make no sense by themselves. There’s no relief, no resting place in this dry, broken world. He’s experiencing the ultimate homelessness. He longs for permanence and wholeness, but he lives in a broken, fragmented world. But Eliot discovered, a few years later, that the eternal, unchanging God is the dwelling place of His people. 2) Our true home is not a place, but a person. Moses wasn’t allowed to enter the land. But his true dwelling place wasn’t the land anyway. The longing for a place where we belong is fulfilled in communion with the eternal God. “The thirst for place is resolved in the gift of communion” (Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, pp. 111-112). The answer to our sense of alienation is not to build our dream house. Have you noticed the strong drive, in our society, to own a house? Why is owning a home so important to people? I believe part of the answer is that people hope to find some sense of permanence in owning a home. They hope to find some sense of relief from the alienation of living in this lost, fallen world. They hope to find some sense of belonging somewhere. But the answer is not to look for an ideal home, where we can live for the rest of our lives. The answer is to take refuge in God: “Lord, through all the generations you have been our home! Before the mountains were created, before you made the earth and the world, you are God, without beginning or end” (NLT).
That’s the first thing we need to know. We need to know who God is. But we also need a more accurate view of ourselves, so the psalmist gives us that in verses 3-11: “So don’t return us to mud, saying, ‘Back to where you came from!’ Patience! You’ve got all the time in the world–whether a thousand years or a day, it’s all the same to you. Are we no more to you than a wispy dream, no more than a blade of grass that springs up gloriously with the rising sun and is cut down without a second thought? Your anger is far and away too much for us; we’re at the end of our rope. You keep track of all our sins; every misdeed since we were children is entered in your books. All we can remember is that frown on your face. Is that all we’re ever going to get? We live for seventy years or so (with luck we might make it to eighty), and what do we have to show for it? Trouble. Toil and trouble and a marker in the graveyard” (The Message).
Life in this world is full of difficulty and sorrow and loss. And each sorrow, each loss, is a reminder of our mortality. Paul says, in 2 Corinthians 4:16: “outwardly we are wasting away.” That’s our condition in this fallen world; we are steadily wasting away. We tend to forget that. We have an innate longing for eternity. When things are going well, we can sometimes almost forget the uncertainty and instability of this life. Much of the frenzy of our society is an attempt to evade the truth about who we are. But no matter what we do, things happen to shatter our sense of comfort, and we are again reminded that we are mortal, and that we live in a fallen world, a world that can never provide the sense of permanence we long for. The author of Hebrews says it in this way: “For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14).
We too easily seek relief in the wrong things. In one of Francis Schaeffer’s printed sermons, he describes the excitement he felt at buying a new car, the first new car he had ever owned. He says he couldn’t keep his eyes off it, and he wanted to keep it looking shiny and new. He was obsessed with it, initially. Have you ever had that experience? There’s a sense of exhilaration that goes with buying something new, but that exhilaration quickly fades. So we find ourselves wanting to buy something else. And the process goes on and on. The poet Kathleen Norris says “Consumerism is fed by a desire to forget our mortality” (Dakota, p. 120). Schaeffer’s main point, in his sermon, is this: “We all tend to live ‘ash heap lives’; we spend most of our time and money on things that will end up in the city dump.” He was thrilled with his new car, but after a couple of days someone bumped into it and made a fairly large scratch on the side. He said that scratch completely changed his attitude about the car. He suddenly realized how fragile and unstable it was; it wasn’t going to last. Someday it was going to end up in the junk yard, as scrap metal. This fallen world has been “subjected to frustration, and decay” as Paul says in Romans 8.
Our lives in this world are uncertain and unstable. We’re experiencing the effects of the Fall. We feel lost and alienated in this world because things are not what they were meant to be. We’re living in a world that is under God’s wrath, a world that is alienated from its Creator. The psalmist doesn’t want to bury his sense of alienation and despair by trying a new hobby or buying a new toy. So he begins by speaking the truth in God’s presence. That’s what he’s been doing for the first 11 verses of this psalm. He begins with the truth about God, in verses 1&2, and then with the truth about us, as people living in this world, in verses 3-11. And then, having begun in this way, he cries out to God and asks for grace to live wisely in the light of the truth.
A large part of our problem is that we so easily live in unreality. We forget who we are and try to live as if we were immortal. But the truth is that our lives in this world are uncertain and unstable. Our earthly possessions may very well outlast us, and we’ll leave behind these things that have gripped our hearts, the things we’ve accumulated in our attempt to drown out the realization of our mortality. “A voice says ‘Cry out.’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’ ‘All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass” (Isa. 40:6-7).
Life in this world is uncertain. If we listen regularly to the news, we hear every day stories of unbearable grief and sorrow. And every one of these stories reminds us, if we’re paying attention, that we live in a fallen world, a world that is alienated from the life of God. We live in a world where sorrow and death are always there, waiting right around the corner. Reminders of our mortality are all around us, if we’re paying attention. We need to pay attention and face the truth about ourselves. It’s wise to be intentional in cultivating this awareness. That’s what the psalmist is doing when he cries out, in verse 12: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Here’s the same idea, in Psalm 39:4: “Show me, O Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life.” The order for night prayer that I use closes every night with these words: “May the all-powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.” Because we’re so prone to illusions of immortality, and because our culture is so absorbed with living for the present moment, we need to be intentional in cultivating an awareness that we will not be here forever. Someday each of us is going to die, and part of our calling in life is to prepare ourselves for that day when we will stand before God. The psalmist begins by speaking the truth in God’s presence, and then he cries out for grace to live in the light of that truth.
We tend to gravitate toward one extreme or the other. Either we hide our heads in the sand and refuse to face the fact that we’re going to die one day, or we become morbid and obsessed with the certainty of death. Some monks, in the past, have slept in their casket, to remind themselves each night that their business in life is to prepare for death. I think that’s going too far. I had a friend in his late 30's who bought a newspaper every day, and the first thing he read each day was the obituary page. He was morbid, obsessed with the idea of dying. The psalmist isn’t morbid, nor is he living in unreality. He’s faced the truth, but he’s facing it in the light of his relationship with God.
In verse 1, he addresses God as “Lord,” Adonai, the Sovereign Lord. The sovereign, eternal God is the focus in the early part of the psalm, when he’s drawing a contrast between God’s eternity and our frailty. But in verse 13, when he begins crying for help, he uses the covenant name, Yahweh. The One he’s praying to is not only the eternal, unchanging God; He’s a God who has entered into a covenant relationship with His people. God is exalted beyond our comprehension, but He is not detached from us. He’s not indifferent to our situation. He is not only God the Creator. He is our God. In relationship with Him, our brief lives in this world have meaning and purpose.
Our lives here are uncertain, but our God is eternal. Living wisely means walking with Him in the light of our own mortality. In July of 2001, my 38-year-old niece got up in the morning, like she might have done any other day of her life. She was in good health. There was every reason to expect that she’d live a long, full life. But that afternoon she was killed in a boating accident. She woke up in the morning, not knowing that it would be the last day of her life. Living wisely means ordering our lives in the light of the fact that we don’t know when our lives are going to end. And, above all, it means living in a growing relationship with the eternal God. “ Now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3).
If this is the last week of your life, will you be ashamed when you’re standing in the Lord’s presence? What about 10 years from now? Will you be ordering your life differently then? Are you living for yourself, straining for something to relieve the tedium and futility of life in this fallen world? Are you seeking relief in all the wrong things? If you’re living for yourself now, if you’re not seeking God’s will in every area of your life, what makes you think things will be any different in 10 or 20 years?
“We all tend to live ‘ash heap lives; we spend most of our time and money on things that will end up in the city dump.” Does that describe your life? In the light of eternity, are you throwing your life away? Meditate on the shortness and uncertainty of your life. Find ways to remind yourself, to bring yourself back to reality. Try this: before bed each night, pray the Lord’s Prayer. Pray it meditatively, paying attention to what you’re saying. In this prayer, you’re involving God in every area of your life. And then close with these words, from the order for Night Prayer that I use: “May the All-Powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.” By doing this, you’re inviting God into every area of your life, and you’re also looking forward, in His presence, to the certainty of your own death, and you’re asking Him to be with you until the end. It doesn’t demand much time, and you can do it after the lights are out, before you fall asleep.
This psalm reminds us of who God is, who we are, and then it guides us in responding to God. Knowing that our lives are quickly passing by, and that God is eternal, how do we pray? What should we pray for? Listen to verses 12-17 in The Message: “Oh! Teach us to live well! Teach us to live wisely and well! Come back, Yahweh–how long do we have to wait?–and treat your servants with kindness for a change. Surprise us with love at daybreak; then we’ll skip and dance all the day long. Make up for the bad times with some good times; we’ve seen enough evil to last a lifetime. Let your servants see what you’re best at–the ways you rule and bless your children. And let the loveliness of our Lord, our God, rest on us, confirming the work that we do. Oh, yes. Affirm the work that we do!” A good way to pray this psalm is by using Isaac Watts’ paraphrase, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”
The author of this psalm is aware of the futility of life in this fallen world. We don’t know who he was. In most Bibles there’s a superscription at the beginning of many psalms. The superscription for Psalm 90 reads, “A prayer of Moses the man of God.” But these superscriptions were added hundreds of years after the text was written. They’re often helpful, but they are not part of the Scripture. This prayer could have come from Moses, or it could have been written by someone else with Moses in mind. Or the tradition tying this psalm to Moses could have developed long after the psalm was written. In any case, this prayer fits well with what we know about Moses.
He grew up as an adopted member of a royal family, then had to flee into the wilderness after he killed an Egyptian who was mistreating an Israelite. For the next 40 years, he lived in the desert as a shepherd, this man who had grown up in Pharaoh’s court. Moses was “educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action,” (Acts 7:22), but as year after year went by in the desert, he must have wondered about the meaning of it all. He then served faithfully, leading God’s people out of Egypt, but he wasn’t allowed to enter the promised land because he lost his temper and dishonored God in front of the nation. In Deuteronomy 34, we see him at the very end of his life: “Then Moses went to Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab and climbed Pisgah Peak, which is across from Jericho. And the Lord showed him the whole land.... Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I told them I would give it to their descendants. I have now allowed you to see it, but you will not enter the land” (34:1-4). The people of Israel had been in captivity in Egypt for over 400 years, and Moses, at God’s direction, had led them out with the intention of bringing them into their own land. But now he himself was not permitted to enter. And immediately after seeing the land from the top of Mt. Pisgah, Moses died. God allowed him to be part of an amazing work of deliverance, but then he died before the work was finished. He spent 40 years as a member of the royal family in Egypt, 40 years as a shepherd in the desert, and 40 years leading God’s people around in the wilderness, dying just before they reached the promised land. He didn’t live to see the real fruit of his life work.
We were created in God’s image, with the ability to worship Him and have fellowship with Him, and part of what this means is that we are created with a desire for permanence and stability. I often speak positively about my experience with OM India. It was one of the real formative times in my Christian life. But it wasn’t always easy. When we first arrived in north India, in the fall of 1977, I was overwhelmed by the culture. I felt like I’d been dropped into a completely different world. Everything looked different; the food was different; I didn’t speak the local language; people thought and acted differently than I did. My main job was to drive a truck, transporting an evangelistic team, but I found driving there incredibly stressful. There were people, bicycles, and animals all over the road, and I’d heard stories about mobs killing truck drivers who hit someone–even when it wasn’t the driver’s fault. For the first few months, I was afraid every time I got behind the wheel. And on top of all that, everyone could tell, just by looking at me, that I didn’t belong in India. I was a foreigner, and people in the villages stared at me wherever I went. After a few months, it all got to me and I went off by myself to spend some time in prayer. And as I was singing a hymn I was gripped with a new realization that in the midst of all the changes I was experiencing, God was still the same. Every area of my life was in upheaval because of the sheer amount of cultural change I had experienced, but God was still there and I could find refuge and rest in Him. That realization was a turning point for me. That’s what the author of this psalm has found. In this world of constant change–where so much of our effort seems futile, where we don’t live to experience the fruit of our labor, where those we love are taken from us in death, where our bodies decline no matter how hard we work at physical fitness, and where we face the certainty of death in the end–we can find hope by taking refuge in our eternal, unchanging God.
The psalmist begins, in verses 1&2, with a description of God. God is eternal. He is a constant, secure dwelling place for His people. The letter to the Hebrews was written to Christians who had suffered for their faith and were now ready to give up. The author of the letter urges them: “Remember those earlier days after you had received the light, when you stood your ground in a great contest in the face of suffering. Sometimes you were publicly exposed to insult and persecution; at other times you stood side by side with those who were so treated” (10:32-33). They had joyfully endured suffering for Christ, but now they were on the verge of turning away from the gospel. They’d become worn down by the pressure, so the author reminds them of the truth. In chapter 13, near the end of the letter, he says this: “Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (13:7-8). These may have been leaders who died during a time of persecution. In any case, they were leaders who taught them at the beginning of their Christian lives, and whose lives had ended well. They hadn’t turned away. They had persevered faithfully to the end, and the author wants his readers to imitate their example: “Consider the outcome of their way of life.” So he reminds them: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” In the midst of all the turmoil and pressure of enduring persecution, they can find rest and refuge in their unchanging God.
The psalmist isn’t just saying that he finds temporary refuge in God. He says God is the permanent dwelling place of His people. This implies two things: 1) We’re not homeless. We’re not adrift, on our own in this lost world. We may feel disconnected and alienated at times. But the reality is that God is our dwelling place. T.S. Eliot, before his conversion to Christianity, wrote a very pessimistic poem entitled “The Waste Land.” He says this, early in the poem (he’s looking at the world around him): “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,/ You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,/ And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/ And the dry stone no sound of water.” His experience, looking at the world, is alienation. He can’t make sense of it, because there’s nothing solid to hold onto. He sees only “a heap of broken images,” fragments that make no sense by themselves. There’s no relief, no resting place in this dry, broken world. He’s experiencing the ultimate homelessness. He longs for permanence and wholeness, but he lives in a broken, fragmented world. But Eliot discovered, a few years later, that the eternal, unchanging God is the dwelling place of His people. 2) Our true home is not a place, but a person. Moses wasn’t allowed to enter the land. But his true dwelling place wasn’t the land anyway. The longing for a place where we belong is fulfilled in communion with the eternal God. “The thirst for place is resolved in the gift of communion” (Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, pp. 111-112). The answer to our sense of alienation is not to build our dream house. Have you noticed the strong drive, in our society, to own a house? Why is owning a home so important to people? I believe part of the answer is that people hope to find some sense of permanence in owning a home. They hope to find some sense of relief from the alienation of living in this lost, fallen world. They hope to find some sense of belonging somewhere. But the answer is not to look for an ideal home, where we can live for the rest of our lives. The answer is to take refuge in God: “Lord, through all the generations you have been our home! Before the mountains were created, before you made the earth and the world, you are God, without beginning or end” (NLT).
That’s the first thing we need to know. We need to know who God is. But we also need a more accurate view of ourselves, so the psalmist gives us that in verses 3-11: “So don’t return us to mud, saying, ‘Back to where you came from!’ Patience! You’ve got all the time in the world–whether a thousand years or a day, it’s all the same to you. Are we no more to you than a wispy dream, no more than a blade of grass that springs up gloriously with the rising sun and is cut down without a second thought? Your anger is far and away too much for us; we’re at the end of our rope. You keep track of all our sins; every misdeed since we were children is entered in your books. All we can remember is that frown on your face. Is that all we’re ever going to get? We live for seventy years or so (with luck we might make it to eighty), and what do we have to show for it? Trouble. Toil and trouble and a marker in the graveyard” (The Message).
Life in this world is full of difficulty and sorrow and loss. And each sorrow, each loss, is a reminder of our mortality. Paul says, in 2 Corinthians 4:16: “outwardly we are wasting away.” That’s our condition in this fallen world; we are steadily wasting away. We tend to forget that. We have an innate longing for eternity. When things are going well, we can sometimes almost forget the uncertainty and instability of this life. Much of the frenzy of our society is an attempt to evade the truth about who we are. But no matter what we do, things happen to shatter our sense of comfort, and we are again reminded that we are mortal, and that we live in a fallen world, a world that can never provide the sense of permanence we long for. The author of Hebrews says it in this way: “For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14).
We too easily seek relief in the wrong things. In one of Francis Schaeffer’s printed sermons, he describes the excitement he felt at buying a new car, the first new car he had ever owned. He says he couldn’t keep his eyes off it, and he wanted to keep it looking shiny and new. He was obsessed with it, initially. Have you ever had that experience? There’s a sense of exhilaration that goes with buying something new, but that exhilaration quickly fades. So we find ourselves wanting to buy something else. And the process goes on and on. The poet Kathleen Norris says “Consumerism is fed by a desire to forget our mortality” (Dakota, p. 120). Schaeffer’s main point, in his sermon, is this: “We all tend to live ‘ash heap lives’; we spend most of our time and money on things that will end up in the city dump.” He was thrilled with his new car, but after a couple of days someone bumped into it and made a fairly large scratch on the side. He said that scratch completely changed his attitude about the car. He suddenly realized how fragile and unstable it was; it wasn’t going to last. Someday it was going to end up in the junk yard, as scrap metal. This fallen world has been “subjected to frustration, and decay” as Paul says in Romans 8.
Our lives in this world are uncertain and unstable. We’re experiencing the effects of the Fall. We feel lost and alienated in this world because things are not what they were meant to be. We’re living in a world that is under God’s wrath, a world that is alienated from its Creator. The psalmist doesn’t want to bury his sense of alienation and despair by trying a new hobby or buying a new toy. So he begins by speaking the truth in God’s presence. That’s what he’s been doing for the first 11 verses of this psalm. He begins with the truth about God, in verses 1&2, and then with the truth about us, as people living in this world, in verses 3-11. And then, having begun in this way, he cries out to God and asks for grace to live wisely in the light of the truth.
A large part of our problem is that we so easily live in unreality. We forget who we are and try to live as if we were immortal. But the truth is that our lives in this world are uncertain and unstable. Our earthly possessions may very well outlast us, and we’ll leave behind these things that have gripped our hearts, the things we’ve accumulated in our attempt to drown out the realization of our mortality. “A voice says ‘Cry out.’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’ ‘All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass” (Isa. 40:6-7).
Life in this world is uncertain. If we listen regularly to the news, we hear every day stories of unbearable grief and sorrow. And every one of these stories reminds us, if we’re paying attention, that we live in a fallen world, a world that is alienated from the life of God. We live in a world where sorrow and death are always there, waiting right around the corner. Reminders of our mortality are all around us, if we’re paying attention. We need to pay attention and face the truth about ourselves. It’s wise to be intentional in cultivating this awareness. That’s what the psalmist is doing when he cries out, in verse 12: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Here’s the same idea, in Psalm 39:4: “Show me, O Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life.” The order for night prayer that I use closes every night with these words: “May the all-powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.” Because we’re so prone to illusions of immortality, and because our culture is so absorbed with living for the present moment, we need to be intentional in cultivating an awareness that we will not be here forever. Someday each of us is going to die, and part of our calling in life is to prepare ourselves for that day when we will stand before God. The psalmist begins by speaking the truth in God’s presence, and then he cries out for grace to live in the light of that truth.
We tend to gravitate toward one extreme or the other. Either we hide our heads in the sand and refuse to face the fact that we’re going to die one day, or we become morbid and obsessed with the certainty of death. Some monks, in the past, have slept in their casket, to remind themselves each night that their business in life is to prepare for death. I think that’s going too far. I had a friend in his late 30's who bought a newspaper every day, and the first thing he read each day was the obituary page. He was morbid, obsessed with the idea of dying. The psalmist isn’t morbid, nor is he living in unreality. He’s faced the truth, but he’s facing it in the light of his relationship with God.
In verse 1, he addresses God as “Lord,” Adonai, the Sovereign Lord. The sovereign, eternal God is the focus in the early part of the psalm, when he’s drawing a contrast between God’s eternity and our frailty. But in verse 13, when he begins crying for help, he uses the covenant name, Yahweh. The One he’s praying to is not only the eternal, unchanging God; He’s a God who has entered into a covenant relationship with His people. God is exalted beyond our comprehension, but He is not detached from us. He’s not indifferent to our situation. He is not only God the Creator. He is our God. In relationship with Him, our brief lives in this world have meaning and purpose.
Our lives here are uncertain, but our God is eternal. Living wisely means walking with Him in the light of our own mortality. In July of 2001, my 38-year-old niece got up in the morning, like she might have done any other day of her life. She was in good health. There was every reason to expect that she’d live a long, full life. But that afternoon she was killed in a boating accident. She woke up in the morning, not knowing that it would be the last day of her life. Living wisely means ordering our lives in the light of the fact that we don’t know when our lives are going to end. And, above all, it means living in a growing relationship with the eternal God. “ Now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3).
If this is the last week of your life, will you be ashamed when you’re standing in the Lord’s presence? What about 10 years from now? Will you be ordering your life differently then? Are you living for yourself, straining for something to relieve the tedium and futility of life in this fallen world? Are you seeking relief in all the wrong things? If you’re living for yourself now, if you’re not seeking God’s will in every area of your life, what makes you think things will be any different in 10 or 20 years?
“We all tend to live ‘ash heap lives; we spend most of our time and money on things that will end up in the city dump.” Does that describe your life? In the light of eternity, are you throwing your life away? Meditate on the shortness and uncertainty of your life. Find ways to remind yourself, to bring yourself back to reality. Try this: before bed each night, pray the Lord’s Prayer. Pray it meditatively, paying attention to what you’re saying. In this prayer, you’re involving God in every area of your life. And then close with these words, from the order for Night Prayer that I use: “May the All-Powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.” By doing this, you’re inviting God into every area of your life, and you’re also looking forward, in His presence, to the certainty of your own death, and you’re asking Him to be with you until the end. It doesn’t demand much time, and you can do it after the lights are out, before you fall asleep.
This psalm reminds us of who God is, who we are, and then it guides us in responding to God. Knowing that our lives are quickly passing by, and that God is eternal, how do we pray? What should we pray for? Listen to verses 12-17 in The Message: “Oh! Teach us to live well! Teach us to live wisely and well! Come back, Yahweh–how long do we have to wait?–and treat your servants with kindness for a change. Surprise us with love at daybreak; then we’ll skip and dance all the day long. Make up for the bad times with some good times; we’ve seen enough evil to last a lifetime. Let your servants see what you’re best at–the ways you rule and bless your children. And let the loveliness of our Lord, our God, rest on us, confirming the work that we do. Oh, yes. Affirm the work that we do!” A good way to pray this psalm is by using Isaac Watts’ paraphrase, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Praying to the One Who Knows All, Psalm 139 (Knowing God Series)
I’ve often heard this question from people who struggle with prayer: “If God knows everything about me, if He knows all my needs, what is the point of prayer? If God loves me and knows what I need, why doesn’t He take care of me whether I ask or not?” What is the point of telling God our needs, when He already knows them? Certainly we aren’t giving Him any new information. We aren’t telling Him something He doesn’t know already.
In Evangelicalism, to a large extent, prayer has been reduced to intercession and supplication. Prayer consists in asking God to do things for us (supplication) and for others (intercession). I’ve been in prayer meetings where the leader is in a hurry to finish with worship and praise, saying “we need to get moving, because we have a lot to pray about.” The really important part of prayer is intercession; worship is just a prelude to put us into the right mood. But in this prayer, in Psalm 139, the psalmist doesn’t seem concerned with making requests. He doesn’t seem to be troubled by the fact that God already knows everything about him. His experience is just the opposite: the realization that God knows all things encourages him to pray. It leads him to worship. In prayer, he has fellowship with the One who knows him better than he knows himself.
We’d do well to begin with this question: What is prayer? What kinds of things can properly be defined as prayer? E.M. Bounds wrote a number of books on the importance of prayer. And he himself was a very prayerful man. If I hear that Bounds prayed two hours each day (I think it was actually much more than that), what was he doing all that time? Was he speaking, making requests, the whole time? If I decide to imitate him in spending large amounts of time in prayer, what will I do with the time I’ve set aside?
This is, for me, an important question. When I was in Nepal, as a relatively new Christian, I had read much about these people who spent two hours each day in prayer, so I decided to do it. I started getting up at 4 in the morning, so that I could spend two hours in prayer before breakfast. But I got tired of praying through lists of names, so I’d break up the time by spending a lot of time singing hymns and choruses. But then I felt guilty. I wasn’t sure that this really qualified as prayer. Somehow I had it in my mind that singing to the Lord didn’t count as prayer, that if I was really praying–like the people I’d read about–I’d be filling the whole time with requests.
Since that time I’ve come to the conclusion that prayer includes more than intercession and supplication. Prayer is more than asking God for things. Some people seem to be particularly gifted in intercession. We should all intercede for one another, and some people clearly have a special gift and call from God in this area. But prayer is more than intercession.
Eugene Peterson has a good description of prayer in his book, Answering God, a book about praying the Psalms: “Prayers are tools, but with this clarification: prayers are not tools for doing or getting, but for being and becoming. In our largely externalized culture, we are urgently presented with tools that enable us to do things (a machine, for instance, to clean the carpet), and to get things (a computer, for instance, to get information). We are also well trained in their use. We are not so readily offered tools that enable our being and becoming human.... At the center of the whole enterprise of being human, prayers are the primary technology. Prayers are tools that God uses to work his will in our bodies and souls. Prayers are tools that we use to collaborate in his work with us” (p. 2).
Prayers are tools that we use to collaborate in God’s work with us. Peterson goes on to point out that prayer is, by its very nature, responsive speech. God has spoken first, and in prayer we respond. The most important thing in prayer is not our speech, but the fact that God, in mercy and grace, has reached out to us. Prayer is answering speech. We’re in a relationship with God. He has spoken to us in His Word, and prayer continues the conversation. Peterson says this a few pages later: “What is essential in prayer is not that we learn to express ourselves, but that we learn to answer God. The Psalms show us how to answer” (p. 6). Prayer is not primarily about expressing ourselves in God’s presence–even expressing our needs–but about responding to Him. That’s why it’s so important to make use of these models of prayer in the Psalms. That’s why the Psalms are so often called a “school of prayer.” They train us in responding to God out of a wide variety of situations and emotional states.
In prayer, we are carrying on a conversation with God. We’re spending time in His presence, interacting with Him. But in a relationship we don’t have to fill all of the time with talk. I try to include several elements in my prayer life: I pray the Psalms every day. I also meditate on Scripture, seeking to be attentive to the fact that it is God’s Word. I spend some time in silence, simply sitting in God’s presence. I sing hymns and choruses. I pray the Lord’s Prayer, morning and evening. I also spend some time in intercession. But I don’t try to fill the whole time with requests, because the point is not to ask God for as many things as is humanly possible during the time I’ve set aside for prayer. The point is to spend time with God, worshiping Him and getting to know Him better; from within that context, I also lift up my own needs and the needs of others. Prayer is not just asking God for things. In prayer, we have fellowship and communion with God, the One who knows us better than we know ourselves.
The psalmist begins, in verses 1-6, by meditating on God’s complete knowledge of him. Here’s how it reads in The Message: “Yahweh, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand. I’m an open book to you; even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking. You know when I leave and when I get back; I’m never out of your sight. You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence. I look behind me and you’re there, then up ahead and you’re there, too–your reassuring presence, coming and going. This is too much, too wonderful–I can’t take it all in!” Notice that he doesn’t just say, “Oh Lord, you know everything about me,” and then move on to something else. He stays with the idea, looking at it from different angles, to let it sink into his mind.
There are two things going on here. The psalmist is offering worship to God in response to the realization of God’s complete knowledge of him. But he’s also using prayer here as a tool, in the way Peterson describes, so he stays with the idea to let it sink in more deeply. “He wants the conviction to sink deeply into his soul that God knows him through and through, so he comes at the idea from a variety of angles and aspects” (Patrick Henry Reardon, Christ in the Psalms, p. 277). Both aspects of prayer are important. We’re offering something to God, and, at the same time, we’re being transformed.
We often pass by things too quickly in our spiritual lives. We’ve heard the same truths over and over, all our lives, and when we hear and read them they just skim over the surface of our minds. We live at such a fast pace, going from one thing to another, that often we’re not even fully engaged in what we’re doing. It takes unhurried time for the truth of God’s Word to sink into our minds. Several years ago I read a book about praying Scripture, and the author had this helpful advice: “First, we must create within our hearts a flexible space of resonance, so that the Word can penetrate its deepest parts and touch its innermost fibers. This demands the kind of recollection we feel the need for when something great and beautiful appears in our life. A poem demands that we pause at the end for silence. A musical theme that has moved us continues to echo, sweetly and insistently, within our soul. We feel the need to keep listening to this inner echo until it has permeated every fiber of our heart. The Word of God is much more demanding than a musical theme and much more profound.... meditation is compared to the assimilation of food.... We ponder each word in order to grasp its full meaning, imprint it on our memory and taste its sweetness, find joy and nourishment for our soul” (Mariano Magrassi, Praying the Bible, p. 109). That’s what the psalmist is doing here. He’s not anxious to get on to the next thing. He keeps looking at the truth from different angles, to let it sink into his mind and heart. He’s giving himself time to assimilate it.
But then, this realization that God knows him completely doesn’t lead immediately to warm, secure feelings. He doesn’t immediately feel uplifted. From time to time I receive mailings from churches promoting their services, promising that those who attend will hear an “uplifting message.” But the truth doesn’t always affect us in this way. The psalmist’s instinctive reaction, when he realizes God’s complete knowledge of him, is to run and hide. He wants to respond the way Adam and Eve did in the Garden, immediately after the Fall: “The man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:8). When we come face to face with God’s absolute holiness and purity, and realize at the same time that this God knows the secrets of our hearts, we’re overwhelmed with a sense of our own sinfulness. We’re undone. We fall at His feet, like Peter when he realized who Jesus was, crying out “depart from me, Lord; I am a sinner” (Luke 5:8). We instinctively want to hide from Him.
But the Psalmist realizes that this is impossible, that there is nowhere in the universe where he can escape God’s presence. Listen, again, to these verses in The Message: “Is there anyplace I can go to avoid your Spirit? To be out of your sight? If I climb to the sky, you’re there! If I go underground, you’re there! If I flew on the morning’s wings to the far western horizon, You’d find me in a minute–you’re already there waiting! Then I said to myself, ‘Oh, he even sees me in the dark! At night I’m immersed in the light!’ It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.” Jonah sought to escape God’s presence, because he didn’t want to do what God was commanding him to do. The psalmist realizes that there’s no point in trying to escape from God. Everywhere he turns, everywhere he could possibly go, God is there. God knows everything about him, and it is impossible to escape His presence. We have a plaque in our living room with these words: “Bidden or not bidden God is present.” God’s presence is inescapable.
The psalmist knows that he is a sinner. That’s why he instinctively wants to run from God. He knows that the words of his mouth and the thoughts of his heart have often been displeasing to God. He knows that he has often rebelled and gone his own way. So why is God so interested in him? Why is God so attentive to him? The answer is in verses 13-18: God is his Creator. God formed him in his mother’s womb and has cared for him since his birth: “Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother’s womb. I thank you, High God–you’re breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made! I worship in adoration–what a creation! You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body; you know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something. Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you, the days of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day. Your thoughts–how rare, how beautiful! God, I’ll never comprehend them! I couldn’t even begin to count them–any more than I could count the sand of the sea” (The Message).
Notice what is happening at this point. As he continues meditating on this truth, he begins to overflow with praise. He doesn’t just say, “Oh Lord, I praise you,” over and over, until he feels emotionally stirred. He’s been gripped by the truth. This God, who knows everything, who is present everywhere, created him and has sustained him since his birth. This God is intimately aware of him and cares about him. The magnitude of this truth leads him to burst into praise. Remember what we saw in Isaiah 40. We begin with the truth. We begin with theology, the truth that God has revealed about Himself. We don’t begin by trying to work up our emotions. But when we grasp the truth, when it begins to sink into the depth of our hearts, we burst into praise, gratitude and wonder.
And then, in the middle of this wonderful meditation on God’s constant presence and care, the psalmist abruptly cries out: “If only you would slay the wicked, O God!” What is the point of verses 19-22? Why does the psalmist bring this into his peaceful meditations on God’s presence? Why can’t he maintain a more inspirational tone? His prayer life isn’t isolated from the reality of life in a fallen world. He’s not writing an uplifting inspirational book. He’s praying, crying out to God in the midst of a sinful, unjust, violent world. He’s surrounded by wicked people. This may be the thing that drove him into God’s presence in the first place. Some commentators think the psalmist has been unfairly accused of something and is taking refuge in God’s presence, meditating on the fact that even if everyone around him believes the lie, God knows the truth.
God is a God of justice, who will exercise vengeance on those who persist in oppressing others, and He has created us in His own image, with an innate desire for justice. The problem for us is what do we do with this sense of outrage that wells up within us? Jesus tells us to love our enemies and to pray for those who wrong us. If we’re not permitted to take vengeance, but are at the same time created with a desire for justice, how do we deal with the emotional turmoil that results from injustice, either committed against ourselves or those we care about? What do we do with our God-given emotional response to the evil things people do to one another? How do we get from where we are to where God is calling us to be? How do we let go of the rage that wells up within us? When everything within us is crying out for vengeance, how do we get ourselves to the point where we are able to love our enemies?
Praying these cries of vengeance in the Psalms–like these verses in Psalm 139–is a good first step. They help us give voice to things we probably wouldn’t express otherwise, things we may not even want to face in ourselves. Rage is similar to grief. If we try to suppress it, it will reappear in some other form and will do much damage. It needs to be expressed and articulated. We need to recognize and take ownership for our rage, and then we need to yield it to God’s wisdom and providential care, saying to God “but you know best how to deal with this.” Praying these Psalms gives us a way to express these powerful feelings, feelings which can turn into bitterness, or something worse, if we don’t deal with them.
We often move too lightly and superficially to the point of forgiveness and grace, without facing fully what is really in our hearts. When we do that, the result is less than what God is calling us to do. Eugene Peterson says some wise things about dealing with hatred: “Hate is our emotional link with the spirituality of evil. It is the volcanic eruption of outrage when the holiness of being, ours or another’s, has been violated. It is also the ugliest and most dangerous of our emotions, the hair trigger on a loaded gun. Embarrassed by the ugliness and fearful of the murderous, we commonly neither admit or pray our hate; we deny it and suppress it. But if it is not admitted it can quickly and easily metamorphose into the evil that provokes it; and if it is not prayed we have lost an essential insight and energy in doing battle with evil” (Answering God, p. 98). We need to admit our rage and hatred, and then bring them before God in prayer. Praying these Psalms helps us give expression to these things in God’s presence, where they can be transformed. But until we’ve faced the truth, we’re not able to move ahead. We can’t forgive until we’ve faced the depth of our anger and hatred. God commands us to forgive, but to get there we first need to express, in His presence, our desire for vengeance.
As far as we know, the Psalmists never take action to avenge themselves. Even in the most violent of these Psalms, the situation is committed to God and left in His hands. We know that David refused to take vengeance on Saul, even when he twice had the chance to kill him. He said: “May the Lord judge between you and me. And may the Lord avenge the wrongs you have done to me, but my hand will not touch you” (1 Samuel 24:12). David trusted God to take vengeance, but he refused to do it himself. Many of the people who criticize these Psalms think they are primitive and brutal. We’re more civilized now. We know better. But given the escalation of violence in our society, do we really think we’re better off than these ancient people? Far better to cry out to God in this way and then leave the whole thing in His hands than to take vengeance ourselves, as so many are doing in the world today.
So, what is the point of praying to One who already knows our needs? He already knows the worst about us. He knew all the worst before He called us to Himself. Our sinfulness never comes as a surprise to Him. He’s not going to be shocked and become disillusioned with us. He knows the worst, and He loves us and is committed to bringing us into His eternal kingdom. We can tell Him all that’s really in our hearts; He knows it all already anyway. It’s safe to bring into His presence our anger and desire for vengeance. We can be at our worst in His presence. And when we’re in His presence, He’s able to transform us and enable us to love our enemies even as He loved us when we were still His enemies.
Because He knows all, rather than fleeing from Him, we invite Him into every area of our lives, saying with the psalmist: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Since He knows everything already, there’s no reason to pretend with Him. We come into His presence and talk to Him about everything that concerns us, not because we think He doesn’t know, but because we know He loves us and because we want to know Him better. We begin by meditating on the truth: His presence is inescapable; He knows everything there is to know about us; He created us and has been caring for us since before we were born. And then, having seen the truth, we pray: “Investigate my life, O God, find out everything about me; Cross-examine and test me, get a clear picture of what I’m about; See for yourself whether I’ve done anything wrong–then guide me on the road to eternal life” (The Message). Rather than hiding, as we were inclined to do at first, we invite Him into every area of our lives, because we want to know this One who knows us perfectly.
In Evangelicalism, to a large extent, prayer has been reduced to intercession and supplication. Prayer consists in asking God to do things for us (supplication) and for others (intercession). I’ve been in prayer meetings where the leader is in a hurry to finish with worship and praise, saying “we need to get moving, because we have a lot to pray about.” The really important part of prayer is intercession; worship is just a prelude to put us into the right mood. But in this prayer, in Psalm 139, the psalmist doesn’t seem concerned with making requests. He doesn’t seem to be troubled by the fact that God already knows everything about him. His experience is just the opposite: the realization that God knows all things encourages him to pray. It leads him to worship. In prayer, he has fellowship with the One who knows him better than he knows himself.
We’d do well to begin with this question: What is prayer? What kinds of things can properly be defined as prayer? E.M. Bounds wrote a number of books on the importance of prayer. And he himself was a very prayerful man. If I hear that Bounds prayed two hours each day (I think it was actually much more than that), what was he doing all that time? Was he speaking, making requests, the whole time? If I decide to imitate him in spending large amounts of time in prayer, what will I do with the time I’ve set aside?
This is, for me, an important question. When I was in Nepal, as a relatively new Christian, I had read much about these people who spent two hours each day in prayer, so I decided to do it. I started getting up at 4 in the morning, so that I could spend two hours in prayer before breakfast. But I got tired of praying through lists of names, so I’d break up the time by spending a lot of time singing hymns and choruses. But then I felt guilty. I wasn’t sure that this really qualified as prayer. Somehow I had it in my mind that singing to the Lord didn’t count as prayer, that if I was really praying–like the people I’d read about–I’d be filling the whole time with requests.
Since that time I’ve come to the conclusion that prayer includes more than intercession and supplication. Prayer is more than asking God for things. Some people seem to be particularly gifted in intercession. We should all intercede for one another, and some people clearly have a special gift and call from God in this area. But prayer is more than intercession.
Eugene Peterson has a good description of prayer in his book, Answering God, a book about praying the Psalms: “Prayers are tools, but with this clarification: prayers are not tools for doing or getting, but for being and becoming. In our largely externalized culture, we are urgently presented with tools that enable us to do things (a machine, for instance, to clean the carpet), and to get things (a computer, for instance, to get information). We are also well trained in their use. We are not so readily offered tools that enable our being and becoming human.... At the center of the whole enterprise of being human, prayers are the primary technology. Prayers are tools that God uses to work his will in our bodies and souls. Prayers are tools that we use to collaborate in his work with us” (p. 2).
Prayers are tools that we use to collaborate in God’s work with us. Peterson goes on to point out that prayer is, by its very nature, responsive speech. God has spoken first, and in prayer we respond. The most important thing in prayer is not our speech, but the fact that God, in mercy and grace, has reached out to us. Prayer is answering speech. We’re in a relationship with God. He has spoken to us in His Word, and prayer continues the conversation. Peterson says this a few pages later: “What is essential in prayer is not that we learn to express ourselves, but that we learn to answer God. The Psalms show us how to answer” (p. 6). Prayer is not primarily about expressing ourselves in God’s presence–even expressing our needs–but about responding to Him. That’s why it’s so important to make use of these models of prayer in the Psalms. That’s why the Psalms are so often called a “school of prayer.” They train us in responding to God out of a wide variety of situations and emotional states.
In prayer, we are carrying on a conversation with God. We’re spending time in His presence, interacting with Him. But in a relationship we don’t have to fill all of the time with talk. I try to include several elements in my prayer life: I pray the Psalms every day. I also meditate on Scripture, seeking to be attentive to the fact that it is God’s Word. I spend some time in silence, simply sitting in God’s presence. I sing hymns and choruses. I pray the Lord’s Prayer, morning and evening. I also spend some time in intercession. But I don’t try to fill the whole time with requests, because the point is not to ask God for as many things as is humanly possible during the time I’ve set aside for prayer. The point is to spend time with God, worshiping Him and getting to know Him better; from within that context, I also lift up my own needs and the needs of others. Prayer is not just asking God for things. In prayer, we have fellowship and communion with God, the One who knows us better than we know ourselves.
The psalmist begins, in verses 1-6, by meditating on God’s complete knowledge of him. Here’s how it reads in The Message: “Yahweh, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand. I’m an open book to you; even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking. You know when I leave and when I get back; I’m never out of your sight. You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence. I look behind me and you’re there, then up ahead and you’re there, too–your reassuring presence, coming and going. This is too much, too wonderful–I can’t take it all in!” Notice that he doesn’t just say, “Oh Lord, you know everything about me,” and then move on to something else. He stays with the idea, looking at it from different angles, to let it sink into his mind.
There are two things going on here. The psalmist is offering worship to God in response to the realization of God’s complete knowledge of him. But he’s also using prayer here as a tool, in the way Peterson describes, so he stays with the idea to let it sink in more deeply. “He wants the conviction to sink deeply into his soul that God knows him through and through, so he comes at the idea from a variety of angles and aspects” (Patrick Henry Reardon, Christ in the Psalms, p. 277). Both aspects of prayer are important. We’re offering something to God, and, at the same time, we’re being transformed.
We often pass by things too quickly in our spiritual lives. We’ve heard the same truths over and over, all our lives, and when we hear and read them they just skim over the surface of our minds. We live at such a fast pace, going from one thing to another, that often we’re not even fully engaged in what we’re doing. It takes unhurried time for the truth of God’s Word to sink into our minds. Several years ago I read a book about praying Scripture, and the author had this helpful advice: “First, we must create within our hearts a flexible space of resonance, so that the Word can penetrate its deepest parts and touch its innermost fibers. This demands the kind of recollection we feel the need for when something great and beautiful appears in our life. A poem demands that we pause at the end for silence. A musical theme that has moved us continues to echo, sweetly and insistently, within our soul. We feel the need to keep listening to this inner echo until it has permeated every fiber of our heart. The Word of God is much more demanding than a musical theme and much more profound.... meditation is compared to the assimilation of food.... We ponder each word in order to grasp its full meaning, imprint it on our memory and taste its sweetness, find joy and nourishment for our soul” (Mariano Magrassi, Praying the Bible, p. 109). That’s what the psalmist is doing here. He’s not anxious to get on to the next thing. He keeps looking at the truth from different angles, to let it sink into his mind and heart. He’s giving himself time to assimilate it.
But then, this realization that God knows him completely doesn’t lead immediately to warm, secure feelings. He doesn’t immediately feel uplifted. From time to time I receive mailings from churches promoting their services, promising that those who attend will hear an “uplifting message.” But the truth doesn’t always affect us in this way. The psalmist’s instinctive reaction, when he realizes God’s complete knowledge of him, is to run and hide. He wants to respond the way Adam and Eve did in the Garden, immediately after the Fall: “The man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:8). When we come face to face with God’s absolute holiness and purity, and realize at the same time that this God knows the secrets of our hearts, we’re overwhelmed with a sense of our own sinfulness. We’re undone. We fall at His feet, like Peter when he realized who Jesus was, crying out “depart from me, Lord; I am a sinner” (Luke 5:8). We instinctively want to hide from Him.
But the Psalmist realizes that this is impossible, that there is nowhere in the universe where he can escape God’s presence. Listen, again, to these verses in The Message: “Is there anyplace I can go to avoid your Spirit? To be out of your sight? If I climb to the sky, you’re there! If I go underground, you’re there! If I flew on the morning’s wings to the far western horizon, You’d find me in a minute–you’re already there waiting! Then I said to myself, ‘Oh, he even sees me in the dark! At night I’m immersed in the light!’ It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.” Jonah sought to escape God’s presence, because he didn’t want to do what God was commanding him to do. The psalmist realizes that there’s no point in trying to escape from God. Everywhere he turns, everywhere he could possibly go, God is there. God knows everything about him, and it is impossible to escape His presence. We have a plaque in our living room with these words: “Bidden or not bidden God is present.” God’s presence is inescapable.
The psalmist knows that he is a sinner. That’s why he instinctively wants to run from God. He knows that the words of his mouth and the thoughts of his heart have often been displeasing to God. He knows that he has often rebelled and gone his own way. So why is God so interested in him? Why is God so attentive to him? The answer is in verses 13-18: God is his Creator. God formed him in his mother’s womb and has cared for him since his birth: “Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother’s womb. I thank you, High God–you’re breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made! I worship in adoration–what a creation! You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body; you know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something. Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you, the days of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day. Your thoughts–how rare, how beautiful! God, I’ll never comprehend them! I couldn’t even begin to count them–any more than I could count the sand of the sea” (The Message).
Notice what is happening at this point. As he continues meditating on this truth, he begins to overflow with praise. He doesn’t just say, “Oh Lord, I praise you,” over and over, until he feels emotionally stirred. He’s been gripped by the truth. This God, who knows everything, who is present everywhere, created him and has sustained him since his birth. This God is intimately aware of him and cares about him. The magnitude of this truth leads him to burst into praise. Remember what we saw in Isaiah 40. We begin with the truth. We begin with theology, the truth that God has revealed about Himself. We don’t begin by trying to work up our emotions. But when we grasp the truth, when it begins to sink into the depth of our hearts, we burst into praise, gratitude and wonder.
And then, in the middle of this wonderful meditation on God’s constant presence and care, the psalmist abruptly cries out: “If only you would slay the wicked, O God!” What is the point of verses 19-22? Why does the psalmist bring this into his peaceful meditations on God’s presence? Why can’t he maintain a more inspirational tone? His prayer life isn’t isolated from the reality of life in a fallen world. He’s not writing an uplifting inspirational book. He’s praying, crying out to God in the midst of a sinful, unjust, violent world. He’s surrounded by wicked people. This may be the thing that drove him into God’s presence in the first place. Some commentators think the psalmist has been unfairly accused of something and is taking refuge in God’s presence, meditating on the fact that even if everyone around him believes the lie, God knows the truth.
God is a God of justice, who will exercise vengeance on those who persist in oppressing others, and He has created us in His own image, with an innate desire for justice. The problem for us is what do we do with this sense of outrage that wells up within us? Jesus tells us to love our enemies and to pray for those who wrong us. If we’re not permitted to take vengeance, but are at the same time created with a desire for justice, how do we deal with the emotional turmoil that results from injustice, either committed against ourselves or those we care about? What do we do with our God-given emotional response to the evil things people do to one another? How do we get from where we are to where God is calling us to be? How do we let go of the rage that wells up within us? When everything within us is crying out for vengeance, how do we get ourselves to the point where we are able to love our enemies?
Praying these cries of vengeance in the Psalms–like these verses in Psalm 139–is a good first step. They help us give voice to things we probably wouldn’t express otherwise, things we may not even want to face in ourselves. Rage is similar to grief. If we try to suppress it, it will reappear in some other form and will do much damage. It needs to be expressed and articulated. We need to recognize and take ownership for our rage, and then we need to yield it to God’s wisdom and providential care, saying to God “but you know best how to deal with this.” Praying these Psalms gives us a way to express these powerful feelings, feelings which can turn into bitterness, or something worse, if we don’t deal with them.
We often move too lightly and superficially to the point of forgiveness and grace, without facing fully what is really in our hearts. When we do that, the result is less than what God is calling us to do. Eugene Peterson says some wise things about dealing with hatred: “Hate is our emotional link with the spirituality of evil. It is the volcanic eruption of outrage when the holiness of being, ours or another’s, has been violated. It is also the ugliest and most dangerous of our emotions, the hair trigger on a loaded gun. Embarrassed by the ugliness and fearful of the murderous, we commonly neither admit or pray our hate; we deny it and suppress it. But if it is not admitted it can quickly and easily metamorphose into the evil that provokes it; and if it is not prayed we have lost an essential insight and energy in doing battle with evil” (Answering God, p. 98). We need to admit our rage and hatred, and then bring them before God in prayer. Praying these Psalms helps us give expression to these things in God’s presence, where they can be transformed. But until we’ve faced the truth, we’re not able to move ahead. We can’t forgive until we’ve faced the depth of our anger and hatred. God commands us to forgive, but to get there we first need to express, in His presence, our desire for vengeance.
As far as we know, the Psalmists never take action to avenge themselves. Even in the most violent of these Psalms, the situation is committed to God and left in His hands. We know that David refused to take vengeance on Saul, even when he twice had the chance to kill him. He said: “May the Lord judge between you and me. And may the Lord avenge the wrongs you have done to me, but my hand will not touch you” (1 Samuel 24:12). David trusted God to take vengeance, but he refused to do it himself. Many of the people who criticize these Psalms think they are primitive and brutal. We’re more civilized now. We know better. But given the escalation of violence in our society, do we really think we’re better off than these ancient people? Far better to cry out to God in this way and then leave the whole thing in His hands than to take vengeance ourselves, as so many are doing in the world today.
So, what is the point of praying to One who already knows our needs? He already knows the worst about us. He knew all the worst before He called us to Himself. Our sinfulness never comes as a surprise to Him. He’s not going to be shocked and become disillusioned with us. He knows the worst, and He loves us and is committed to bringing us into His eternal kingdom. We can tell Him all that’s really in our hearts; He knows it all already anyway. It’s safe to bring into His presence our anger and desire for vengeance. We can be at our worst in His presence. And when we’re in His presence, He’s able to transform us and enable us to love our enemies even as He loved us when we were still His enemies.
Because He knows all, rather than fleeing from Him, we invite Him into every area of our lives, saying with the psalmist: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Since He knows everything already, there’s no reason to pretend with Him. We come into His presence and talk to Him about everything that concerns us, not because we think He doesn’t know, but because we know He loves us and because we want to know Him better. We begin by meditating on the truth: His presence is inescapable; He knows everything there is to know about us; He created us and has been caring for us since before we were born. And then, having seen the truth, we pray: “Investigate my life, O God, find out everything about me; Cross-examine and test me, get a clear picture of what I’m about; See for yourself whether I’ve done anything wrong–then guide me on the road to eternal life” (The Message). Rather than hiding, as we were inclined to do at first, we invite Him into every area of our lives, because we want to know this One who knows us perfectly.
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