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Shelter

Read Psalm 91

Featured Verse: Psalm 91:1,4

“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty…He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. ”

My wife and I were celebrating our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary a few years back oh my, where does time go?) on the beautiful Hawaiian island of Kauai. It was in July, and we were on the rainier side of this lush island, and man was it raining. Throughout the day the clouds would burst and the downpour would send both man and beast running for cover.

We had a ground floor condo for the week that opened up into the grassy interior of the resort, and throughout the week, we noticed that there was a hen and her brood of about five or six baby chicks that roamed the resort. Free-range paradise chickens—what a life.

On one occasion when the downpour hit, we were in the room and the hen was right outside our sliding glass doors. When the clouds burst, it looked as if a firehose had been turned on; it was unbelievable. Then the most amazing thing happened: those baby chicks made a beeline for momma hen. I didn’t know chickens could run that fast. And old momma hen spread her wings like she had done it a million times before, and in one fell swoop, gathered all the babies under her wings and hunkered down in the storm. The chicks literally disappeared from sight for about 10 minutes, while mother hen absorbed the maelstrom.

As we watched this tender scene in amazement, my wife and I simultaneously commented on this passage. As touched as we were by the mother hen’s love for her chicks, we were awestruck and undone by the Heavenly Father’s tender but protective love of his helpless kids—chicks like us.

What an awesome thing that we belong to a God who longs for us to find shelter in the time of storm under the shadow of his wings! And what love the Father has for us that he should send his only Son to absorb the storm of sin and protect us from the righteous wrath of the One who cannot tolerate that sin.

And the Son, Jesus Christ, still longs to gather us under his wings, as a hen gathers her brood. But here’s the deal: You’ve got to run to him!

Got a storm? Start running!

“Nobody seriously believes the universe was made by God without being persuaded that He takes care of His works.”
~John Calvin

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Time Flies

Read Psalm 90

Featured Verse: Psalm 90:12

“Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

True story: Kermit the frog was once heard saying, “Time’s fun when your having flies.” Kermit got his idiom a bit garbled, but that’s quite understandable when Miss Piggy is stalking you!

Kermit was on to something! The truth is, time does fly—whether you are having fun or not. Moses was reflecting on how relatively brief life was when he said in Psalm 90:10,

The length of our days is seventy years—
or eighty, if we have the strength;
yet their span is but trouble and sorrow,
for they quickly pass, and we fly away.

How true that is! Are you as amazed as I am with the speed of time? What once seemed interminable when I was a kid—school, chores, the preacher’s sermon, winter, life—now seems to rush by like a speeding locomotive. I blinked and suddenly this fifteen year-old kid panting to get his driver’s permit is now over fifty and panting just walking up the stairs. Watching my wife-to-be walk down the aisle has turned into the new adventure of empty nesting—overnight! Staring in amazement at the mystery of life as our daughters were born seems like only yesterday. Now they are pursuing their own careers, living in different cities, contemplating the kind of impact apart from mom and dad they want to have in this world.

Time flies!

You could certainly add your own experience to the narrative. And those of you who are older can definitely add an urgent witness to the speed of life even more than I can at this stage of life: Suddenly, the grandkids are getting married; great grandchildren are arriving; the body is not working quite like it used to even though the mind still thinks of yourself as a youngster, full of vim and vigor; you are facing life without your soul-mate—and something you never dreamed possible is now a gritty reality.

Time flies!

Yes, time flies, and I need to add a twist. As the poet said, “Tis one life will soon be past. Only what’s done for Christ will last.” That is the truth, my friend. Time flies, so use it wisely. Make the most of it. Time is a gift from God, that’s why it’s called the present.

So perhaps it would be a good idea to follow Moses’ lead and pray that prayer today—and every day: “Lord, teach me to number my days soberly, so that I might live each of them wisely.”

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”
~Henry David Thoreau

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A Promise Made—A Promise Kept

Read Psalm 89

Featured Verse: Psalm 89:34

“I will not violate my covenant or alter what my lips have uttered.”

God makes promises…and he keeps them.

We ought to be grateful for that! You and I are alive today—saved, forgiven, adopted into God’s family, walking daily in an intimate relationship with Jesus, empowered by the Holy Spirit for good works, destined for an eternity full of unending purpose and indescribable fulfillment—only by virtue of God’s faithfulness to his promise.

The fact that God makes a promise guarantees he will keep that promise.

Yet that has not been true of our earthly experience, has it? We have been made promises only to have them broken. Parents, friends, teachers, bosses, politicians, preachers, and even our spouses—all have made promises, and chances are, most, if not all, have failed to deliver on their guarantees. In the realm of human relationships, our experience has taught us that a promise made is not necessarily a promise kept.

And we, ourselves, have made promises only to break them before the ink dried on our guarantee.

Not so with God. He makes covenants, and because he is a covenantly faithful God, he will do what he has promised to do. Even though we may fail him—and suffer the consequences of our failure, either through Divine punishment or natural outcomes, or both—God will stay true to his promise. (Psalm 89:30-37) God cannot help himself. Psalm 89:35 reminds us,

Once for all, I have sworn by my holiness—
and I will not lie to David-

No, God will not lie to David, nor will God lie to you. Of course this psalm is specifically referring to God’s covenantal promise to King David, but it should be generally applied to God’s covenantal promise to all who are his people by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. That’s me, and that’s you, and that’s a very good thing!

So here’s the deal: Even though the people around your may fail to keep their end of the bargain, and though you may not always follow through with what you have said you would do, you can relax with God—he will always come through for you.

Guaranteed!

“God does not give us everything we want, but He does fulfill His promises; leading us along the best and straightest paths to Himself.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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The Irresistible Appeal Of A Sad Song

Read Psalm 88

Featured Verse: Psalm 88:1-3

A maskil of Heman the Ezrahite.
“O LORD, the God who saves me, day and night I cry out before you. May my prayer come before you; turn your ear to my cry. For my soul is full of trouble and my life draws near the grave.”

Country and Western music (they just call it “Country” these days) isn’t the only genre to have an over-abundance of sad songs. The truth is, all types of music have their fair share of lament. It may not be obvious at first, but the inspiration for so many of the songs we love have their origin in a broken heart or a dashed hope or a shattered dream.

The reason we keep coming back to sad songs time after time, generation after generation, millennium after millennium—and will continue to do so until sadness is banned from the created realm at the end of time—is because they work. As we listen to them, the singer skillfully pulls from us the very same raw-edged emotions of pain, loss, and disappointment contained in the song, and somehow magically, mysteriously, inextricably, we become a part of it. Strangely, a sad song done well make us even sadder—and we love it.

That’s what the psalm is doing here. He’s sad, and he has written a song about it that pulls us into the raw, jagged edge of his pain. This man despaired of death—perhaps from outside forces, or maybe from the inner pain of his heartbroken life. (Psalm 88:3) He felt abandoned by his closest friends, and all alone in the world. (Psalm 88:8,18). He was simply worn out with sorrow (Psalm 88:9) and was deeply disappointed with God for it. (Psalm 88:13-14) He had suffered a life-long devastation—with no relief in sight, and he was at a point of surrendering to the likelihood that his would always be a hard and sad life. (Psalm 88:15)

We know that this man, named Heman by the way, was a very wise man (I Chronicles 4:31)—among the wisest of the wise. Yet all of his wisdom, talent (he was also a singer-songwriter according to I Chronicles 15:19) and position in the king’s court didn’t prevent nor alleviate the pain that saturated his world. But Heman was wise enough not just to sit around and stew in his sad juices. Perhaps what made him so wise and talented was that he did something as therapeutic as anything else on earth to counteract his sadness: He wrote songs. He put his experiences and his emotions into words, and those words were set to music, and they were memorialized in the psalter of the human race, the book of Psalms. Maybe his pain never went away. We just don’t know, but I’m guessing—no, I’m sure—he felt a whole lot better knowing that others would be inspired and find strength for their own painful journey through his music.

So why don’t you give it a shot? You’ve got pain, too. You have your fair share of sorrow, and disappointment. Sometime you wrestle with the sobering sense that your sadness over a matter may just be your lot in life. Perhaps it never will go away—perish the thought—but that may be your reality. Go ahead and put your experience into words. Then turn your words into a tune. And if nothing else, sing your own song to the Lord.

You never know, someone may discover your sad song someday, and your lament may become famous. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“Pain, if patiently endured, and sanctified to us, is a great purifier of our corrupted nature.”
—George Whitefield

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Signs

Read Psalm 86

Featured Verse: Psalm 86:17

“Give me a sign of your goodness, that my enemies may see it and be put to shame, for you, O LORD, have helped me and comforted me.”

I have taken to praying this psalm over the past couple of years. Not so much the second part about my enemies—I may be naïve, but I don’t think I wrestle with people who are out to get me quite like David did. It’s the first part of that verse that I love: Give me a sign of your goodness.

Here is the way some of the other translations put it:

“Send me a sign of your favor.” (New Living Translation)

“So look me in the eye and show kindness…Make a show of how much you love me…” (The Message)

“Show that you approve of me!” (Contemporary English Version)

That is a great prayer to pray in any version—and even better if God so happens to answer it. What was the sign David was looking for? For sure, David needed protection (Psalm 86:2), but he wouldn’t mind if God threw in a little mercy, too (Psalm 86:3,16). David wanted God to give him reason to laugh ((Psalm 86:4), perhaps from the knowledge that yet again he had been forgiven of his sins (Psalm 86:5,15). And in general, since David had fully devoted himself to God (Psalm 86:2), he wanted his life to be living proof that God loved him.

We don’t normally encourage people to pray for signs, since we believe that true faith doesn’t focus primarily on visible answers. We teach faith over sight; that it’s more spiritual to believe in the invisible than to grasp for the visible. But David’s faith led him to believe God for and boldly ask for a literal, physical sign that would prove to the whole world that he was living under Divine favor. What is so bad about that?

So go ahead, pray for a sign of God’s goodness today. I am! I am asking that God will show me a literal, physical sign of his favor today. I, unapologetically, want the whole world to know that he approves of me. I am requesting that God will look me in the eye and make a show of how fond he is of me—not tomorrow, but today!

Who knows, maybe God will grant our request today!

“Few are they who by faith touch Him; multitudes are they who throng about Him.”
—Augustine

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Hear—And Do!

Read Psalm 85

Featured Verse: Psalm 85:8

“I will listen to what God the LORD will say;he promises peace to his people, his saints—but let them not return to folly.”

I don’t believe formulas are ever possible with the Lord, but if we can distill his Word down to one, here is a simple prescription for Divine favor: Hear—and do!

Listen to God, then do what he says. Hear and do! James echoed that command in the New Testament when he said, “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” Then, for the one who hears and does, James added, “He will be blessed in what he does.” (James 1:22,25)

There is no deep, mysterious secret to the revival of favor that the psalmist is seeking in Psalm 85. There is no complex set of rules and regulations the believer must master in order to live in the blessing of abundance promised in the Bible. It is so simple even a child can get it. In fact, all good parents drill this into their children early and often: Listen and obey!

You have no problem with that—right? Neither do I! So here’s the question: Why aren’t you doing that?

I’m not trying to be judgmental or confrontational, I’m just asking a serious question. You have areas of your life where you are either not listening to God, or not obeying what you hear—or both! So do I. And that may be the very reason you and I are not living in the full abundance of God, spiritually, financially, physically, professionally or relationally.

So what are you going to do about it? I think I will do a little evaluating today—some listening, first, then obeying. I plan on getting this one right. You can hold me accountable on that one. And when I get to the end of my life, I hope that I will have so lived that on my headstone are inscribed these words: He listened to God—and obeyed!

“When it comes time to die, make sure that all you have to do is die.”
—Jim Elliott

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A Song For Going To Church

Read Psalm 84

Featured Verse: Psalm 84:10

“Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.”

Do you sing on your way to church? The Israelites did. There was a whole series of songs written just for people on their way to the tabernacle, and later, the temple, in Jerusalem. They were called psalms of assent. These songs usually extolled the blessings of belonging to God and the anticipation of coming to the earthy dwelling that housed his uncontainable presence.

Perhaps we ought to revive that tradition. I’m sure it would heighten our anticipation of entering the Lord’s presence with the community of believers and deepen our experience of his mighty presence in the house of worship.

Of course, the New Testament teaches us that we no longer need to go to the temple in Jerusalem in order to worship—a good thing, since it no longer exists. Under the new covenant, God, himself, continually dwells in you, personally—you are now the temple of the Holy Spirit. (I Corinthians 6:19) Yet while God dwells in you individually, your salvation is not to be divorced from God’s people collectively—the church. You and I, together, make up the new covenant temple of God. (I Corinthians 3:16-17; II Corinthians 6:15-17; Ephesians 2:20-22)

As we come together corporately, the very place where we gather—church building, school auditorium, family room, under a tree—along with those who gather, is the temple of God, his holy dwelling place on earth. Something powerful happens when we, the body of Christ, come together to exalt the head of the body, Jesus Christ. As Christ is worshipped, God’s presence fills the temple. And that is something to sing about!

If you have lost the kind of anticipation for going to church that makes you sing, I would suggest you have misplaced your understanding of what the community of believers is all about. I would challenge you to go back and find it—it is crucial to your spiritual health. When you come to church, you are coming into the very place and to the very people who are now the dwelling place of God! And where God dwells there is both earthly joy and eternal pleasure. (Psalm 16:11)

One day of the kind of earthly joy and eternal pleasure we experience as God dwells among his people is better than a thousand days on the best beaches of Maui or on the rides at Disneyland or on the greens at Pebble Beach or in between the sheets of your bed. If you don’t get that, your vision is clouded.

So start singing about it on the way to church, and pretty soon, it will get into your spirit and you will begin to see what the psalmist saw—and then you can write your own psalm of assent.

“When we worship together as a community of living Christians, we do not worship alone, we worship ‘with all the company of heaven.’”
—Marianne H. Micks