Consider how I love your precepts! Give me life according to your steadfast love. Psalm 119:159
The psalmist sounds pretty frail. Nine times in Psalm 119 he asks God to give him life. We cannot know exactly what that meant every time he requested it. He may have feared for his physical safety, but he also sounds deeply afflicted, worn down, perhaps running on empty. He wants God to breathe life into him again.
What touches me is the way he asks. “Consider how I love Your precepts.” Not, Look how perfectly I have kept them.
Many of God’s children are taught a quieter version of a bargain: if I do this, God will do that. Obedience becomes a way of controlling the outcomes. If I pray, serve, give, and live faithfully, surely God will keep catastrophe outside the borders of my life.
Then the diagnosis comes. The marriage breaks. Someone I love suffers. And beneath my grief rises an accusation: I did all these things for You. How could You let this happen? It is the theology of the older brother: I have served You all these years. You owe me something.
But covenant love is not a transaction. God loves His children and answers them with wisdom larger than the moment they are living. I can ask boldly for intervention without believing I have earned the answer I want.
I see the tension of this mystery most clearly in Jesus. The Father repeatedly preserved Him because His hour had not yet come. Then Gethsemane arrived, and the cup was not removed. The Father’s love had not changed. It’s just that the larger redemptive purpose had come into view.
Somewhere in this is the kind of trust I want. Not confidence that God will arrange my circumstances according to my obedience, but confidence that His steadfast love will hold me through whatever He permits.
Today one believer will be released from prison while another remains behind bars. One person will rise unexpectedly from a sickbed while another faithful Christian enters hospice. God has not loved one and abandoned the other.
My life is part of a story whose meaning I cannot always see from inside the chapter.
When I cannot understand Your ways, I fall back on what cannot change, Your steadfast love. Amen.
