Category: Psalms

Teach me to do Your will, For You are my God; Let Your good Spirit lead me on level ground.
  Psalms 143:10

God fathers each child differently. His path is a solitary one and my journey will never imitate that of my parents. If my parents were iconic in their faith, the expectations for me to follow in their footsteps will be impossible to attain. I am not either parent nor should I try to be.

The patriarchs modeled this kind of obedience.  Isaac was told by God to avoid Egypt during a time of famine. God made it clear that Egypt was off limits. But God’s plan for Isaac’s son, Jacob, was different. In his famine, Egypt was the place he was to go and settle. Doing something different from his father had to feel frightening at first. Jacob must have been confused as he embarked on a journey so peculiar.

God stretched me out of my family’s mold sometime in my mid-forties. My views of some peripheral biblical issues differed from that of my father and the legalistic church I was raised in. There were some tense discussions and feelings from his disapproval created a shadow over our relationship.  With time, it improved as it became clear to him that God had His hand on my life and I learned to speak of my new positions with grace. Before he died, God moved us on to the same page through some ‘end of life’ experiences and I am so thankful.

To complicate matters, I married young into a well-known Christian family whose patriarch was a famous evangelist. Things were harmonious throughout the early years of our marriage because both Ron and I held to the family’s views on most every biblical issue. Eventually though, God began to take us on the journey He had planned for us. It meant leaving home and the ministry his father started. Though we still agreed on the tenets of the Gospel, our interpretations of secondary issues of grace didn’t gel. Again, we experienced feelings that we were outsiders and it was painful to no longer fit.

God’s message to each disciple is clear. We are His children first and members of our earthly family second. Egypt may be denied to our fathers but permissible for us. God is a kind Father who leads deliberately ~ giving His child the courage to take steps away from our ‘family’s way of doing things’. The fallout can make us second-guess our new direction but God gives grace with the call to go where He sends us. His voice is wild and wonderful; his ways are peculiar and solitary. Any price we pay is long compensated by the joy of hearing God say, “Well done!”

My heart begs to be shaped by You, and by no one else. Amen

Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.  Psalm 20:7

Futility.  When is the last time you felt it?  Probably the last time you realized that there are things you just can’t fix.  What’s broken stays broken.  Because it’s too painful to admit that, you exhaust yourself by applying human band-aids.  Your efforts do seem to make enough of a difference to stop the bleeding.  It’s profound enough to cause you to get up and exert another round of superhuman attempt.  But extract yourself from the situation and it won’t take long for the intensity of the problem to resurface.

Remember the feeding of the 5,000?  Jesus was filled with compassion by the crowd’s hunger.  He knew that people in physical distress wouldn’t be able to listen to a kingdom message so He sought to alleviate that by providing a meal.  He turned to Phillip.  “Where shall we buy bread to feed these people?”  This was a test.  He hoped that Phillip would have experienced enough of Jesus’ divinity to fashion this reply, “Only you can provide supernatural amounts of bread, Lord.”  But instead, Phillip calculates how many days wages might buy a meager supply of food but at the end of his problem solving, he had to admit that the situation was still hopeless.  Jesus was the only answer but Phillip didn’t consider that.

The same kinds of questions still come to us today.  Can you hear them in your spirit?  Wherever you and I have a need, there is a corresponding question.

Where will you buy compassion today?  It appears that no one understands your struggles.

Where will you buy peace?  Angry people are your companions and they are not turning to the Prince of Peace.

Where will you buy intimacy?  Loneliness is making you cynical and withdrawn.

Where will you buy intervention?  All you know is abandonment.

Where will you buy the provision you seek?  You have nothing left to sell.

The questions still exist and the test is still divinely administered.  The answer is still the same but how will we respond?  By working harder?  Laboring longer?  Waiting for humanity to deliver?

Jesus, You are my only answer.  I will stop grabbing, manipulating, and despairing.  You hold my answer in Your hands.  In Your name, Amen

O my God, in you I trust; let me not be put to shame; let not my enemies exult over me. Psalm 25:2

What are the things you regret?  Regret is a powerful emotion and if I choose to live in it without having placed all my hopes in a God who redeems, I will become depressed and withdrawn.  There were words spoken that I can’t take back.  There were a series of selfish acts that seemed so small at the time but yielded great pain for those around me.  That is the cruelty of sin; what looked like no big deal led me to do it a second time, then a third, and it wasn’t long before guilt became my ever constant companion.  I have thought many times, “If only I could go back and do it right!”

Wisdom runs deep in the heart of a repentant sinner. I am passionate about the lessons I’ve learned from my mistakes.  Give me a soapbox (and God has) and I’ll proclaim loudly, “Don’t do it!  You can’t afford the ultimate consequences of shame and regret.”

The real tragedy is the child of God who has come to Christ but has never tapped into what it means to ‘abide’ to experience a resurrection power that heals places of shame.  Many, including myself for a few decades, lived in the bitter place of regret.  I numbed my pain with service to God, hoping to lessen my guilt.  This proved futile and led to an emotional crash in my forties.

Every now and then, I have to stop everything and look honestly at how my sin has shaped me.  Sin slaughters hope.  Forgiveness resuscitates it.  Is there something I’ve done that still causes me to shrink and live small?  As a fly feeds on rotting flesh, Satan feeds on guilt and shame.  He’ll parade my past before my eyes continually if I let him.  Every memory where my body still slumps as it remembers needs to be impacted again by the good news of God’s unfathomable mercy.

You never intended for your children to live in the shadows of regret.  The tears of repentance are meant to lead me to the joy of forgiveness and a new beginning.  I don’t want to wince as I remember.  In Jesus name, Amen

 

By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host.  Psalm 33:6

When I make something, I begin with pre-existing pieces.  Make a cake and I have a list of ingredients that already exist.  Fashion a piece of pottery and there is clay to mold.  I don’t make the clay.  While I am only an artisan, God is a Creator.  He made the earth out of nothing.  There was nothing there for Him to work with except omnipotent power.  If He wanted water, He made water where there had been nothingness.  Water had never been and didn’t even have a name!

This is what makes God ~ God.  This is where He excels.  He has not changed with time.  His power has not diminished.  This same creative God of Genesis spoke again through the prophet Isaiah and said, “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?  I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”  Isaiah 43:19  Once again, something out of nothing.

Throughout my life, I have stood (and am standing) on this powerful truth in prayer.  My Father can bring something about when I see absolutely no evidence that such a thing could ever exist.  He can bring reconciliation when there is hatred.  He can bring repentance when there is stubborn rebellion.  He can bring opportunity when others haven’t yet thought of it.  He can bring provision when cupboards are empty.  He can bring recognition when there’s invisibility.

What needs to come to pass that, as of now, shows no sign of happening?  When you pray, ask boldly – but with the mind of Christ and for the glory of His name.   If we are God’s, His power and promises are at work over the expanse of our lives, over the deep and the unseen.

Speak Your Word over my life and bring into existence what is not yet there.  When it appears, I will fall to my knees in worship.  In Jesus name, Amen

He will drink from the brook by the way; therefore he will lift up his head.  Psalm 110:7

From what do I need saving?  The forgiveness of sins was only the beginning.  So much more, as it pertains to salvation, is offered me in Christ.  Do I draw from its waters when I need it?  Or, do I suffer needlessly?  If it’s the latter, the reason is either unawareness that there is help from God’s well or my lack of humility to admit my need and ask for salvation.

 So Lord, I look at the well of salvation that you made available at the foot of the cross.  You helped me see my sin, how absolutely lost I was, so that I ran to the well of your mercy to drink.  I pray for all those I love today who are too threatened to admit their need of a Savior.  Show them the horror of living under Your condemnation and the exhilaration of living under Your grace.

 

Jesus, the well of salvation is still deep for every spiritual child You are raising.  Am I willing to see my sin and my need?

• Where I feed on my fear and become small, lead me to confess it and drink from your well of courage.  You promise me salvation.
• Where I feed on the torment of past failures, lead me to confess it and drink from your well of forgiveness.  You mercy is new every morning.
• Where I criticize others in order to feel powerful, lead me to confess it and remember your undeserved love toward me when I was condemned to die.  You deeply love the one I am maligning.  Even the unregenerate.
• Where I feel angry over needs yet unmet, lead me to confess my entitlement and drink from your well of promises to the humble.  You know my need and will bend low to save me if I live gratefully.
• Where I feel hopelessness over my own sin, lead me out of unbelief.  I drink from the well of salvation and acknowledge Your power to change the one You created

Make me a child who runs to Your well of provision.  Let me awaken with Your well of resources ever before me.  Let me drink of it as easily as I sit down to eat three meals a day.  Smash my pride.  Enable me to view myself as You see me; both sinful and forgiven.  You see the level of my thirst today.  Do what you need to do to increase it so that I live as one who proves that You are enough.  The abundant life starts at the well of salvation. Deepen my thirst.  Amen

How clearly the sky reveals God’s glory!  How plainly it shows what he has done!  Each day announces it to the following day; each night repeats it to the next.  No speech or words are used, no sound is heard;  yet their message goes out to all the world and is heard to the ends of the earth.  Psalm 19:1-4

The radiance of God’s glory is veiled even though so many of His children, including me, ask everyday, “Show me your glory today.”  I’ve seen enough of it to change my heart but the amount I have seen is a grain of sand in the vast ocean of glory.

What happens when God shows His face and gives more than a small dose?  Apparently, silence.

Job was silenced in his accusations when God became present and started asking him questions.

Isaiah was silenced when He saw God in all of His glory.  Immediately, he pronounced himself unclean.

Habakkuk tried to speak and nothing came out.

John, as well as he knew Jesus, saw him in his glorified state and fell as dead at His feet.  Jesus had to touch him and bring life back to John’s body.

One day, all of us will stand before God.  We will see him in all of His glory.  It won’t be the same as standing before human judges.  There, we are often acquitted, even though guilty.  Our judges are fallen and we grow cynical of earthly laws and their consequences when we are tempted to discount those in higher authority.

The most eloquent will be silenced on the day they see God.  He who has been self-impressed, insistent that his good deeds outweigh his bad deeds and are enough to earn him a place in heaven, will tremble and lose his voice in the presence of holiness.  Even the most faithful of God’s children will bow low in humility.  God is more glorious than any human description; more holy than flawed people can even conceive.

As a fallen woman, I can not imagine what perfection is like.  For now, I see glimpses of Him and it stirs me to worship and defer my will to His.  Since I was created to worship and to love God, this is the most exhilarating experience I will ever know in this lifetime.  Any of Satan’s counterfeits pale in comparison.

Let me see as much of Your glory as I can see and live.  Please, Lord. Amen

O LORD, you have examined my heart and know everything about me.  Psalm 139:1

Our family has moved many times over the years.  We, like many of you reading this, have had to learn how to make different kinds of places ‘home’.  We have been involved in various kinds of churches, assorted in denomination.  While we enjoyed making new friends, there was always a challenge.  The new affiliations we made didn’t know our history.  They didn’t know the places where we grew up; the schools, teachers, and the life experiences that shaped us.  They didn’t know our parents.  They never walked the grounds of our childhood home.  Their ability to really understand who we were was compromised by a lack of history.  That was often isolating and lonely.

I can never say to God, “But you just don’t understand.”  He was involved with me from the beginning and that relationship started even before my conception.  He knew every subplot of my story before I even lived it.  He was an active participant early on even when I was unaware of His presence.  He knew me when I was a slave to sin and He knew how I would respond internally to imprisonment. He took note of it all as I lived it and with every step into dark places, He wrote redemptive opposites into my story line.

I am still under transformation.  There are things, even today, which puzzle me about myself.  I get frustrated at times and wonder why I respond to life like I do.  But now, I know who to run to.  “Reveal myself to me, Lord”… is a prayer that started turning my life around some years ago.  Because He has been my God throughout the course of my entire life’s history, He has divine insight into what makes me the person I am.  He is gracious to reveal why certain things shut me down, why I can be shy, or stubborn, or overcompensating.  Oh, it is a comfort to be in a relationship with One who not only knows me, but loves me.

Some are intimate today with someone who knows too much about them and uses the information against them.  Oh, they are not like God.  We must be careful to make God our refuge.  Only He deserves the abandon of childlike trust.  Only He should be given the power to write and shape someone’s identity.  People come and go.  God remains in my history past – and will be in every part of my history future.

I give you all the power to re-write my past and reveal my future.  In Jesus name, Amen

For my words are wise and my thoughts are filled with insight.  Psalm 49:3

Encouragers are hard to find.  Discouragers are everywhere.  One look, one word of criticism, and someone already fragile wants to throw up their hands and quit.  Yet, when most of us think of someone who encourages, we picture a person who compliments and gives positive feedback.  That is a weak translation.  True, encouraging words are designed to penetrate to the core of anothers weakness.

I have to know someone well to give them comfort.  I must know their life, their work, and enough about their family to understand where their sources of joy and pain exist.  To know where to infuse spiritual courage, I have to be intuitive; knowing with just a look that they are not themselves on a certain day.  If they put on a good face, I will see through it and not let it slide.

Ron and I hold a neighborhood bible study in our home each Sunday night.  We are challenged each week to not allow the generic “good to see you!” to be the extent of our interaction.  Ron and I want so much to engage like Christ would if He were the teacher of a small group.  We have ruled out the assumption that to encourage is to give shallow compliments and parrot clichés.  They don’t impart anything but anger and loneliness.

I have some rich encouragers in my life.  And because I have experienced the power of Jesus in their words to me, I love to encourage others.  I can’t wait to meet a stranger, hear their story, ask them where they struggle, and leave them with the words of Christ for where they faint.  But if I’m drowning in my own challenges and don’t know how to abide in Christ, then I have no courage to give away.   I have to work through my own issues with God because the promises of God, strategically spoken, are the lifelines others need. Encouraging words are meant to penetrate the darkness of anothers despair.

Out of your perfect knowledge of people, give me the Your words for them.  Make them as honey for others wounds.  In Jesus’ name, Amen

Contend, O Lord, with those who contend with me; fight against those who fight against me. Let them be like chaff before the wind, with the angel of the Lord driving them on. Let their way be dark and slippery, with the angel of the Lord pursuing them. Psalm 35:1,5-6

Imprecatory psalms are those that cry out for judgment and for God to bring calamity upon enemies. The thought of that can be off-putting if I believe that God is loving but not necessarily just. If I believe that He is only loving, I focus completely on forgiving and forgetting. But if believe that He is also just, I know that I’m invited to cry out for God’s judgment upon those who persecute the saints.

If I’ve wronged others and suffer their retribution, this is not righteous persecution. Therefore, prayers for judgment are not mine to pray. I am the one who is under judgment until I repent. But, if I am afflicted unjustly because of my faith, imprecatory Psalms are allowed. Prayer is in my arsenal, not revenge.

Lest I salivate at the thought of God letting my enemies have it, there is a catch. For whom am I offended? If I believe I deserve better than this, that I have rights, and I am indignant that any one should rise up against me, then I am enraged solely for my sake. God is not in my thoughts as I dream of revenge. I rise up to be the judge and to judge. But, if I am offended for God (and this takes some soul searching), imprecatory psalms are there for me and David teaches me how to pray them.

The next time I am spoken against, rejected, or mocked because of a kingdom clash, I need to ask myself why I’m angry. Naturally, personal pain will be my instinctive reaction but spiritual maturity is to be able to move past that to view God’s perspective. God sees the offense but understands that it was committed because we’re His children and Satan’s enemies. If I set out to really hurt someone, I will be most effective if I hurt one of their children. Satan knows this principle. He can’t lash out personally at God for he is a defeated foe because of Christ. So how can he wage war? By going on a rampage against God’s precious children. He thrives on carnage. As the saints in heaven see earth’s martyrs and cry out, “How long, O Lord?”, Satan hears and this lament is his opiate.

Don’t let me pray for Your intervention and judgement until it is a holy prayer. In Jesus name, Amen

 

  Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit.
Psalm 34:13  

How many marriages implode because couples can’t talk honestly about their parents? It’s hard to ‘leave and cleave’. Childhoods are sacred unless there has been unhappiness we’re anxious to leave behind.

There comes a point in every person’s life when God calls us to see the truth about our family. I am to embrace the good, acknowledge the bad, and cling to God for grace as I grieve and make different choices. I am to love God more than my ancestors and love truth more than I love the ‘family way of doing things’. If everybody did this, it would be easier but only a minority face the truth of their families and are willing to live as God’s son or daughter. They risk being the only one in their families who are willing to be sanctified, ‘set apart’, from everyone else.

There is an unwise way to talk to our spouses about their parents. It’s when past hurts affect my tone.  Legitimate complaints are disregarded because my words are vicious. Every conversation that exposes ungodliness in family needs a lot of prayer beforehand. You know the truth of the phrase, ‘Blood is thicker than water.’ It’s hard to hear someone else, even a spouse, talk about my parents and siblings and not immediately think, ‘How dare you!’

Few scriptures are more well known that this one. “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” Never is this more true than when I see my family as God sees them. When I embrace the truth of my origins, endless spiritual possibilities open up before me.

How long it took for me to see the faults of the family I love; even longer to see my own faults. Thank you for not giving up and continuing to bring the truth before my eyes. Amen