Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 0-230 Sunday 26 Nov 2000

Reading: PSALM 38 – A SEVERE MERCY

(From ‘Encounter with God’ Bible Reading Notes)

If we fall away from God, total honesty will be our first step back: ‘All my longings lie open before you, O Lord; my sighing is not hidden from you’ (v 9).

The powerful descriptions of this man’s selfinflicted sickness suggest some serious disorder at the root of his life (vs 3,58,13,14; see Isa 1:26): perhaps addictions or promiscuity or deviant sexual behaviour. Yet he is still a believer. God is using his illness to grasp his life, to break and heal his rebellious will and to haul him back into the light (vs 1,2).

The process has brought him to a point of total honesty. (See Luke 15:1721) It is due to, ‘My sin … my guilt … my sinful folly .. my iniquity’ (vs 3,5,18). Healing begins here with his frank willingness to take responsibility for his disobedience and to embrace his guilt and shame (v 4). His attitude is less a modern ‘sorry’ prayer, but more akin to the powerful confession that ‘we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts .. and there is no health in us miserable offenders’. (See James 4:110)

Not so as to stay wallowing in the misery of it (that, too, could be a subtle egoism: look how sensitive and spiritual I am!) but to bring all the chaos out into God’s light, to face it and name it for what it is: ‘the expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action … savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust’ (Shakespeare, Sonnet 129).

However special this man’s past experience of God he cannot trade on it now. He must set out to find God all over again, and again, and again, and then again, as indeed we each of us must, every morning and before we sleep at night: to find him this time is all that matters (vs 21,22).

How would you describe God’s grasp on your life? One Christian called him ‘thoumasteringmeGod’.

– Dennis Lennon

Copyright Scripture Union, 2000

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