Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 0-235 Sunday 03 Dec 2000

Reading: PSALM 39 – BEYOND QUESTION

(From ‘Encounter with God’ Bible Reading Notes)

Every test seems to place a question mark against the love of God. We are too quick to judge him: ‘Lord … my hope is in you’ (v 7).

We boil at different temperatures. The biblical teachers advise we stay well below boiling point. (See Prov 16:32; 24:1-6) Emotional explosions generate much heat, little light, and always leave a mess. Show passionate intensity over things that matter, by all means, but let it be restrained and constructive.

Yet ‘the fire burns’ in this man’s agitated mind (vs 2,3). He must speak. (See Ps 77:112) Very wisely he asks for realistic selfknowledge in the immensities of the world. ‘Lord, give me a sense of my place within your purposes.’ We hang by a thread (see Job 8:815), ephemeral, confused (vs 47).

But this is not our gloomy modern cynical nihilism, nor is it Shakespeare’s man as ‘a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon stage and then is heard no more’. Our minuscule existence is totally vindicated, redeemed, made purposeful by the very wonderful, ‘But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you’ (v 7). Not by measurements or selfanalysis or by looking in the mirror do we find the truth about ourselves, but by the call of God that comes to us and the promise we receive. (See 1 Pet 2:9)

Therefore only one opinion counts in the end, the opinion of the One who calls us to live the life he has set before us. To be ‘rich towards God’ by embracing his call with all our energies is all that matters. (See Luke 12:21) That is what makes us truly human, not the chemistry of our bodies. The call opens up the future as it comes to us out of the future, from the far side of eternity. Follow it home.

There is enormous release in letting go of one’s heavy self importance. ‘To be a feather on the breath of God’ says one mystic. ‘To be swayed about, motelike in God’s mighty glow’ says another.

– Dennis Lennon

Copyright Scripture Union, 2000