wisdom

Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 1-216 Sunday 09 Dec 2001

Reading: PSALM 90 – TO GAIN A HEART OF WISDOM

(From ‘Encounter with God’ Bible Reading Notes)

‘Grant to me, above all things to be desired, that my heart may find its peace in Thee. Thou art the peace of my heart – out of Thee all things are hard and unquiet’ (Thomas a Kempis, 1380-1471).

When my mother was terminally ill, a friend sent me these words to pray for her: ‘God keep you safe until the word of your life is fully spoken’. This psalm seems to me to be the prayer of a person who longs that the word of her life before God will truly be ‘fully spoken’.

I suggest that we can speak this psalm again to God as a review of our lives, or of this past year a looking back and a looking forward. Let your imagination work all the time with the idea of a ‘fully spoken’ life.

Verses 1 and 2 help us reflect, with joy and pain, on our ‘generations’, our families and their relationship with God recent or long standing. Whatever your story here, remember ‘from everlasting to everlasting you are God’.

Verses 3-6 keep us humble about God’s perspectives. I’m writing this on the first day of 2001 and this psalm tells me all the human enterprise of the past thousand years is a mere one circle of the clock to God.

Verses 7-12 alert us to the other side of this truth, the worth God gives each day (Luke 12:6,7; Ps 139:1-4,15,16) and the choice we face to let wisdom or foolishness shape our life.

Verses 13-17 encourage us to review our experience of God – his compassion, the fulfilment of his love, times when he has seemed inactive in our lives, has even ‘afflicted’ us. And what ‘work of your hands’ would you ask him to establish as you look forward to a new year?

‘One rides the psalms like a river current, noticing in passing how alien these ancient and sophisticated texts are, and how utterly accessible’ (Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk, Lion, 2000).

– Pauline Hoggarth

Copyright Scripture Union, 2001

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