I love the book of Psalms. I hope you do too. There are times when
I do not know what words to speak to my wandering heart or to express sincerely
in my prayer life to God. As we are going through different psalms as part of a
new sermon series, I thought for your warm encouragement to share a favorite
psalm of mine that resonates with me in almost every season which I find
myself. It is Psalm 73.
The psalm starts off expressing the favor of God towards His
people, Israel:
Truly God is good to Israel, to those who
are pure in heart (v. 1).
What almost every psalm and prayer written for us in the Bible
starts off with is a proper recognition of the majesty and transcendent
holiness of God. Any worthwhile prayer does not start with the focus on us –
our difficult circumstances or sinful condition. It starts with who God is and
His proper place as the center of the universe, the center of our hearts.
Quickly though, Asaph the psalm writer jumps into the initial
despair of envying those who reject God openly, disavow His existence, and deny
His universal significance of any sort. In an increasingly secularized world, I
often discover my daily experiences lead to questioning how could it be that so
many people, especially some of the most despicable or openly malicious
personalities towards the people of faith, some even amongst my colleagues or
my friends growing up, so easily prosper and find both endless pleasure and
ease of living?
For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw
the prosperity of the wicked. For they have no pangs until death; their bodies
are fat and sleek. They are not in trouble as others are; they are not stricken
like the rest of mankind (vv. 3-5).
They get the better
jobs. They get the awards. They get the financial windfalls of rare wealth.
They maintain longevity of health and physical energy. After the initial
praises and formal recognition of the supremacy of our Father in heaven, many
saints in the Bible move into a sequence of honest, emotionally raw, humanly
real, cries of suffering and sin. This is where I move next.
A frequently puzzled look, coupled with oft-subtle, dismissive
scoff, on the faces of friends and family meets my convictions and actions to
live faithfully to both the gospel and the call to holiness sounded by our Lord
and Savior. Sometimes, and I even do not find sympathy in the most open of
Christian circles, I look at the prosperity and the earthly well-being of those
who do not follow Jesus, and even more so, who refuse to give Jesus any more
than a rebellious obscene gesture in greeting. When life gets hard as a
Christian for me
– when friends shun me because I refuse to talk openly of sexual
promiscuity
– when classmates disdain my resistance to not sharing in
practices of academic dishonesty
– when employers ignore me for a job only because of my loyalty
to faith and virtue
– when a parent tells other family members to never grow up to
emulate me
those kinds of
responses from the world can discourage me sooner or later. Maybe you have
faced the same, and wonder how God can for so long tolerate and allow the
flourishing, at first glance, of those who do not bat an eye at the beauty and
glory of the one true God, revealed through His Son Jesus Christ. Dying to self
every day as a Christ-follower means often social disrepute, intellectual
scorn, and relational abandonment from anyone outside of the flock of God. They
mock my every move to remain obedient to the commands of God, and taunt the
promises of true spiritual riches. I get tempted to bitterness, and cynicism. I
give voice to my complaint, and express my discouragements to the Lord Himself
as Asaph did.
But, the Psalm is not yet over. The
prayer goes on. The story continues. Asaph explains:
But when I thought how to understand this,
it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then
I discerned their end. (vv. 16-17)
After the cries of
the faithful are completely shared in prayer, that is not the end for the one
who brings the matter before the throne of God. A faithful prayer re-orients
the saint towards the eternal purposes of God. When I myself enter the
sanctuary of God, into the assembly of the church, before the very Cross by
which we, of undeserved grace, die and are born again to new life, I recall the
true wonder and awe of God in His greatest work. My eyes opened once again,
both you and I, as Christians, have been saved from the most truly horrible
reality of our existence, the evil of sin. And such salvation includes the
eternal riches of His grace, where in the life to come, every pain, every
sorrow, every loss, every broken dream becomes complete and restored. The life
we always wanted but could never achieve, God promises:
– to make the enemy a friend
– to turn the rebel into a
citizen
– to adopt the orphan as a son
– to marry the widow as a bride
– to love the lonely as a brother
– to make the forgotten
always remembered
– to provide the wanderer with a home
– to bring the dead back to life.
From the beginning mountaintop
greeting of the greatness of God, to the painful cries of a doubting saint, rebounding
to a remembered destiny, I personally recall the glorious end of the sons and
daughters of heaven. And like every great stroke of a truly powerful story,
Psalm 73 ends with a burst of overflowing joy and unshakable cling to the
person of God Himself. Listen in:
Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is
nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but
God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever (vv. 25-26).
This is such an end of a prayer like this, befitting
a psalm as such, where both the overarching transcendence of God and the low
estate of the fallen-ness of mankind collide into a crescendo resolution of
eternally glorious proportions. When I meditate on this psalm to the end, I am
floored with awe before God. My problems slip away. My envies towards the
unbelievers who reap the temporary, fleeting, earthly pleasures of common
grace, they erode and are removed from sight. My heart leaps with gladness
again, and I remember the ultimate hope is found in Jesus Christ alone, for the
glory of God alone, and on this earth, as I live each day, my portion is God,
who holds me up forever as His.
Does your prayer life reflect
such sincere worship? Does your discipleship demonstrate such intimate boldness
before the throne of God above? Dig into the psalms! Wrestle yourself mightily
towards the joy of salvation! That is what I find the psalms are for, as was
given this example from Psalm 73. A personal meditation to guide my praying
words, a re-focusing of my praiseful singing, a reminder of my darkness once
alive, now crucified. That is my go-to psalm. What is yours?
