I'm Praising God Anyway!

Psalm 57 is a strange and beautiful cry of David, the shepherd who would later become king of Israel. 

The superscription says that he composed it while hiding out in a cave from King Saul. Saul could see how God favored David: Saul had been faithless and there would come a time when God would displace him from the throne and give it to David. 

But David was unwilling to lay a finger on Saul, the Lord's anointed and so, despite his military prowess and popularity among the people, instead of defending himself against the king, David ran. And hid in caves.

David prays:

I cry out to God Most High,
    to God, who vindicates me.
 He sends from heaven and saves me,
    rebuking those who hotly pursue me—
    God sends forth his love and his faithfulness.

 I am in the midst of lions;
    I am forced to dwell among ravenous beasts—
men whose teeth are spears and arrows,
    whose tongues are sharp swords. (Psalm 57:2-4)

David knows his dire situation and prays for deliverance to the only One he believes can help.

It's here that David prays:

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens;
    let your glory be over all the earth. (Psalm 57:5)

Whatever God does, David is saying, he prays that God will be exalted and His glory seen by everyone. Yes, he wants to be delivered. Yes, he asks that God spare his life. But more than anything, he wants his God to be given glory. He wants the whole creation to give God the honor and praise that is God's due.

In verse 6 of the psalm, David again speaks of the plans for his destruction being hatched and implemented by his enemies. 

But then, David prays not only that God will be exalted by the nations of the world (he will pray that again in verse 11), he expresses his intention to himself sing God's praises, even in the midst of his distress:

My heart, O God, is steadfast,
    my heart is steadfast;
    I will sing and make music.
 Awake, my soul!
    Awake, harp and lyre!
    I will awaken the dawn.

I will praise you, Lord, among the nations;
    I will sing of you among the peoples.
 For great is your love, reaching to the heavens;
    your faithfulness reaches to the skies.

David is making no deals with God. He hasn't prayed, "God, deliver me and I will sing your praises." David has a confidence in God that no matter what happens, he will belong to God. And no matter what conditions prevail in his life, he will praise God. He will make music to God. He will praise God among all peoples and nations.

Last night, I was feeling down. No, bleak. Almost everything I've tried to accomplish in the past two weeks has ended in failure. Or at least that's how I felt. From technology (for work) to taxes (my daughter's), from giving myself a haircut that was a disaster to trying to record some of my songs on a new app, from an online Catechism lesson plan that didn't turn out as I'd hoped to the ongoing fear that all of us who are in at-risk categories feel in the midst of this coronavirus plague, I felt accosted by failure, even by death.

But as I prayed before going to bed last night, I realized how self-absorbed my thoughts had become.

My call is to praise God among the nations, when I succeed and when I fail. My call is to "sing" of God among the peoples.

David said that he was so intent on fulfilling this call that he would "awaken the dawn" with his songs of praise to God!

I went to bed with a different perspective. Then this morning, I woke to see this psalm appointed for my quiet time reading in The One Year Chronological Bible. The question is never whether I have succeeded or failed in my own eyes. It's not even whether I live or die. It's whether I'm following Jesus, the One Who gives life and peace and forgiveness to those who turn from the stupid, futile ways of thinking in this selfish, fallen world. No matter what, He is my Deliverer!

God, forgive my bellyaching and self-pity. Your Son Jesus died and rose from the grave, assuring us that all who turn from sin and follow Him have a share in His victory over sin, death, and the grave. And we live with You now and forever. In Jesus, I belong to You and You deserve my praise always. Help me today to praise You and sing Your praises by whatever means You give me to do so.In Jesus' name, I pray. Amen



[This song, composed and performed by Bruce Cockburn during his "Christian phase" in the 1980s, always reminds me of the last line in verse 8 of the psalm. At the time of the song's release, Cockburn called To Raise the Morning Dawn one of his "God songs." Like David, he seemed intent to wake up the day with praises of God. I pray that he will come again to his former love for Jesus and follow Him. He has more songs he could sing in praise of the God we know in Jesus Christ!]

"...this world's walls no longer stay my eyes"

I love this poem from Malcolm Guite's soon to be published new cycle of poems.

I'm especially fond of several lines.

First, this one: "Then this world’s walls no longer stay my eyes..."

When heaven invades my world in Christ, previous limitations on my vision begin to dissolve. I see beyond my stunted world to catch glimpses of the eternal, of God, of other people made in God's image, as in need of love, grace, and mercy as me, of who I am by God's grace given in Christ. To use the words of another poet-musician, Bruce Cockburn (see below), Christ, not us, as Cockburn has it, kicks at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

And then these lines:

"I see his tree, with blossom on its bough,
And nothing can be ordinary now"

Beautiful! I look on the One we crucified and pierced by our sin and see in it the way to a new life, blossoming, exploding with eternal possibilities. How after seeing that, can anything ever be ordinary again? If life can spring from so undeserved a death, God can bring undeserved new life to even me.

'The Promise and the Perils of Democracy'

That's the name of a three-part series I wrote back in 2005. The reference to then-current events dates the pieces a bit. But I think that the principles I talk about still hold true. Check it out and tell me what you think (don't expect the usual political mumbo-jumbo or, as Bruce Cockburn once put it, the "idolatry of ideology"):

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Somebody Touched Me by Bruce Cockburn

Where Real Pain and Real Pleasure Lead Us

"A heart that is broken is a heart that is open" (U2, Cedarwoode Road)

"One day you're waiting for the sky to fall,
"The next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all" (Bruce Cockburn, Lovers in a Dangerous Time)

Through lots of my years, I've sought to live a placid life. I don't suppose that's so different from most people. We all want, in the words of another song, this one Paul McCartney's Too Much Rain, "a happy and peaceful life."

But I realize that much of the placid life I sought was actually a lifeless life.

I tried to avoid confrontation, often when it would have been best to take it on, because I didn't want upleasantness.

I held most people at arm's length, despite a surface friendliness, because, after all, I could be moving on and goodbyes to those you really care about hurt. Besides, some people turn on you and cause you pain.

I would even avoid things of great beauty for the grief I projected they would someday bring me when they were no longer there. ("You're gonna make me lonesome when you go," Dylan sang in his 1974 song.)

What I have come to realize--what I am still coming to realize--is that while a person may achieve a stale, lifeless placidity by staying away from the pains and pleasures of human existence, there is less of life, less of love, and less of God in a life of avoidance.

In his book, The Screwtape Letters, a work of fiction that purports to be the correspondence of a senior tempter with a junior tempter, C.S. Lewis has his evil protagonist advise his charge to keep his patient--the human being the junior tempter is trying to dislodge from relationship with God--from experiencing any real pain or real pleasure.

Real pleasure only comes from God.

It's God Who created the gift of sex, for example. It can bring authentic pleasure to men and women committed to one another and respectful of one another: physical pleasure, emotional pleasure, a sense of being loved and accepted no matter what the rest of the world may think or say.

It's God Who created the gifts of food and taste. It's a wonderful pleasure to bite into an apple and taste its sweet tang, feel the crunch of of the fruit in your teeth. And it's good for us.

But pleasures like these can be marred by misuse or overuse or abuse.

Sex can be seen as an end in itself that doesn't bring the whole package of pleasure God intended it to bring.

Food can be candied and processed and perverted and overeaten, an object that results not in pleasure but dullness, addiction, and obesity.

Lewis' devil concedes that only God can create real pleasure and that hell has found no way to replicate it in its pure form.

Real pain, on the other hand, comes from really living in the depths of life.

There are some who manufacture faux pain in order to call attention to themselves or to invest their lives with drama that makes them feel as though they're living. ("Suffering was the only thing that made me feel I was alive," Carly Simon sang in Haven't Got Time for the Pain.)

We live surrounded by such people: drama queens and drama kings. They parcel out gossip to make themselves seem important. They're people who are, if not in the center of some drama, real or imagined, in the know about it.

They crow about the offenses, real and imagined, perpetrated against them on Facebook, at the water cooler, in the packed dockets of courts, and in church fellowship halls.

But contact with real pain, a real consequence of this world's enslavement to sin, death, and darkness, is very different than contact with fake pain: The news that we've had a major heart attack, when we receive a diagnosis of cancer, when a loved one dies, when a friend deserts us, being physically abused, being persecuted. Those are occasions of real pain.

Real pleasure and real pain can have the same effect on us though, says Lewis. They can bring us back to reality, out of our dream worlds, away from our selfish attempts to insulate ourselves from reality, to deny our mortality, our finitude, and our need for the God Who made us and Who came to our world to save us from sin, death, and darkness and to give us the life with Him for which we were made.

In Psalm 8, King David sings: "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens." Pleasure in looking at the skies, which are only part of God's creation, led David to the truth that this amazing universe has a creator and He is to be praised. (I find myself looking at and taking pictures of the skies all the time these days.)

Then, David, considering God's goodness, is led later in the psalm to wonder: "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?"

Real pleasure often leads people to praise, even those who may not consider themselves especially religious. In his 1971 song, Duncan, Paul Simon has the lead character sing, "I was playing my guitar/Lying underneath the stars/Just thanking the Lord/For my fingers."

Praise, I believe, in fact, is the truest, most real thing that human beings can ever engage in because through it, we acknowledge the fundamental truth of the universe: God is God and I'm not and that's good.

Real pain too, will lead us into the precincts of real truth--and the author of truth, the One Who is truth Himself. This, as we've mentioned here many times before, was the experience of a first century Christian named Paul. In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul talks about the many wonderful things God had shown him. But, he said, to keep him from getting too full of himself for being so blessed, God had allowed an unidentified thorn in the flesh to remain in his life. Paul asked for its removal three times. But God had told him no, "My grace is sufficient." "I'm all you need," God is telling Paul. "Your real pain will pass one day. But I love and am with you now. That's enough. Life with me is all there is of reality, now through the fog of pain and death, but one day in eternity, in its fullness and beauty and peace."

So long as we live in this world, we will be susceptible to real pain and real pleasure. We can't pretend they're not there. But I'm convinced that it's only in the midst of them that we can become either grateful enough or desperate enough to know God and experience His presence in our lives. Real pleasure and real pain break us open to His grace and love, if we will open the door from our sides. The risen Jesus says in Revelation 3:20: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me."

Real pleasure and pain usher me into reality and truth, the place where I can most clearly see and know God.

That's because neither real pleasure nor real pain leave me feeling that I am in control.

And that's good, because, despite my efforts to create a false placidity, I never was in control in the first place.

No Other Name

A Thought for Today:
There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12, New Testament).

A man named Peter, an early follower of Jesus, spoke those words to religious leaders in Jerusalem after he and another Jesus-follower, John, were ordered not to speak of Jesus again. They had also been beaten.

But Peter said that they couldn't help but speak of Jesus, no matter what the threats. Peter persisted in following Jesus because he had experienced Jesus' tough love and because he knew that Jesus had risen from the dead.

The process of dying will cause any person to fear. That's only natural. But the follower of Jesus has no fear about the time beyond the grave. We know that we belong to God forever!

That's why true Christians have always been in the forefront of fighting for what is right. Wilberforce and Newton fought slavery. Tutu combatted injustice in South Africa. Mother Teresa comforted the dead and stood against abortion as a form of birth control. Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church stood against Hitler and the Nazis. Billy Graham has continued to share Jesus Christ with the world in spite of almost constant death threats and the dismissive condescension of elites, both inside and outside the Church. Movements to establish hospitals and higher education have usually begun among those who confess Christ.

In spite of the hatred and threats heaped upon them, followers of Jesus have the "right stuff" to persist. That right stuff is an eternal relationship with Jesus Christ!

Karl Marx criticized religion as an opiate, insulating people from their own pain, preventing them from doing anything about injustice by focusing the religious on the rewards of a sweet by-and-by. Marx got it precisely wrong. Knowing that our eternities are secure gives followers of Jesus the freedom to live this life to the full.

When Archbishop Desmond Tutu fought against apartheid in South Africa, he received daily death threats. A reporter asked him why he persisted. Tutu replied that he couldn't help it; injustice was wrong and he would fight it. Besides, he added, death isn't the worst thing that can happen to a Christian.

God plants within the hearts of those who surrender themselves to Him through Jesus Christ, a love for the things God loves and a hatred for those things God hates. Although such passions will put them at odds with the prevailing values of the world, Jesus-followers will persist. They will, in that memorable phrase of Bruce Cockburn's, rise like grass through cement. Unafraid of death, appalled by the evil they see, they fight for what's right.

The greatest evil in the world is the imprisonment of sin that afflicts the human race. According to Psalm 51, we are born in sin. The Bible says that proper payment for our sin is death (Romans 6:23).

But God doesn't want us to die. He wants us to live with Him forever. That's why Jesus came into the world, lived a perfect and sinless life, died on a cross in our places, and rose from the dead. The most famous passage in the Bible quotes Jesus as He says, For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life (John 3:16).

Do you want to be free from the fears that hold you back and keep you from being all that God intended you to be--all that you know, deep inside, that you were meant to be?

Do you want to be free of those nagging feelings of inadequacy that dog you?

Do you want to experience peace in spite of the chaos?

Do you want to move toward becoming the loving person you dream of being?

Do you want to be confident about this life and the next?

Give your life to Jesus Christ and you will begin to experience these things. You will find yourself free to lovingly fight for what is right...free to act in loving ways toward others, free to enter the process of becoming the person God had in mind when He made you. And you will be unafraid of what is beyond the grave. You will belong to God. Surrender to Jesus Christ today and start truly living!