Waiting doesn't come naturally to humans. It's inconvenient, it's annoying, but most of all it's painful. We're are all familiar with waiting and so was the community behind Psalm 85. Like us, they're waiting to bounce back from a less than ideal situation. In it all, they hear from the One who promises peace or 'shalom'. God is the one who offers shalom. Its completeness and wholeness to our fractured situations, relationships, and souls. And in him is where we find our enoughness. So in the wait, we can know and experience the living God who brings shalom.
Where Help Comes From – Honestly Confronting & Waiting on the Lord
In Psalm 130 we’re shown one way to approach our Righteous God: crying out honestly, demanding God’s attention, but also remembering his compassion and mercy. Even more, as a “Psalm of Ascent,” the poet of Psalm 130 insists that waiting is a legitimate and embodied prayer. Waiting is an under-rated theme in the whole of the scriptures, and the second half of this Psalm gives us some encouragement in how to embrace waiting as a spiritual practice in our own lives. Ultimately, we wait for Jesus’ return to set all things right, and as he is even now “making all things new,” we wait in the now-and-not-yet of his Kingdom, in hope.
Where Help Comes From – Find Your Soul Again
What does it mean to lose our souls? How do we get it back when it’s gone? The soul is the core of a person. It’s the soul which yearns for more of God. When we’ve been disconnected from God it’s our soul that misses him. It can ache if it goes too long without him.
This tends to happen when our desires have been left unchecked. Desires, as opposed to needs - like food, shelter, warmth etc - will always have the potential to consume us because they can never be satisfied. And the more we desire, the more our desires are unmet. The more unmet desires we have the more we grow agitated, competitive and aggressive.
The Psalmist encourages us back from the chaos of unmet desires, to putting our hope in God once more. He is not something to be desired, but he is who we need. He alone satisfies all our longing. This is a call to come back to him once more.
Where Help Comes From – Freedom from Shame
We kicked off this new series by remembering first what the psalms were for. They were the ‘hymnbook’ of the Jewish people, sung and recited at every gathering and worship service, which shows us that to them, worship was more then praise and gratitude, it was the full gamut of all human emotion. Many of them were written by King David, who embodied what Israel knew itself to be: called and broken.
Psalm 32 is the perfect confession prayer for this condition - a condition that we share too: called and broken. And it builds to a declaration of what God called David, because of Jesus, we get to be called too: righteous. But as a starting place, we have to truly believe that being disconnected from self, other, and God himself (or the condition of ’shame’ as it’s more widely known) was never ever ever what God wants for us to feel. This can be the hardest part for many of us (especially if the church has historically been the place where we’ve experienced shame the most) but it’s true: God never ever wants you to feel shame.