Psalm 6

I knew I would come across one of my biggest issues in Psalms and how I see life sooner or later. And this difficulty will most certainly be reflected in the clumsiness of expression, unlike the semblance of eloquence you the reader might have been accustomed to over the past few days.

This psalm troubles me so because it exposes how real David is. To most that is a good thing, as it allows us to connect with David who is human just like us despite the plentiful records of his accolades and achievements.

However that is where my problem lies, if David was a man after God’s own heart, how the heck can he go through such anxiety, such agony, such sin. Why would one record all these downfalls and mar the image of a man supposedly so close to God? I hold David in such high regard, he is one of the uber role models in my life and I’m certainly not alone on this matter. Thus I find it difficult to comprehend his shortcomings.

For me personally, I shallowly recognise that these records of his groaning, and moaning is because he isn’t perfect, he isn’t Jesus, he isn’t God, he is just a man, cursed with sin from the day of his birth just like you and me. And that is where I’ll frequently leave it at, and ignore the deeper implications, because I’m scared of what might be revealed. I look up to David as a man of honour and integrity, and above all a man so close to God, and I don’t want his shortcomings to tarnish that image.

I admit that this fear has seeped into my own personal walk with God. When I do fall away, even just a little which happens oh so frequently, I’m scared to approach God. I am proud, and I want to “save face”, thus presenting my fallen self before God is hard. I want to be able to come before God as clean as possible, and the only way to be clean is to allow God to clean me, and because I’m too scared to approach God, it creates one hell of a vicious cycle. Eventually, after going through the motions of church enough, I do break that vicious cycle, but only because of ignorance, I leave it aside and get on with my journey, not fully dealing with the core issue and rectifying it.

So what is the core issue? I believe for me is my pride. I’ve touched on it briefly before when I discussed Psalm 3. I hold much value in who I am, and what I have achieved, and what I am able to accomplish. That is awesome when taken in the context of God, because it is what God is able to fulfil through me, however I often bypass that principle and credit all the glory to myself. When I say “all glory to God”, or “only because of God” when someone praises me, majority of the time, it only is lip service.

Similarly, when I stray, I ignore the truth that Jesus can set me straight, rather I want to be the one who sets my self straight before God. Appealing to God on the basis of my righteousness, unlike David who pleads to God for deliverance on the ground of God’s mercy. As much as I like to say those were my own words, but that would be plagiarising. In an effort to try and understand this Psalm better, I googled it and came across this, and it’s little insight on verse 4 is what struck me the most.

Even after all this writing, I’m still trying to come into grips with David not being perfect. However, what I greatly appreciate is that David though imperfect, was extremely humble and recognised that he was unable to approach God by his own works and righteousness when he sinned, and/or was distant from God. And just like David, I want to implore God for deliverance because of His enduring mercy and return fully surrendered unto Him.

Filed under: Cogitations, God, Life, Psalm

Psalm 5

I detest subjecting my senses to a barrage of stimuli upon waking up in the morning. In other words, I like waking up to peace and quiet. No music, no TV, no computer, nothing really. I especially hate waking up to my two alarm clocks set a few minutes apart, which will both inevitably be snoozed for an hour at least, a necessary evil. But when I can, I take great pleasure in slowly creeping out of bed when my body and mind is ready, and quietly start up my day. Slowly preparing for the assault on my sense that will be the day.

However there is one thing important missing in my little morning routine. That is an explicit initiative to commune with God. I do attempt to pray as I fall in and out of sleep when I snooze my alarm, but it really is pitiful. Yes there is the tired excuse of “I’m nocturnal, I can’t function properly in the morning” etc., but there is something really beautiful about praying the morning that I still haven’t learnt and appropriated in my life. But this was what spoke to me in verse 3:

3 In the morning, O LORD, you hear my voice;
in the morning I lay my requests before you
and wait in expectation. (NIV)

It’s almost as if, God doesn’t hear you any other time of the day apart from the morning. That sounds almost blasphemous, but please don’t get me wrong and hear my explanation. My understanding of this verse reminds of the first fruits principle, which simply is offer unto God that which is borne first. In the context of verse 3, the first fruit is our time. And by that logic, I infer the beginning of our day is to be rendered unto God.

This is the beautiful part about praying in the morning. In the morning, the beginning of our day, God hears our prayers, our petitions, our requests that we offer up to him, this then allows Him to answer us during the day while we’re still awake. And this is what I meant when I say God doesn’t hear you any other time of the day because He is too busy answering you! That is of course if you’re looking up to Him through the course of the day expecting.

It sheds new light to my understanding of being in constant prayer to God. I first have to engage God, and than God reciprocates for the rest of the day transforming my monologue into a dialogue as I wait expectantly for a reply. Maybe this might be the key to improving my lacklustre prayer life and there’s only one way to find out.

I know what I’m doing when I wake up tomorrow morning. Do you?

Filed under: God, Life, Psalm

Psalm 4

At the conclusion of my post on Psalm 2, to me it felt just a tad unresolved. I get this sense of “yes, God has set me free from the pleasures of the world, but what exactly is it replaced with?” It only highlights to me how impossible it is to wrap God up and what He is capable of in one Psalm. However, this psalm fills my little void of insecurity. What with exactly? God given gladness (GGG)!

7 You have put gladness in my heart,
More than in the season that their grain and wine increased. (NKJV)

What I love about it is that it is so personal. I get this image of God injecting a syringe full of glad potion into my heart. And this gladness far exceeds that which can be gleaned from the joys of the world as represented by the grain and wine. Don’t get me wrong here, God enjoys blessing us with abundance and this indirectly evokes joy in us too. After all the increase in grain and wine was a result of God shining his face upon us (verse 6), and definitely it blesses everyone and everyone is happy, but only momentarily for the season. And that is the beauty of God, the real joy giver, He is permanent.

I think that may need some paraphrasing and clarification. The ideas all make sense in my head, but writing it out linearly like this is extremely clumsy. Nonetheless, if it didn’t make sense, here’s another take of it. The gist of it is that, yes God can bless us with an abundance of material wealth, be it grain, wine, car, gear, bags, shoes etc., but these are merely temporary joy-givers. The only assurance of permanent joy that surpasses what was mentioned before is that which God has personally placed in your heart.

And a characteristic of possessing GGG is the pleasure of both lying down in peace and sleeping (verse 7, NKJV). I take that as affirmation that I do have GGG, I go to bed every night and almost immediately am asleep soundly. I guess I’m spoiled to the point that I really cannot empathise with those who find it difficult to lie down in peace, let alone sleep. Just anecdotally, I think there are many plagued by sleeping difficulties. My only encouragement are the words of David from verse 4 and 5:

4 Be angry, and do not sin.
Meditate within your heart on your bed, and be still.        Selah
5 Offer the sacrifices of righteousness,
And put your trust in the LORD. (NKJV)

Though I may be bless with good sleep, yet I know there are still many sleeps to be slept. Thus for me, I should not and will not take my GGG for granted, instead I will daily offer right sacrifices and trust in the Lord. And I am glad that God alone, makes me dwell in safety.

Filed under: God, Life, Psalm

Psalm 3

Confidence is such a transient character trait. To some, a person who is confident, may be seen as arrogant. If only confidence could be quantified, it’ll be like a RPG character with a confidence stat/rating. Where anything beyond a 73 in confidence becomes arrogance, and than anything beyond 97 falls into the total asshole jerk category. I know for myself, that on any given day, my imaginary confidence stat can run the entire scale. Well maybe not to the point of a non-existent confidence, after all one of my five strengths according to Gallup, is self-assurance.

And I’m sure, one of the greatest man in the bible, King David, must surely have been born with a bone named confidence. I mean, this guy was so confident, he was practically fearless. Think about it, some kid, not even a soldier, stands up for his country and slays the defying Goliath. Psalm 3, reveals to me where his confidence comes from.

3But You, O Lord, are a shield for me, my glory, and the lifter of my head. (NKJV)

I don’t think David could make it any more clearer than that. I’ll emphasise for good measure. Put simply, God was David’s confidence.

In my limited ability to read the Chinese bible, the shield is understood as protection from all four sides. Well correct me if I’m wrong, but I saw the chinese word for four in there, and that wasn’t in the English translation. Nonetheless, compared to the typical front-protecting only shield, God has got your back, and your side, and your front. Really, with God covering all bases for you, what do you have to be scared of?

But God goes beyond mere protection. He is our glory. As confident as David is, he does not say God glorifies us. This statement evokes a sense of an absolute and complete surrender of our being and identity to God. It’s not “less of me and more of You (God)”, rather it is “none of me, and all of You”. Can I humble myself to such a point of complete surrender? Just that thought scares me, even though I know that I’m worth more when all of me is God’s glory, there are things so deep, that I still hold too, whether consciously or subconsciously that prevents me from fully realising this truth, and I know I have to work on it.

However I can be assured that surrendering my all to God, does not mean being pussy whipped and hen pecked into submission. Because of the priceless value of the Glory of God in my life, my head can be lifted high. This is the confidence that David walked in, so much so that he is unfazed by the tens of thousands foes chanting “God will not deliver him”.

Not only that, he is so assured in God that he can lie down to sleep surrounded by the tens of thousand rallied against him. However this is not assurance that he will live. Rather by the tone of voice, it seems more like “I’m going to sleep Lord, if it is for me to be with You now, let them take my life, if not sustain me and let me see another day.” Kinda like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in Nebuchadneszzar’s fiery furnace. This is the sort of godly confidence I want.

With a God-centric confidence, arrogance is non-existent. However, I still take great pride in what very little I have. And that is my challenge, to have the balls like King David to face giants, to sleep when surrounded by 10000 men after his life and to be completely surrendered to God.

Lord, You are my glory.

Filed under: God, Life, Psalm

Psalm 2

My quest to accomplish a Psalm a day has been on a hiatus a bit more than temporary! But after reading this, and all of the author’s subsequent post, I was greatly inspired to resume writing again. This was what particularly struck me from that post about Genesis 11:

But the truth is, most of what I am doing right now seems really easy. Not because I am overtly talented or smart, but because God is. I feel like all I have to do is stay close to Him and show up to the blank page. I didn’t create any of the cool stuff that is happening, so I don’t have as much pressure to maintain it as I anticipated. I get to sit back and enjoy watching God do the impossible.

That’s kind of the opposite of what happened in Genesis 11 with the tower of Babel. The people wanted to reach the heavens and make their own name known around the earth. God wasn’t cool with that. So He stepped in and made everything impossible by fracturing the common language into a thousand different dialects.

After primed by that post, Psalm 2 finally began to make sense to me. I’ve spent the odd train ride into work every so often reading and re-reading this Psalm coveting some thought provoking insight, and when that failed, offered up some pitifully insincere prayer to God where the implied message is ‘let me build up my tower of Babel through my awesome wisdom and knowledge’. That is most definitely a surefire way for God to answer you… with a resolute no.

Just like the confusion of language that occurred at the tower of babel, maybe a confusion of bible version made it that bit more difficult to understand. I was especially hung up at verse three when the ‘kings of the earth’ says what I thought was in reference to the Lord and his Anointed One “Let us break their chains and throw off their fetters” (NIV). It puzzled me as to why the heck would the Lord and his Anointed One be bounded by chains. Have you not won already if you fight a bounded up God? It’s like stealing candy from a baby (excuse the cliched idiom). Why would you want to set God loose when He is omnipotent?

Reading the NKJV enlightened me. It was not that the kings of the earth had God bounded and wanted to destroy His chains when conspiring against God. Rather it was their desire to break free from God:

3 “Let us break Their bonds in pieces
And cast away Their cords from us.” (NKJV)

This stems from a marred image of God, where God has a tyrannic rule over our lives, choking us, keeping our hands chained, and feet fettered. Put in modern context, issues that are relevant would be like: “Being Christian, God spoils all the fun, I can’t drink, gamble, fuck around etc., I want my freedom.” And that was exactly what I did in the beginning of the year. I took a huge turn, and wanted to break these “chains” that God had around me.

And what does God do? He laughs and scoffs at how silly these actions are. I suppose heaven must be a pretty jolly place with God bellowing out laughter at how often I’ve attempted to try and break these “chains” just to have some fun.

Regardless, God plays the power card right here, He exercises his authority as the supreme being that reigns over all the universe here. I believe we forced God’s hand because of our tarnish image of God as the dictator of lives, and thus God appropriates himself as such.

But the end is not nigh.

6 “Yet I [God] have set My King
On My holy hill of Zion.” (NKJV)

God has given us a King – Jesus Christ – and that is fully realised in the new testament where we are loosen from the bondage of sin.

As amazing as that is, and not for one moment am I downplaying the importance of salvation, but there is something even more astounding.

God has enabled you and me to proclaim and declare a decree that states “we are his son and his daughter, anything we ask for is not to big for Him, as the nations are our inheritance, and we have authority over it”. (verse 8 paraphrased). This is the freedom that “the conspiring kings and rulers of the earth” lust after in attempting to break away from God. As oxymoronic it may be, rendering our all unto our Father God does not mean entering a life devoid of freedom, rather we are now completely liberated from sin and the world is our oyster as a son and daughter of the most high.

My encouragement is that we need to change our image of God and realign our relationship with God. No longer should we see ourselves bounded by a prudent set of rules and regulations, rather approach God as a loving father who desires to “bless you for taking refuge in Him” (verse 12).

Filed under: God, Life, Psalm