Yesterday morning, I
was drawn to some verses in Psalm 25 that refreshed my soul, so today I decided
to spend the week praying through the whole Psalm. As I skimmed it through to
format it for prayer journaling, I could already see how timely each phrase
will be to me. It felt good to see how God had prepared words for my soul that
transcend the ages and speak to our hearts as though they had just been written
for our edification that morning.
Here is the food for
my soul from the first verse:
“To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.”[1]
“To you”
This is super personal. What destination is my soul seeking?
God. As I live a life of toil in this foreign land of the world, what does my
soul desire? To go to God.
In the midst of all the things the world, the flesh, and the
devil have done to me, and the wounds, and self-protection, and sarkiness, and
failures that abound, what does my inner being desire more than anything? To
turn to God with everything I am, and have, and desire. No matter the
corruption of my own heart, and soul, and mind, there is no one else, and my
soul longs to go “to” my Father.
Whatever we are dealing with today, the destination is the
same, to go “to” the Father “in” Jesus Christ “by” the presence, power, and provision of the Holy Spirit. We
ought to do this first thing in the morning, and then our hearts are prepared
to turn “to” the Triune in everything
we face during the course of the day.
“O LORD”
This is ultra personal! “LORD”
in uppercase always refers to the personal name of God. It is likely pronounced
“Yahweh,” or close to that. “Jehovah” is a very poor
transliteration, but is understood as referring to this name.
While the Jews chose not to pronounce the name out of
reverence for its glory, and English translations continue this tradition,[2]
the fact that God inspired the Old Testament writers to use his personal name
tells us to come to him personally, calling on his name.
Also, since this is the ultimate, quintessential, name for
God (yes, God has many names), it invites our souls to come to God with every
name that distinguishes him, however those names relate to whatever we are
going through right now. It is as though “Yahweh” is the sum and substance of
all that is God, while his other names are like a magnificent spectrum of
colors that make up the Light of his glory.
If nothing else, when we pray, “Our Father who is in heaven,”[3]
we are to think of how personally we are able to approach God. He is a person
who has revealed himself in his names, and we are to come to him with a sense
of his all-sufficiency, and honor him with the expectations that are worthy of
the Most Holy One.
“I lift up”
We do not call God down to us (why would we want him with us
in our cesspools of misery?), but we lift up ourselves to him. We do not want a
God who comes down to us and commiserates with us in our misery, and bondage,
and fear, and guilt, and shame. That he is with us where we are is
indisputable. However, the Scriptures continually call us to see that God is in
heaven, and we are on earth, and the direction of our approach is always
upward.
This is why God tells us to lift up our eyes to the heavens,
or to look up to the hills from whence our help comes. The New Testament
writers tell us to fix our eyes on spiritual things, to fix our eyes above, to
set our minds on the things of the Spirit, to keep our minds set on the fact
that there is a heavenly city whose builder and maker is God, and Jesus is soon
coming to take us there.
This is truly a life-changer for me. All my introspective,
self-examination that simply affirms the miserable condition of my soul does
nothing to help me. However, I can come to God with the true condition of my
soul and lift it up to him. A completely different perspective.
“my soul”
We cannot escape this. What is so clearly revealed throughout
Scripture is that we must repent of our self-protection, and sarkiness, and
prideful efforts to keep God out of our inner beings, and turn to God with our
souls. Even if we do not know how to access our souls, we still lift them up to
God. Even if our souls feel like a dark mass of seething pain, or a mass of
numbness that feels nothing at all, we can still express to God that we are
lifting our souls to him as our only hope.
Of course, Ephesians 3 gives us a prayer to help us with
this. It goes something like, “I pray
that, according to the riches of your glory, you would grant us to be
strengthened with power, through your Holy Spirit, in our inner beings, so that
Jesus Christ would dwell in our hearts through faith.”[4]
That is the way to pray in such a way that lifts up our very souls to Yahweh,
the Only True God.
The rest of Psalm 25 identifies a host of situations and
needs the writer presents to Yahweh. It encourages me to begin with the
conscious approach to God in which I bring my soul, my inner being, to him in
faith that he will hear my prayers about everything else, and answer in such a
way as causes his good pleasure to fill me with the fullness of joy.
With a soul raised up
into God’s presence, I can now consider how the rest of the Psalm encourages me
to pray about whatever is going on in my life, and in the church, right now.
© 2016 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517,
Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted,
Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English
Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good
News Publishers.)
[1]
Psalm 25:1
[2]
Here is a brief explanation of why English translations of the Old Testament translate
“LORD” instead of “Yahweh” or “Jehovah”: https://carm.org/why-do-bibles-use-%E2%80%9Clord%E2%80%9D-instead-yhwh-or-jehovah
[3]
As Jesus taught us to pray in Matthew 6:9-13
[4]
The full prayer is found in Ephesians 3:14-21
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