Tag: Psalm 40

The Hope We Need When We Feel Like Giving Up

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psalm 40-2

I hear my son singing his favorite song after I put him to bed for naptime.

Singing himself to sleep…isn’t that the sweetest?

But he’s not singing “Jesus Loves Me” or “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”

He’s not even singing “The Ladybug Picnic” (our personal favorite) or “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.”

No, at the top of his lungs, he is crooning out:

“Bob, the Quitter.  Can He pix it?  Bob, the Quitter.  Yes, he pix it!” (he’s still working on the ‘f’ sound for ‘fix.)

This is not how the song goes.

This summer, my daughters have been making up parodies of the theme songs to preschool TV shows. They’ve tackled all the big ones: Elmo, Little Einsteins, Blue’s Clues, Wonder Pets.

And now this: Bob, the Builder.

Unfortunately, my son has adopted their parody of good old construction site Bob and instead of singing “Bob, the Builder….” he now sings “Bob, the Quitter” every single time.

My daughters are now under strict orders not to sing any of their parodies within his hearing in case they ruin yet another song for him.

And, whenever my son breaks into this now-ruined tune, I try to sing it the right way, emphasizing “Builder” with great force so he’ll hear me and make the correction.

So far, this has failed.  Bob the Quitter it remains.

My boy has dug in his heels on this one, which of course makes this parody even funnier.

He refuses to quit singing a song about a “quitter” who apparently can indeed fix things despite his propensity for giving up!

It boggles the mind.

Still, while I admire my son’s tenacity and willingness to hang on tight, I’m sure at some point he’ll correct his little ditty and sing with just as much heart: “Bob, the Builder, Can he fix it?  Bob the Builder, yes he can!”

And I’ll rejoice because, not only will the lyrics finally be correct, he’ll get the whole point of the song in the first place:

Don’t quit.  Don’t give up.

Don’t get bogged down by the problem; keep your eyes fixed on the goal and the finish and the completed work.

After all, that’s what we all need at times, the reminder to just keep going.

When we’re broken and overwhelmed, weary and ready to give up, maybe we can’t tackle everything before us.

But this next thing, this next calling, this next task, that we can do with God’s help.

One more step. One more day.

One more prayer even when you haven’t seen results.

One more act of obedience to God even if it feels overlooked or unappreciated.

One more choice to be faithful despite the unfaithfulness of others or to act with integrity even when others fail.

God knows what it is we truly need in the moments when we want to quit, what we need to hang on one tiny step at a time.

When Paul was imprisoned in Jerusalem and the forces against him seemed overwhelming, look what God did for him:

The following night the Lord stood by him and said, “Take courage, for as you have testified to the facts about me in Jerusalem, so you must testify also in Rome” (Acts 23:11 ESV). 

“Take courage.”

That’s what the Lord told Paul.

Why?  Because it wasn’t over yet.  There was more to come.  Paul didn’t need to worry because God promised there was more to this story.

God didn’t tell Paul everything, but he did show the next step was Rome.

And, this is what I pray when I feel like throwing up my hands to concede defeat,

“God, help me remember there is more to this story. Give me courage.  Help me hold on until you finish this work.”

Even more than that, I remember the Psalmist who said:

I waited patiently for the Lord;
    he inclined to me and heard my cry.
2 He drew me up from the pit of destruction,
    out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
    making my steps secure.
3 He put a new song in my mouth,
    a song of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear,
    and put their trust in the Lord (Psalm 40:1-3).

I ask God for the “new song” only He can give.

Then I set my heart on that future, for the day when the pit will be behind me and I’ll be standing on the steadiness of a rock.  My feet won’t be shaky.  The ground beneath me will be strong.

And I’ll sing a “new song…of praise to our God.”

For all of us who feel like laying down and giving up, may we ask God today for a new vision, a new song, and the hope we need to just keep going each new day.

 

VBS for Grown-Ups: Even When You’re Left Out….

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Vacation Bible School.  That’s just for kids, right?  Silly songs.  Silly skits.  Silly costumes.  Kids stuff.  Sure.

But is there any message in Scripture that God delivers just for people 12 and under? We older and ‘wiser’ ones sometimes make faith so complicated when the simple beauty of truth is what we really need.

This week, I’ll be singing songs and doing those silly skits from Group Publishing’s Weird Animals VBS at my own church.

Here on the blog, I’ll be sharing with you those same stories, the same lessons, the same truth, but for grown-ups.

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 Who is like the Lord our God, the One who sits enthroned on high,
  who stoops down to look on the heavens and the earth?
He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
  he seats them with princes, with the princes of his people (Psalm 113:5-8).

“Mom, can you tie my shoe?”

I kneel down, slightly off balance, and whip the laces into loops and knots.

“Mom, can you wash my hair?”

Bending over a daughter with her eyes pinched tightly shut, I scrub with shampoo and rinse away suds.

“Mom, can you show me how to play this on the piano?”

I stoop to press the keys, one hand pointing to the music, the other playing notes.

“Mom, can you hold my hand?”

Tilted to one side, I lean over to entwine our fingers and we swing our arms together.

“Mom, I’m hurt!”

Dropping to the ground, I clean the wound and press on the miraculously comforting Princess Band-Aid.

Life with children is a life bent low.  It’s the ministry of kneeling down, stooping over, leaning, and bending to wipe, scrub, heal, hold, read, listen–to love.  So often, it’s the movement down to hug a child and lift her up.

God bends low to reach His children, too.

He could have sat, poised on His righteous throne, holy and unresponsive to our need.

But He didn’t. Jesus Christ, our Savior, our Sacrifice, is the great Love of God bending low so He could raise us up.

And He continued that ministry.  Finding Peter’s mother-in-law sick in bed with a fever, Jesus “bent over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her” (Luke 4:39).

Petitioned by a leper for healing, Jesus “reached out his hand and touched the man” (Luke 5:13).

Confronted by an angry mob gathering stones to throw at the adulterous woman, Jesus “stooped down and wrote on the ground” (John 8:8).

He could have stood at a distance.  He had the power to heal with words alone, and sometimes He did.

These ten lepers, society’s outcasts, living away for so long from family, friends, faith, they didn’t even know they could come to Jesus.  They knew the rules.  Stay away from others.  So, “they stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, ‘Jesus, Master, have pity on us!'” (Luke 17:12 NIV).

And He healed them with a word, just simple instructions.

But other times He chose to make it physical, and it so often required Him to bend low, to stoop, to reach out.matthew28-20

Jesus didn’t mind the mess.  He touched the “unclean,” when it was against the rules for them to have contact with other humans for fear they’d stain the holiness of others.

Jesus got down in the dirt with people.  And not just the high and mighty, the lofty, the righteous, the elite.

With the shunned, ignored, rejected.  With the outcasts.  With the unclean and the sin-stained.

With them.

With us.

Even now, He promises, “surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20 NIV).

If you feel left out…rejected…outside….outcast…shunned….dirty….not good enough, never good enough, never gonna be good enough…..

Drink in this truth:

Even when you’re left out, Jesus loves you.

God is not waiting for us to get cleaned up, to overcome, to fix it all up, to force holiness either.   He isn’t put off by our faces smudged with dirt, our hands caked with mud, our fingernails lined with soil from trying to claw our way out of the pit we’re in.

Instead, David tells us:

“He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand (Psalm 40:2).

You cannot be so deep in the darkness to be beyond His reach. You cannot be so covered in dirt that He’s scared away or disgusted.

God puts on His muddy boots, wades in and rescues us so that we can be with Him.

As Lysa TerKeurst writes:

We may be overlooked by others, but we are handpicked by God.

 

Originally posted May 11, 2012

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  Her book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, is available now!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2014 Heather King

 

God in Muddy Boots

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 Who is like the Lord our God, the One who sits enthroned on high,
  who stoops down to look on the heavens and the earth?
He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
  he seats them with princes, with the princes of his people (Psalm 113:5-8).

“Mom, can you tie my shoe?”

I kneel down, slightly off balance, and whip the laces into loops and knots.

“Mom, can you wash my hair?”

Bending over a daughter with her eyes pinched tightly shut, I scrub with shampoo and rinse the suds away carefully.

“Mom, can you show me how to play this on the piano?”

I stoop to press the keys, one hand pointing to the music, the other playing notes, showing melody, showing tempo, showing dynamics.

“Mom, can you hold my hand?”

Tilted to one side, I lean over to entwine our fingers and we swing our arms together to the rhythm of our pace.

“Mom, I’m hurt!”

Dropping to the ground, I clean the wound and press on the miraculous Band-Aid that instantly heals all hurts whether or not blood is involved.

Life with children is a life bent low.  It’s the ministry of kneeling down, stooping over, leaning, and bending to wipe, scrub, heal, hold, read, listen–to love.  So often, it’s the movement down to hug a child and lift her up.

God bends low to reach His children, too.

He could have sat, poised on His righteous throne, holy and unresponsive to our need, drumming His fingers while waiting for us to reach up to Him.

But He didn’t.  Seeing that we could never be righteous enough, He came to us instead, abandoning glory to take up the humble life in human flesh.  Jesus Christ, our Savior, our Sacrifice, is the great Love of God as He bent low in order to raise us up.

And He continued that ministry as He healed and forgave.  Finding Peter’s mother-in-law sick in bed with a fever, Jesus “bent over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her” (Luke 4:39).  Petitioned by a leper for healing, Jesus “reached out his hand and touched the man” (Luke 5:13).  Confronted by an angry mob prepared to stone a woman caught in adultery, Jesus “stooped down and wrote on the ground” (John 8:8).

Jesus could have simply spoken words of healing and forgiveness over anyone.  He had the power to heal with words alone, and sometimes He did.

But other times He chose to make it physical, and it so often required Him to bend low, to stoop, to reach out.  How else can a perfect and holy God touch us who are broken, sick, or dirty from sin?

Jesus didn’t mind the mess.  He touched people even when they were religiously “unclean,” when it was against the rules for them to have contact with other humans because they were so tainted that they’d stain the holiness of others.

This week, at an end-year celebration of a Bible Study group, a woman shared what she learned by studying David’s life.  She described putting on her muddy boots, the sweat pants she doesn’t care about and the raggedy t-shirt that means nothing to her and thinking nothing of getting down into the dirt.

Jesus got down in the dirt with people.  In the same way, this woman said, God didn’t mind getting down into the dirt with King David and He’s willing to do this for us, as well. 

God is not waiting for us to get cleaned up, to overcome, to fix it all up, to climb and clamber to success.   He isn’t put off by our faces smudged with dirt, our hands caked with mud, our fingernails lined with soil from trying to claw our way out of the pit we’re in.

Instead, David tells us:

“He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand (Psalm 40:2).

In order to lift David up, God had to reach down low, stretching a hand deep into the darkness to pull the shepherd-king on out to safety and firm ground and light and life.

For those who find themselves in the pit now, remember that God will reach low to you and He will lift you up.  You cannot be so deep in the darkness to be beyond His ability to save you. You cannot be so covered in dirt that He’s scared away or disgusted.

God puts on His muddy boots at times to wade in and rescue us.

Then He calls us to engage in this same ministry of bending low to reach others.  We don’t walk by friends in caverns and potholes and chasms, pretending that everything is all right or hoping for another bystander to reach down and rescue them.

We don’t turn up our noses at the dirt on another’s face,  refusing to stoop down to hold their hand and pull them up.

God wants us to be willing to kneel, stoop, bend, lean, and drop to the ground in all of the humility and love that naturally flows out of people who have been saved themselves.

It’s the ministry of a mom.  It’s the ministry of a child to an aging parent.  It’s the ministry of teachers and a ministry to the wayward and the lonely, the lost and the hurting.  It’s the ministry to the broken and a ministry to the least of these.

It’s the ministry of bending low to love another just as God has done for us.

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer for www.myfrienddebbie.com and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2012 Heather King

Twisted Ankle; Twisted Truth

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“Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful”
Hebrews 10:23

For some reason when I clean, I clean fast.  No slow and methodical wiping of the rag or scrubbing of the dish for me.

In an old episode of How Clean is Your House (love that show!), the expert cleaner explained how many calories you could work off just by vacuuming.  I probably double that with my aerobic cleaning.

So, yesterday I snatched up the trash bag with an upwards yank, dropped it on the floor, tied it up in record time and dashed out the front door, hopped down the front steps, tossed open the trash can lid, plopped the trash bag in, released the lid so it crashed down and kept on walking in one nearly unbroken stride.

Unbroken, that is, until I stepped down on what I thought was solid ground, but was really a sink hole courtesy of our friendly front yard mole.  My ankle twisted in an unexpected direction.  I felt the wince of pain as I almost hit the ground.

Now, fortunately, it was just a momentary shock of pain.  In a few seconds I was limping down the driveway for the mail.  A minute later I was back to the sport of Extreme Cleaning with no long-term damages.

But life in its way is no less unexpected and sometimes no less shockingly painful.

It can be as simple as the surprise pitfalls in a single day.  Like the fact that my house was passably clean when we awoke this morning.  Then my three daughters painted beautiful artwork, and each other, and the chairs, the table, the carpet, their clothes.  After an unplanned mid-morning bath, all of the paint flecked off their bodies onto the bathtub.

Surprise!  Suddenly my day became a whole-house scrub-down and laundry marathon.

It can be as paralyzing as a life-changing twist.  The phone call with bad news.  The hack to your budget.  The visit to the doctor.  The sputter of a car.  The removing of a wedding ring.

Somehow in the middle of this topsy-turvy, always uncertain, shake-up of a world, the Psalmist wrote:

“My heart, O God, is steadfast, my heart is steadfast; I will sing and make music” (Psalm 57:7, NIV). 

Reading the preceding verses makes it clear, David wasn’t treading on a comfortable path when he penned this Psalm.  He wrote these particular words “when he had fled from Saul into the cave.”

So, how then, could his heart be steadfast?  How could he be “firmly fixed in place, immovable, not subject to change, firm in belief” while running for his life from the powerful king of an enemy? (Merriam-Webster).

And what about us?

Those minor unexpected annoyances in my morning left me cranky and quick-to-snap.

Major upsets to my plans and life cost me a night of sleep.

Steadfast?  Not me.  Not hardly.

The trouble is that the steadiness of my belief seems utterly dependent on the ease of the path I trod.

It’s not dependent enough on Him, My God, My Firm Foundation, My Solid Rock.

Martha sank deep into an unexpected pit when Jesus didn’t heal her brother, Lazarus.  Instead, she left the place of mourning over his death in order to confront Jesus about it privately.  “’Lord,’ Martha said to Jesus, ‘if you had been here, my brother would not have died.'” (John 11:21).

Jesus knew just what to ask her:  “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (Luke 11:25-26).

Did she believe this?  Did she believe that Jesus was more than a nice friend and successful religious teacher?  Did she believe in Him was resurrection and life?

Martha regained her footing on this shaky ground by stating her belief: “Yes, Lord,” she replied, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world” (John 11:27).

Yesterday, I felt the familiar suffocation of fear at some unexpected news.

Today, I experienced the all-too-familiar bad attitude over some twists in my day.

And Jesus asks me, “What do you believe?”

He asks the same of you.

You may be tempted to spout off the Nicene Creed or fall back safely on the answers of a good Christian girl.

Really, though.  Truly.  Honestly.

What do you believe?

Shaky ground and a loss of footing are always signs of belief problems.

It means:

we’ve been putting our faith in ourselves, in others, in our circumstances.
we’re relying on our own plans.
we’re depending on our own strength.
we’ve bought into lies somewhere along the way.

As you catch your breath after a fall, steady yourself by reaffirming the truth.

I believe God loves me, always, unconditionally, fully.
I believe that God’s grace covers over all my sins.
I believe that I will never go through any circumstance alone; God will never leave me nor forsake me.
I believe that He can do anything, even more than I could ever imagine.
I believe that even when I see tragedy, God is working on my behalf and for my good.
I believe that God will be glorified in every situation.
I believe God will provide for my every need.

Do you believe this?

Then, with the Psalmist you can say:

“He lifted me out of the pit of despair,
      out of the mud and the mire.
   He set my feet on solid ground
      and steadied me as I walked along (Psalm 40:2, NLT)

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer for www.myfrienddebbie.com and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2011 Heather King