Written by: Deborah Forman - National Centre for Youth Ministry
Psalm 31 v 19-22
How great is your goodness that you have stored up for those who fear you,
that you have given to those who trust you.
You do this for all to see.
You protect them by your presence from what people plan against them.
You shelter them from evil words.
Praise the LORD.
His love to me was wonderful when my city was attacked.
In my distress, I said,
" God cannot see me!"
But you heard my prayer when I cried out to you for help.
Notes
In this part of the psalm, the writer is talking about the sense of comfort
and protection that comes from casting one's care on God. The relationship
we are called to have with God is one of trust, reverence and right appreciation
of his character. If we are able to respond to God in this way then he will
reveal his goodness and his love to us.
This does not mean that we shall be immune from people treating us badly or saying hurtful things to us. When people treat us with unkindness they are attempting to deny our humanity and our very being. For those of us whose sense of identity is bound up with Christ - who have a sense of being loved and known - their attempts will be in vain. Like all of us there are times when we imagine that God is totally absent and that we are on our own. We imagine that we are too small and insignificant, even in our distress, for God to take any notice of us. But we are wrong to think this, and it is perhaps particularly when we are in distress that God hears our prayer.
Think of a time or occasion when you have felt alone and unseen by God. Did you come to God in prayer? Did you tell him how you felt? How did it feel talking to God? God will never force himself upon us but if we turn to him he will always be there.
Prayer
Gracious Lord, give me such confidence and trust in your saving presence that
I remember to come before you in my joy and in my distress. Amen
Psalm 31 v 23-24
Love the LORD, all you who belong to him.
The LORD protects those who truly believe, but he punishes the proud as much
as they have sinned.
All you who put your hope in the LORD be strong and brave.
Notes
God is interested in the relationship he has with us, his children, and our
response to this relationship must be to love him. Sometimes it feels a bit
strange to be asked to love God, because we only think in terms of the love
we have for parents, siblings, friends, boyfriends, girlfriends and so on.
To be commanded to love God, who is greater than anything we can possibly
imagine, seems both beyond us and a tad presumptuous. Shouldn't we be concentrating
on awe and reverence? But God is actually interested in us and knows us better
than we know ourselves. He loves us for who we are, warts and all. To be
loved in this unconditional way is so amazing that love must be our response.
There is wonderful upside-downness about God. "He punishes the proud..." This is a theme echoed in both the Old Testament and the New. In Luke 1 v 46-55, Mary says: "...he has scattered the people who are proud...". Pride is self-seeking, placing self at the centre of the universe, the place rightly occupied by God. It is a rejection both of God’s greatness and of our need of him.
How often do we fall into the trap of being self-centred and imagining that we can manage on our own? If we place ourselves at the centre of all then it is not possible to be in relationship with God, and it is difficult to imagine any worse punishment.
If, on the other hand, we do not think so much of ourselves and have a sense of our own insignificance, God will raise us up and through our relationship with him give us a sense of worth.
Prayer
Dear Lord, help me not to become self-centred and to keep you at the centre
of my life. I pray that I may love you with all my heart, as you love me.
Amen.
Psalm 32 v 1-2
Happy is the person whose sins are forgiven, whose wrongs are pardoned.
Happy is the person whom the LORD does not consider guilty and in whom there
is nothing false.
Notes
Reading this makes me think of those times when something may really be weighing
on your mind. You wake up with it and you go to bed with it. It may be that
you feel you have said the wrong thing and upset someone. It may be that
you didn't listen properly when someone wanted to talk to you, or you brushed
someone off with a flippant remark. Whatever it is, you know in your heart
that until you have made your peace with the person it won’t go away.
It’s often hard to go to someone and say, "I'm sorry". But
however difficult it may be, it pales into insignificance beside the sense
of relief and lightness of step that comes from reconciliation.
If this is how we feel when we seek and receive forgiveness from our fellow human beings, then how much more wonderful will it be when we seek and receive the forgiveness of God?
The word "happy" has become quite a weak word in our culture and does not fully capture the meaning in the way it is used in this psalm. We use it in phrases such as: "Are you happy with that decision?" Even when we say that someone looks happy, we very often simply mean that they don't look gloomy. In the New Testament, the word "happy" is used in some translations of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, whereas some versions have "blessed". The word happy here seems to me to have all those meanings. To know that your sins are forgiven is to be blessed by God, to have the lines of communication fully open. It is to be in the right place, to be in right relationship both with God and human beings. It is to have great joy and gladness.
Prayer
Heavenly Father, help me to live at peace with you and with my fellow men and
women so that I may know the happiness that comes from you alone. Amen
Psalm 32 v 3-5
When I kept things to myself,
I felt weak deep inside me.
I moaned all day long.
Day and night you punished me.
My strength was gone as in the summer heat.
Then I confessed my sins to you and didn't hide my guilt.
I said, "I will confess my sins to the LORD," and you forgave my
guilt.
Notes
It is part of human nature to want to hide things, especially when they have
gone wrong. To an extent this is about not wanting to be blamed. But it is
also about not wanting to open ourselves to hurt. We live in an "I'm
OK, you're OK" society where weakness tends to be looked down on and
where the main thing is to present a together appearance. I wonder how often
you have replied to someone's question, "How's it going?" with, "Fine,
thanks" and inside you’re feeling anything but fine.
The result of this is that we even find it difficult to be open before God and try to hide, imagining that he doesn’t know what is going on. The problem is that if we keep things we are afraid of to ourselves then it will be a bit like having a wound that isn't cleaned properly and therefore festers and causes even more pain than the original wound. This is just what the writer of this psalm is talking about. Not only does he say how physically and emotionally awful he feels, but he turns the tables and blames it on God. Now, God can take it, but if you think about it, the real punishment is self-inflicted. As soon as the turnaround takes place and the writer turns to God in a spirit of openness, he receives forgiveness, and with forgiveness comes healing and release from pain.
God is always there longing to forgive us. He does not want us to live in pain. But at the same time he has given us freedom and will therefore not force himself upon us. It is for us to turn around and accept the gift.
Nobody can accept a gift if they have their hands behind their backs.
Prayer
Dear Lord, you are a God of forgiveness and healing. Help me to come before
you with open hands and an open heart. Amen
Psalm 32 v 6-7
For this reason, all who obey you should pray to you while they still can.
When troubles rise like a flood, they will not reach them.
You are my hiding place.
You protect me from my troubles and fill me with songs of salvation.
Notes
In the verse before this passage, the writer says that God has forgiven all
his sins. Here we see that those who obey God should pray to him in response
to this forgiveness. In Psalm 31 v 23 the response to the unconditional love
of God is love. Here the response to forgiveness is prayer.
There is no right or wrong way to pray and the old saying "pray as you can and not as you can't" holds good. Prayer is about coming into the presence of the Lord and waiting upon him. It is not about having super-spiritual experiences all the time. People often say to me that their prayers don't work, but prayer is not about working or not working, it is about giving time to waiting expectantly. We cannot summon God just when we want, and if, in our prayer time, we are granted that wonderful sense of connectedness for even one brief moment then we are most richly blessed. Prayer will not act as an insurance policy against trouble, but the person of prayer will know what to do with their troubles. They will know that there is no place to take them other than to God, and he is the source of comfort and protection against despair.
If the response to the love of God is love, and the response to the forgiveness of God is prayer, then the response to the protection of God is songs of salvation - in other words, joy at the nature of God, which bubbles up in music. Music is one of the ways in which we can move beyond words and express the joy that defies words.
Prayer
Father, teach me to pray that I may be drawn to worship you with my whole being.
Amen
Psalm 32 v 8-9
The LORD says, "I will make you wise and show you where to go.
I will guide you and watch over you.
So don't be like a horse or donkey that doesn't understand.
They must be led with bits and reins, or they will not come near you."
Notes
I find shopping problematic because I am presented with so many choices and
I don't know on what criteria to base my decisions. Life too presents so
many choices that you can often find yourself not knowing which way to go.
There are plenty of ways of deciding: you can just do what the majority are
doing; you can take the option that will result in the best job and highest
salary; you can take the easiest option, the one that will make no demands
upon you; or you can take the difficult option because it will win you admiration.
In these verses, the psalmist offers a better way. If we lead a life that is undergirded by prayer and therefore open to God, then God himself will give us the wisdom to take the right path and will guarantee to be there beside us as we follow it. The alternative is to be stubborn and to imagine that we don't need any guidance and can manage perfectly well on our own. Any of you who have ever tried to lead a donkey or a horse in a direction they don’t want to go will understand just what sort of stubbornness is being talked about here! If we act like the horse or the donkey, then we are denying ourselves and shutting off the risk and opportunity and the new horizons that God might have in store for us.
Prayer
Gracious Lord, give me ears to hear your call and help me to answer it in trust.
Amen
Psalm 32 v 10-11
Wicked people have many troubles, but the LORD's love surrounds those who trust
him.
Good people, rejoice and be happy in the LORD.
Sing all you whose hearts are right.
Notes
There is a sense of sadness here that the wicked, those who turn their backs
on God, experience their life as full of troubles. They are contrasted with
those who trust in God and are thus surrounded by his love. The direct contrast
makes one think that God is longing for them to turn away from wickedness
so that he can surround them too with love. Sadly they will not allow such
intimacy and choose to wallow in their troubles. The response to the love
of God is rejoicing, happiness and singing. People are led to worship with
their whole being. There is a sense of spontaneity to their response.
It is not always easy to trust in the Lord, but these verses make it clear that it is by far the preferable option. Trust means placing yourself in someone else's hands and abandoning control. You need to have absolute faith that you will not be let down in any way. We should always try to be worthy of trust. It's all too easy to let others down, to fail to attend a meeting you promised to be at, to forget an arrangement. Many of the ways in which we fail the trust test are not necessarily the big things of life. The only place where we may be sure that we shall never be let down is with God.
Prayer
Lord, may I remember to always place my trust in you and to be worthy of the
trust of others. Lead me to worship you always and everywhere with my whole
being, in all that I say and do and am. Amen
word-on-the-web uses the Scripture text taken from the Youth Bible, New Century Version (Anglicised Edition) copyright 1993 by Word Publishing Milton Keynes