Sorry for the lack of blogs over the past week...I wasn't here. I figured, since I'm going through Psalms, that a Selah was in order...jk  . Anyway...the reading for day 40 was Psalm 26-45. The first passage I want to highlight is Psalm 27. This Psalm starts with "The Lord is my ligh and my salvation - whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life - of whom shall I be afraid? When evil men advance against me to devour my flesh, when my enemies and foes attack me, they will stumble and fall." So now a story from Mark Labberton's book The Dangerous Act of Worship; "One Sunday I was preaching on Psalm 27. It is a remarkable psalm of hope for God's deliverance from fear for those who have faced tough times. With the same candor found in many psalms, this one vividly dexcribes being afraid and finding God's comfort. I'm sure it was at least a 'nice sermon,' maybe even a fairly good one. Later that week I attended a dinner sponsored by the International Justice Mission, a Christian human rights organization that seeks justice for people facing various forms of oppression. Elisabeth, a beautiful seventeen-year-old Christian girl from Southeast Asia, spoke at the dinner. She had grown up in a strong Christian home, memorizing Bible verses, which became all the more poignant to her during the year she spent in forced prostitution, enslaved in a squalid brothel in a major Asian city. As she spoke, she projected a picture of her room in the brothel. Over the bed where she was so brutally treated she had written these words on the wall: 'The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?'...I sat listening to Elisabeth's story of being forced into the sex trade when she was just sixteen years old. I thought back to the previous Sunday and my sermon on this same psalm, remembering some of the fears I had listed for those in my church. Those were real and legitimate fears, but none of them were as consequential as those Elisabeth faced. I had this silent image of a moivegoing through my mind - listening to Elisabeth while envisioning my congregation gathering for worship on a random Sunday. While we were busy trying to park our cars in Berkley that morning, a task 'so totally horrible,' as one person said to me recently, girls like Elisabeth were coming to worship in their settings too. She came before God in her windowles brothel. We did so in our glass-walled sanctuary. We were hoping the teenagers we sent off to the youth group actually got there. Once the car is parked, the teenagers are in the youth group, the band is warmed up, and the hour has come, what happens in our service has to have integrity, for the people in our church but also for Elisabeth. Somehow the God we name, the music we sing, the prayers we offer, and the Scriptures we hear read and preached has to call us deeper into God's heart and deeper into the world for which Christ died." I hope this story broke your heart as it did mine, but I pray that we won't leave it at that. We have to put our brokeness into action. What are some practical ways we can do that? Psalm 35:9-10 says, "Then my soul will rejoice in the Lord and delight in His salvation. My whole being will exclaim, 'Who is like you, O Lord? You rescue the poor from those too strong for them, the poor and needy from those who rob them'." This is what God does for people like Elisabeth who put their hope in God Almighty. Psalm 37:5-6 says, "Commit your way to the Lord; trust in Him and He will do this: He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, the justice of your cause like the noonday sun." What an amazing promise that God has given to us. Why don't we take hold of it? We probably all know the song As the Deer, but we don't know that Psalm 42, the psalm that song comes from, is not a happy psalm. It is a psalm of anguish and crying out to God to meet with him and to hang on for God to come. Think of that next time you sing that song. |
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