Mediation for February 11, 2009
From The Rev. Peter A. Munson
Psalm 81:8-16
8 Hear, O my people, while I admonish you;
O Israel, if you would but listen to me!
9 There shall be no strange god among you;
you shall not bow down to a foreign god.
10 I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.
Open your mouth wide and I will fill it.
11 But my people did not listen to my voice;
Israel would not submit to me.
12 So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts,
to follow their own devices.
13 O that my people would listen to me,
that Israel would walk in my ways!
14 Then I would quickly subdue their enemies,
and turn my hand against their foes.
15 Those who hate the Lord would cringe before him,
and their doom would last forever.
16 I would feed you with the finest of the wheat,
and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.
Are We Following Our Own Devices?
There is this curious old phrase in verse 12 of this Psalm. "... I gave them over to their stubborn hearts, to follow their own devices." (emphasis mine) When you read the entire Psalm, you understand immediately that "following our own devices" here means doing whatever we feel like doing once we squeeze God out of our lives. Following my own devices is whatever I do once I stop listening to God, once I act as if "I am my own person" and that God has no call upon my life. But Paul reminds us, as he reminded the Christians in Corinth, "... do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price..." (1 Cor. 6:19-20 - emphasis mine)
It seems that all the time I am tempted to stop listening to God. I am tempted not to pray. The Tempter - the voice that most directly competes with the voice of God - likes to put all sorts of excuses in my ears.
"It's not productive to pray. You have more important things to do."
"You're busy. Get on with your day."
"You're about to write a sermon or a meditation. That's a form of praying."
"You can pray later today."
"Hasn't prayer felt kind of boring lately? You need to shake things up. Go for a run or to the gym instead. You can pray while doing those things."
I often succumb to these temptations, and before long, I realize that I'm just sort of running around, doing my own thing - without much of a sense of direction. God has given me over to my stubborn heart, and left me to follow my own devices. And the truth is this: following my own devices, in a rather short amount of time, leads me to a barren wasteland. God wants me to listen and walk in his ways. God wants to feed me with the finest of the wheat, and satisfy me with sweet honey from the rock, but like the Israelites in the wilderness, I am quick to complain about the heavenly diet that God is feeding me. I get restless, and try to convince myself that some other god is going to fill me in some new and special way.
But those spiritual holes in me can only be filled by the one true God. Satan is a liar - the Father of Lies, in fact. When I listen too much to the voice of the Tempter, I end up in a very lonely, isolated and frustrated place - no matter how many things it might look like I am accomplishing.
Will we seek God's voice today? Will you? Will I? Or will we just get caught up on a wave of running around, a wave of "the urgent", a wave of anxiety?
It is God that I desperately need. I am reminded of the song that we sometimes sing at 10:30, and its refrain: "I'm desperate for You!" Yes, indeed. And when we are desperate for God, no other person or thing or activity will ever, ever fill our desperate need. God, being God, sometimes lets us go off on our own way, lets us be stubborn, lets us follow our own devices.
Sooner or later we come to our senses, tell the Tempter to bug off, and return to God. And then the Lord feeds us with the finest of the wheat, and gives us honey from the rock. And we smile and rejoice, and we say to ourselves, "What were we thinking?" And we hear God say, "I don't know. But it's good to have you back!"