Mighty To Save

Psalm 19:8b: "The commandment of the Lord is clear and gives light to the eyes."

Today's Forward Day by Day meditation asks "Do you like the psalms? Why or why not?"

It's easy to be troubled by the anger and the vindictiveness of the Psalms, the clear contrast with the "love thine enemy" of Jesus. But in fact we can love the Psalms because they show God loves all of, just as we are. We can realize that God MEANT for the psalms to trouble us, to challenge us. To see in ourselves the very human flaws caused by suffering and lack of understanding in the writers of the psalms. God loves ALL of us, all our love, all our hate, all our hopes, and all our fears.

The psalms remind us not to worship (idolize) the Bible like an inerrant, perfect God, or seek answers to our problems with a Magic Eight Ball ("Signs Point to Yes"). The psalms remind us to see the Bible not as some perfectly clear, understandable owner's manual with a crystal clear troubleshooting guide and summary index guide at the end, instead of an ancient mixture of wisdom and folly that ends with raining fire, angels spitting swords, and terrifying dragons and beasts. The psalms help us see the Bible as a beautiful, mysterious expression of people like us in their constant, two steps forward one step backward struggle to understand, fear and love an all powerful and perfect being that made the entire universe, the very fabric of time and space.

We need to see the Bible as a total picture, as an ever-unfolding story of God’s love for us.

And we can love Psalm 19 like our FDBD author does. So may the words of our mouth and the meditations of our Facebook and FDBD posts be always acceptable in thy sight, Oh God, our strength and our Redeemer. 🙏

Psalm 131:2: "I do not occupy myself with great matters, or with things that are too hard for me."

Sometimes our first reaction when we read the Bible, including the Psalms, is to be judgmental. Like today's Psalm quote. We read it and say "No!" We MUST worry about the big things beyond our control like climate change, clean water, clean air, a healthy democracy, human rights, the devastation in Haiti and the chaos in Afghanistan. Even if we can't do anything by ourselves we must work together and not turn our backs on a problem. We think the instinct to cop out and not care is wrong and selfish.

But then we remember that the Bible is a beautiful combination of God and humanity. God inspired people of more than a thousand years and the result is the crazy, confusing, flawed, powerful and wonderful book we have today. We remember that the person who wrote this Psalm was thinking like the every day Jew of King David's time. A time without social media, mass media, and the ability to project our voice beyond our little village, much less around the world.

This Psalm is about trusting God, the classic Let Go and Let God feeling of confident love in our Father that Jesus told us he wanted us to have if we wanted to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Today we have to walk that fine line between caring about the big problems and doing our tiny part to fix them while we still trust that God is piloting this great big voyage called life, no matter how stormy the seas. 🙏

Today’s Forward Day by Day meditation tells the story of a group of Missionaries to Asia who started in Williams College called “The Brethren.” Today many Christians and especially Christian missionaries have a bad rep in secular society. This is understandable because some of the loudest Christians are also the angriest and least loving. Their light is black light that distorts reality in a neon lie.

So many Christian Missionaries like “The Brethren” went abroad to share the Gospel as well as health, education, and well-being. They truly loved and were one with the people they served. They were washers of feet like Christ.

Others disdained the people and this disempowered them. Often these missionaries had a vision of “the White Man’s Burden.” A former missionary once confessed with sadness and some shame that someone in his group had nailed a brown paper bag to the wall of their group home. On that bag the other missionary had written “When this bag starts looking white it’s time to go home.” The implication was there should be no hope of meeting a potential spouse among the non-white natives.

May we all shine the light of Christ’s love in this broken and beautiful world. 🌎🙏