Happy EXCELLENT Saturday, friends!
It’s not excellent because we went to one grandson’s kindergarten graduation on Thursday and will go to another grandson’s birthday party today (where we’ll see all 5 of our grands).
It’s not excellent because everything is going just beautifully here in the Texas panhandle. (It’s not, as our region has been ravaged by wildfires for the past 3 days).
It’s excellent because of who God is in ALL the circumstances of our lives.
When I opened my hymnal this morning and saw the title of today’s hymn, that’s all I needed to think of Larnell Harris singing “How Excellent Is Thy Name”! about 40 years ago.
I sang the song for several years with an accompaniment track I purchased in a Christian bookstore in Clovis, NM. It was probably in 1989.
If there are any singers of a certain age reading this, you will likely remember the days of going into a Christian bookstore and selecting a handful of accompaniment tracks on cassette tape (or “canned music” as the haters called them) from their large selection that took up a whole wall in that section of the store.
Then you would take your tapes into a “soundproof” booth and listen to the cassette with headphones on to see if it was a good fit for your voice.
I put “soundproof” in quotation marks because the room definitely was NOT soundproof if you decided to sing out loud with the track.
Every person walking by could hear your unaccompanied voice (since the track was playing through headphones).
I’ll just say that that no one who walked by and heard that ever waited outside the booth to say, “You’re awesome! Would you come sing at my church?”
Memories …
After reminiscing with today’s hymn, I opened my Bible to today’s reading from Psalm 119.
Verse 114 grabbed my attention today.
“Your statutes are always righteous;give me understanding that I may live.”
Psalm 119 uses several different words pretty much interchangeably in describing God’s revelation of Himself and His world.
Statues, laws, precepts, words, commands, etc …
The Hebrew words certainly have different meanings, but as we read them through the poetic genre of the Psalms, I think (along with many scholars) that we can miss the point of the message if we spend too much time trying to differentiate between those terms.
It’s more like the Psalms provide us with a thesaurus of ways to describe how God has revealed Himself.
Here’s what I noticed today:
God’s revelation is always righteous. He’s always right whether we understand Him or not. He always knows and does what is right because He’s … well … God.
And sometimes we look around us and cannot reconcile what we have heard—or been taught—about God with what we’re seeing with our eyes.
“Why doesn’t God miraculously intervene and put out these fires? Good people are suffering!”
“This must be some kind of punishment for sin. God’s trying to get our attention.”
I’m often reminded of a quote from my friend, Rodney Cox: “If what you’ve always believed turned out to be false, how soon would you want to know?”
When the Psalmist prays “give me understanding that I may live,” I don’t think he’s asking for the ability to understand the circumstances—to make sense of what’s going on around him.
I think He’s asking for a deeper understanding of the righteous character of God so that he can live righteously himself in the midst of circumstances that may never make sense.
God, how do we learn to trust You and walk with You when we don’t understand what’s going on around us and the road ahead of us is unclear?
I think it begins with trusting who He was, is, and always will be.
God, give us insight into Your unchanging character, so we might live today—and all our remaining days—in step with You.
Be amazing today, my friend.
