Psalm 131. Repose After Struggle

The great preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said of this Psalm that it’s one of the shortest to read, but one of the longest to learn.

It’s a beautiful Psalm – a wee jewel, full of meaning and wisdom – but it’s easily overlooked because it’s so small.
So today we’re going to linger for a while over each of its three verses, and give ourselves some time to meditate on what it is that God may be saying to us through these words.

The Hebrew Title at the head of the Psalm says “A Psalm of David”, and it helps to get the Psalm in context if we remind ourselves of who David was…

David was a shepherd boy who was plucked from obscurity at the age of 16 and, much to the amazement of his family, was anointed by the prophet Samuel to become the next King of Israel.

David wasn’t the most likely candidate. He wasn’t the biggest or strongest of his brothers; compared to them, as fighting men, he was relatively inexperienced. But none of that mattered, either to God or to Samuel. Why? Because, in Samuel’s own words, “The Lord doesn’t look at the things that people look at. People look at the outward appearance. But the Lord looks at the heart.”

David’s heart commended him to God. He was King material. The only problem was there already was a King – King Saul. Saul had been making a mess of things since the day he was anointed and God had lost patience with him. But he was still on the throne. And as David emerged as a great military leader with huge popularity among the people, Saul grew more and more jealous of him, and eventually that broke out in open hostility. He wanted David’s life.

So David fled, with some of his supporters, and they moved from place to place to keep out of harm’s way. Now David could easily have mustered the support to overthrow Saul. In fact, there were a couple of instances when Saul, unknowingly, was utterly at David’s mercy.

One of my favourites is when Saul and his men were tracking David across the country, and Saul went into a cave to ‘relieve himself’ . But it’s the very cave that David and his men are hiding out in. They could have run him through there and then. He was utterly defenceless. But they didn’t do it.

David was adamant that they had to wait for God’s timing, and even though the throne was within his grasp, and he was being unfairly pursued and threatened by Saul, he refused to stretch out his hand and kill him.

In the end, Saul chose to fall on his own sword at the end of a battle he was losing, David became king, and so began a great era in Israel’s history. And David wanted nothing more than to build a temple to the God who had chosen him and delivered him from Saul. But for his own reasons, God said ‘no, David’ – that honour will belong to one of your sons, but not to you. It was Solomon who later fulfilled that dream.

Now with that little bit of history, I hope these words will make more sense now, as words of David.

“My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
Or things too wonderful for me”.

Here was a man caught up in great matters, who had the power to stretch out his hand and take whatever he wanted. But for the best part of his life, he fought those urges, he submitted them to God’s will. He accepted his place, and God’s timing.

That was David.

But what about you and me? What does this verse of the Psalm say to us?

Well it talks about three things we need to be aware of – our hearts, our eyes and our pride.

The Scriptures talk a lot about the heart – the seat of the emotions.

It says in the Proverbs that the heart is the wellspring of life, but the prophet Jeremiah also warns us that the heart can be deceitful above all things.

The heart can be the source of our life, but it can also be the architect of our destruction. David’s heart led him to live honourably – Saul’s to a bitter end. What was the difference? I think it was down to the kind of thoughts they entertained there. That’s why the writer of Proverbs says “Above all else, guard your heart – for it is the wellspring of life”.

What does a guard do? A guard takes care with what, or who, gains entry.

The bouncer’s on the door to stop troublemakers getting in to the club. The airport security checks are there to stop the wrong kind of people getting on the plane and taking it over.

Be careful what thoughts you let enter your heart. If you let the wrong sort get through, you might find they’re terribly difficult to evict later on. You might find that they take over, and take you off in directions you really don’t want to go in.

And the thing is, what takes hold of your heart profoundly affects your ability to see. Saul’s heart became full of fear and conspiracy theories. And because of that he came to see David as an enemy, even though David was a faithful and honourable subject with no malice in his heart.

Equally well, we know the stories about Mother Teresa and people like her, whose hearts are so gripped by a vision of Jesus and a love for God, that they can see past the festering wounds of the person they’re caring for to the child of God within.

I see this again and again in my life as a pastor. What you hold and store up in your heart determines how you see things. If you cherish bitterness you’ll see reasons to take offence. If you cherish anger, you’ll find cause for provocation. If you cherish faith, hope and love, you’ll see the possibilities in every person and every situation.

Above all else, guard your heart, says the writer.

David, it seems to me, knew how to guard his heart.

And that’s why he could say: “My heart is not proud. My eyes are not haughty”.

Ever since the dawn of time, religious folk of all persuasions have understood that the most dangerous sins aren’t the ones done in the body – the ones the tabloids love - but the ones entertained and encouraged in the mind.

Jesus was relatively kind to the hookers and the drunks. He came down like a ton of bricks on the clean-living Pharisees.

The chief of sins has always been the sin of pride. Tradition holds that it was pride that led to Lucifer’s fall from heaven; it was pride in their own ability to make wise decisions that led Adam and Eve to eat the apple.

Pride is the root sin, because pride is always about the imperious ‘I’. It’s all about me. Me, me, me.
My pain, my desires, my needs, my wants, my ambition.

If you have a self - and I think that includes most of us here this morning – the chief temptation is always to be self-ish. Not in the sense of being greedy or avaricious, but in living our lives as though the story of my needs and wants and desires is the most important story around.

That’s what we’re born into. That’s our natural state. The scientists tell us it may even be embedded in our genetic code.

No-one has to tell the newborn baby to scream and cry for milk – to demand feeding at the breast of its mother. The ‘imperious I’ kicks in the minute we’re born. And things are fine as long as mother feeds. But months or years later, when mother decides the time’s come to withold milk so the child can graduate to food, that’s when the trouble starts.

For the first time, the Imperious I doesn’t get what it wants. A battle of wills begins with tears and tantrums. But in the end, there’s only ever one winner, evidenced by the fact that we’re all going home to mince and tatties after church today and not a nice drink of warm milk. Eventually, unless something is drastically wrong, we all move onto solids.

And the struggle to change the child’s diet so it’s ready for the rest of its life is accompanied by a very significant development in the child’s psyche.
If we could listen in to the newborn’s thought processes we’d hear it yelling “I, I, I, I, I, I. I'm hungry, I'm wet, I'm dirty, I'm tired." But the weaned child, lying in its mother’s arms, wanting her not for her food, but for herself, snuggles in and experiences a new rhythm as their hearts beat in unison – “I – Thou”

It’s been a struggle, but the child has learned an important lesson. None of us are the centre of the universe. We are all of us beings in relation, and we must learn to give and take.

I’ve known and loved this Psalm for years, and I’ve always thought of it as lovely and peaceful. And it is.

But it’s only as I’ve thought about it this time round that I’ve come to understand that the peace we find here, in this beautiful image of the mother and the weaned child, is a hard-won peace that comes after a long hard battle.

“Repose after struggle” is the way Spurgeon put it.

And that’s a word that speaks to us today because we all know the demands of the imperious I. David certainly did – he was no saint. Saw a woman he wanted – took her. He could do that, he was King. Got her pregnant – then had her husband killed to try and cover up the mess. I I I I I

But more often than not, the road David chose was the one he spells out in this Psalm.

“I do not concern myself with great matters, or things too wonderful for me. But I have stilled and quietened my soul; like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child is my soul within me”.

This is a Psalm of battle. The battle you and I have to still our souls before God; to recognise when we’re behaving like an imperious I; to struggle and pray and talk our way to a better place and a better rhythm, where the I, I, I, I becomes I-Thou, I-Thou, I-Thou.

This Psalm reminds us that none of us are the centre of the universe. We are all of us beings in relation, and we must learn to give and take.

What would our families be like; what would our churches be like, if we had a little more “I-Thou” and a little less “I,I,I,I”. A little less defending of territory and a little more generosity towards others? A little less falling out and a little more forebearing?

Wouldn’t it be better, for everyone? Of course it would!

But is God going to step in and magic things better? Not according to David. This is a fight. We have to struggle to come to peace within ourselves and between ourselves. It doesn’t come naturally. We have to work at it. We have to overcome our instincts.

“I have stilled and quietened my soul” says David, because it wasn’t still – it wasn’t quiet. It was agitated and upset. And he struggled, and it was hard, but he found himself in a better place:

Like a weaned child is my soul within me. I'm growing up, in other words. I'm learning to rest in God.

If that’s the work that’s needing done in you this morning, David's encouraging you that it can be done; but he’s also telling you that nobody else can do it for you. “I have stilled and quietened MY soul”.

**********

Many vital life lessons from this shortest of Psalms.

Guard your heart – be careful what gets in there and takes root,
Because once it’s in there, it’ll affect what you see.

If you want to know peace, you have to struggle. You have to let God help you turn that I,I,I,I into I-Thou, I-Thou.

And in closing, let me make one last observation.

Verse 3 is almost a footnote to the Psalm and we’re not sure whether it belongs to David, or whether someone else added this to the end many years later.

It says “O Israel, put your hope in the LORD both now and forevermore”

And as I read through the Psalm I realised what a wonderful progression there is in these three short verses.

We start with the Imperious I, we progress to I-Thou, and we end with an all-embracing ‘we’. The Psalmist addresses Israel - the whole people – wishing, willing them to know God as that loving, patient, occasionally embattled mother, who knows what’s best and will struggle with us out of love until we bend to her wisdom.

That is the love in whose arms we rest this morning.
Thanks be to God


Let us pray
Almighty God,to whom all hearts are open,
all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden;
Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,
that we may perfectly love you,
and worthily magnify your name,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Help us still and quieten our souls before you.
Help us not to be enslaved to the tyranny of the imperious I,
But learn to make room for a Thou,
Be it you, or you as we find you in other people.

Help us know ourselves as people in relation;
Willing and able to give and take
For the good of all.

So hear our prayers,
Because we offer them all in the name of our friend and saviour, Jesus Christ,
Amen

Blessed are the Pure in Heart

We begin the New Year by ending our series in the Beatitudes, and the blessing we’re looking at today is one that really caught my imagination earlier in the week when I sat down to think about it.

Jesus said: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Now we’ll get to the question of purity in a minute, but before then there’s a tangent I want us to follow, because it leads us into some really important truth.

Listen to that beatitude again.

Blessed are the pure in heart, says Jesus, for they will see God.

There’s something here so obvious that we’d easily miss it, but it’s so significant that we daren’t miss it. What he’s highlighting is that there’s a profound link between what goes on in our heart, and what goes on with our eyes.

And when I realised that, it was like someone took the cork out of the bottle. All these insights and images came fizzing up from nowhere.

I remembered a scene from the Silence of the Lambs where Dr Hannibal Lecter is helping an FBI agent called Clarice Starling catch a serial killer.

“He covets, Clarice, That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet? Do we seek out things to covet? No, we begin by coveting what we see every day.” – The eyes influencing the heart.

I remembered King David, hanging around listlessly on the roof of his palace when he should have been leading his troops in battle, and catching a glimpse of his neighbour’s wife as she undressed for her evening bath. The seed of an idea took root, and he let it grow. The eyes influencing the heart.

I remember a certain 4 year old I live with, who will remain nameless, who until fairly recently didn’t know how to work the remote control on the telly and was therefore limited to whatever channel we chose for her. And we always chose CBeeBees, for two reasons – 1) it’s educational and 2) there are no commercials.

Now the self-same 4 year old has worked out how to use the remote control, and even though we police things quite carefully, she’s coming under the irresistible influence of the advertising agencies who want to sell her things and seem desperate to get her parents to consolidate all their debts into one manageable monthly repayment. They are getting to her little heart through her little eyes.

And on a more serious note, I remembered a piece I read recently about how both teenage boys and girls are being affected by the ready availability of pornography over the internet. The average age at which boys have their first exposure to online pornography is 11, and there’s growing raft of evidence that teenage boys’ treatment and evaluation of girls is becoming conditioned by what they’ve been watching online.

Girls are affected too, because they’re feeling more pressure than ever to look like these pneumatic models the boys are lusting after, and, worse still, to be as sexually accommodating as them. Another example of the profound connection between the eyes and the heart.

“The eyes” says Jesus “are like a lamp for the body. If your eyes are sound, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are no good, your body will be in darkness”.

What we feed our eyes on, we feed our hearts on. What we behold, develops a hold over us, for good or for ill.

But that isn’t the whole story in the eyes/heart relationship. Because the lines of action aren’t one way. How we are in our hearts also determines what we choose to see; maybe even what we’re able to see.

18 days after the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963, white supremacists planted a bomb in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama, and four children were killed.

Connie Lynch, a member of the local Ku Klux Klan was interviewed after the bombing and she was given a hard time because innocent children had been killed. Her response was staggering. “They weren’t children. Children are little people. Little human beings, and that means white people…. They’re just niggers…. and if there’s four less niggers tonight, then I say “good for whoever planted the bomb”

Contrast that with Mother Teresa, who was once asked how she could minister with such kindness among folk whose bodies were rotting away with illness. “Each one of them is Jesus in disguise” she said.

One woman couldn't even recognise the humanity in another human being. The other was able to see the image of God in even the most deformed human being. The condition of our hearts determines what we’re able to see.

And we can bring that idea much closer to home. We all know that there are folk we find it hard to think badly of because we love them, and others we find it hard to see any good in because we dislike them. And the thing is, those judgments, however strongly felt, may not be sound. Our heart is dictating what we’re able to see and others might see the same people in a very different light.

So instead of a one way street from eye to heart, it’s more like a roundabout. What I take in through my eyes affects my heart, but it's equally true that how my heart is determines how I see things.

So now that we’ve followed our tangent, let’s digress back to the beatitude.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

But what does it mean to be pure in heart?

Is he talking about folk who are naturally guileless and straightforward? Is he talking about the super-holy? The goody-two shoes? The spiritual high-achievers?

Come to think of it, can anyone ever really be pure in heart?

I don’t think there’s even one of us here who would dare to claim that title. We know our pitfalls and our weaknesses only too well.

So whatever this is about, I don’t think it’s an expectation of perfection. Christ knows that’s beyond us.

I’ve thought long and hard about that this week, and what helped was when I picked up that word ‘pure’ and ran with it for a while.

It’s important to remember that anything that we call pure doesn’t start out pure. It has to become pure. Even the platinum in Kate Middleton’s engagement ring had to be dug up and refined several times to get rid of all the dross.

Purification is a process – something that takes time and effort. But what we’re aiming for at the end of it is one thing, whether it’s a metal, or a chemical, or a liquid or whatever. When we get down to that one thing, we can say we’ve reached a state of purity.

So what does it mean to be pure in heart?

I think it means that you’re the kind of person whose heart and eyes are focused on the one thing. On God himself.

You’re still a real person. You get up, wash, have breakfast, go to work, love your family, pay your bills. You don’t walk around in a holy trance! But God’s at the centre of it all. He’s the canvas you paint your life on. The field your sow your life in. The sun at the centre of the universe which is you. He gets the priority he warrants, as God. He gets your time and attention.
Are any of us there yet? No.

Should we be discouraged by that? No.

I’m fond of quoting a verse from the book of Hebrews that’s stayed with me since the first time I heard it. Hebrews 10:14 which says that through his sacrifice Jesus has made perfect forever those who are being made holy. What that tells us is that in eternity, it’s a done deal! Our future with God is certain. But for now, we are being made holy. We’re being purified. And that can be a messy process.

So this is not about never messing up. It’s about keeping going with singleness of mind and purpose, even when you do mess up.

How set are you on God? It’s an important question for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, there are several places in the Scriptures that suggest that how we approach God will determine what we find in him.

Psalm 18 is typical: the Psalmist says

25 To the faithful you show yourself faithful,
to the blameless you show yourself blameless,

26 to the pure you show yourself pure,
but to the crooked you show yourself shrewd.

If we’re lax or lukewarm in our dealings with God, do we expect him to be otherwise with us?

Every now and again, folk say to me that they wish God would make it easier to know him – that he’d come alongside and overwhelm them with some profound experience. And THEN they’d be able to believe.

It happens for some that way. But for most of us, it’s not like that. For most of us, I think God keeps a perfect distance to see just how serious we are about going after him. Any woman who’s ever courted the affections of a man will know the sense in that! It’s called playing hard to get! And it sorts out those who are really interested from the timewasters.

It’s the pure in heart, says Jesus, who will see God. Not the perfect or the faultless, but those who genuinely set their heart and mind on knowing him. They’ll stumble, they’ll fall, they’ll mess up. But they’ll keep going because they’ve come to believe that the answers they’re looking for aren’t to be found in anyone or anything else.

Whether you’re just beginning your pursuit of God, or you’ve been at it for years, today’s beatitude is an encouragement to keep going. It’s a promise that those who seek earnestly will find.

I’ll finish with some words from the book of Proverbs that I love, written a thousand years before our Gospel reading today. I’ve always heard them as a word from God directly to me, and you should hear them that way too.


My child, if you accept my words
and store up my commands within you
turning your ear to wisdom
and applying your heart to understanding
and if you call out for insight
and cry aloud for understanding,
and if you look for it as for silver
and search for it as for hidden treasure,
then you will understand the fear of the LORD
and find the knowledge of God.

It’s all there – everything we’ve been thinking about this morning. Searching, learning, looking, understanding, finding.

Eyes and heart, focused on the one thing, bringing blessing.

Amen