Dear Friends,
We hope this week's devotional will encourage you in your spiritual walk. We give thanks to Rev. Dr Linda Stargel, Academic Dean and Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies and Biblical Language, for writing this devotional.
You are welcome to share this and include it in your church newsletters if you wish; we just ask that you please give credit to NTC and the author. Thank you!
Psalm 81:1, 10-16 (NIV)
1 Sing for joy to God our strength;
shout aloud to the God of Jacob!
10 I am the Lord your God,
who brought you up out of Egypt.
Open wide your mouth and I will fill it.
11 “But my people would not listen to me;
Israel would not submit to me.
12 So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts
to follow their own devices.
13 “If my people would only listen to me,
if Israel would only follow my ways,
14 how quickly I would subdue their enemies
and turn my hand against their foes!
15 Those who hate the Lord would cringe before him,
and their punishment would last forever.
16 But you would be fed with the finest of wheat;
with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.”
Devotional
If Only…
Two psalms of lament that recall the crisis and pain of exile come before this one. But Psalm 81 makes the reason for the people’s suffering in those psalms abundantly clear ([8],11-12). Israel doesn’t listen to God—neither with her ears nor with her actions. The people have stubborn hearts. Elsewhere in the Old and New Testaments, this root sickness of God’s people is identified as a divided heart—being one minute for God, and another only for themselves.
But stubborn-heartedness is only half of the message of Psalm 81. The psalm begins with a call to joyous praise, followed by God’s own words. And in every verse that accuses Israel of stubbornness, God nevertheless identifies Israel as “my people.” In verse 10, God recalls how he delivered her out of Egypt. When she cried out in distress, God listened and rescued her [v. 7]. The expectation was that Israel, in turn, would listen to and rely on God alone [vv. 8-9]. God’s passionate desire was to fill and satisfy Israel so that she would experience complete freedom (10b, 16). “If only…” (13).
God is relentless, never giving up on Israel, but He cannot force her to receive the good gifts he longs to give. God pursues and pleads with his delivered yet heart-divided people. “If only…”
This pursuing, pleading God wants to fill and satisfy us too. If only …
If only we recognized our dividedness.
If only we confessed our inability to fix our own hearts and lives despite all our trying. If only we pursued God as He pursues us.
If only we pleaded with God to offer us a different solution—a brand new heart, filled with His Spirit; a heart that desires what He desires.
If only the Saviour he sent to us offered heart transplants along with forgiveness.
If only we knew that this is exactly the gracious gift that God offers to us in Jesus Christ.
If only we would receive it by faith.
Prayer
God of relentless love and grace, we want the fullness of everything you offer us in Christ Jesus. Forgive us for our failure to listen and cleanse us of our stubborn-heartedness. We surrender to you and pray that you would fill us and satisfy us with the abundance of your grace. In Christ’s name we pray. AMEN.
Shalom,
Linda M. Stargel
Academic Dean
Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies and Biblical Language