“Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise Your name.” Psalm 142:7 David sure had a way with words. 1 Samuel 16:18 “Then one of the servants answered and said, “Look, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, who is skillful in playing, a mighty man of valor, a man of war, prudent in speech, and a handsome person; and the Lord is with him.” “Prudent in speech” means He was wise with his choice of words and there was much thought and wisdom in what he said. We have evidence of that over and over in the Psalms. This morning I was reading through Psalm 142. The caption in my Bible says “A Prayer when he was in the cave.” I’ve never been in a real cave before but I’ve seen plenty of them in movies. Dark and damp are two words that immediately come to mind. Bats, crawly things, hard rocks for a pillow and dirt for a bed. Nothing I would willingly walk into. Unless I’m in hiding. And even then, you can bet I would have been fussing about it. “What am I doing here? Really? What has it come to that I ended in a cave? God, don’t’ you care about me?” Verse 2 tells us that David poured out his complaint before God and declared His trouble. It wasn’t so much a “where are you God?” but more of a “ok, here I am God. I know you know, but it does my heart good to say it.” Because in the very next verse, it says when His spirit was overwhelmed within him he says “Then You knew my path, in the way in which I walk.” David poured out his cry and was immediately assured that God was aware of his path. When we become overwhelmed in our “cave” and we cry out to God, the Comforter always comes and reminds us that God does indeed know where we are. He’s aware of our every step. That makes all the difference to me. If I’m hiding in a cave, I just want to know that God sees me. Cause it can get awful cold and dark in a cave. David must have suffered some discouragement there because we come to one of the most vulnerable statements he makes: “Bring my soul out of prison.” That really stopped me in my tracks when I read that. It so perfectly describes how desperate life can be sometimes. Our soul can literally feel as if it’s locked up. Every Sunday I see women who have been picked up and put in jail for one reason or another. They never meant to end up there. They could never imagine that the things they were doing would get them locked up. They are in shock and trying to figure out the next steps. It’s kind of like that when our soul is locked up. I know It was like that for me when my soul was locked up. I never thought through where my small steps of disobedience would take me. After all, it was just a small step. I know what you’re thinking…one small step leads to another and then another, right? The thing is, when you’re the one taking the small steps in the wrong direction, it becomes amazingly easy to justify what you’re doing. And anyone who says something is just being too critical and self-righteous. So I kept on taking those small steps. The Holy Spirit was faithful to talk to me, but I was more and more determined to ignore Him. After all, I was a church girl. I wasn’t one of those “heathens”. I was raised doing it all right. Surely I had enough sense of direction to take care of myself by now. WRONG! How dumb could I be? You might as well have just handed me the key so I could lock myself up cause I was building my own steel bars of disobedience that would make for a nice big cell. It wasn’t David’s disobedience that had his soul locked up (although disobedience would come later), but he was crying out for the Lord to restore and lift him up so that “I may praise your name”. He’d been brought low because of his enemies. Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. I have been. I listened to my own reasoning, I made my own decisions based on that faulty reasoning, and I lived with an unhappy soul…..a soul that was locked up. I could still smile at church though and no one would have a clue. I’m so aware of that now as I sing to “Christian” audiences…..you may look good, adorned in the appropriate church clothing with your Bible in tow, but you could be as locked up as the inmate on 120 Prison Farm Road. Psalm 142:1 is for all of us, “I cry out to the Lord with my voice.” He does hear us. He’s always listening for the call of His child. The call of repentance. The sound of the prideful heart crashing to the floor of the cave.
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AuthorHi! I am Donna and I'm traveling. It's a journey to discover who I am in Christ every day....no looking back, face to the Son! Come join me! Archives
October 2017
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