By David ReayFriday 10 Jun 2016LifeWords DevotionalsFaithReading Time: 0 minutes
Transcript:
Read Psalm 93
1 The Lord is king! He is robed in majesty.
Indeed, the Lord is robed in majesty and armed with strength.
The world stands firm
and cannot be shaken.
2 Your throne, O Lord, has stood from time immemorial.
You yourself are from the everlasting past.
3 The floods have risen up, O Lord.
The floods have roared like thunder;
the floods have lifted their pounding waves.
4 But mightier than the violent raging of the seas,
mightier than the breakers on the shore—
the Lord above is mightier than these!
5 Your royal laws cannot be changed.
Your reign, O Lord, is holy forever and ever. (NLT)
If we fail to focus on God, to seek to put him at the centre of all we do, we risk being swamped by fearful lethargy, or panicked hyperactivity. We have no solid centre; all is negotiable, all is unpredictable. We are at the mercy of those who market good, of those whose esteem we crave. Nothing else can truly take the place of God at the centre of our lives.
None of this means we become super-spiritual hermits, uninvolved in the world. Rather, our involvement in the world is shaped not by our own need for approval or identity, not by our fears or delusions. It is shaped by our desire to honour God and extend his rule in his world.
Without an ongoing worship of God, we are consigned to what Eugene Peterson terms a life of ‘spasms and jerks’. Swept this way and that by whatever is popular, whatever makes us feel good. Of course, we remind ourselves that worship of God is not merely attending a church on Sunday but a consistent self-offering to God.
There is much in our world that may threaten us or throw us off balance. Our challenge is to not let that changeability dictate terms to us. As our Psalm reminds us, God remains firm and solid despite the storms. All else can be shaken but he cannot. Our God, to use the words of the poet T.S. Eliot, is the “still point of the turning world.”
Blessings
David Reay