Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Psalm 124

If the Lord had not been on our side - let Israel say -
If the Lord had not been on our side when men attacked us,
When their anger flared against us, they would have swallowed us alive.
The flood would have engulfed us,
The torrent would have swept over us,
The raging waters would have carried us away.

Praise be to the Lord who has not let us be torn by their teeth.
We have escaped like a bird out of the fowler's snare;
The snare has been broken and we have escaped.
Our help is in the name of the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.

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Wholeness. That's the word that comes to mind when I think about what the psalmist was dealing with in these verses. Again flowing perfectly with the previous Psalm in which they entrusted themselves to God's mercy, here the Psalmist leads Israel in remembering a time when God's mercy led to deliverance.

The anger is pictured vividly in these verses - words like attack, flare, and raging; animal imagery like tearing by the teeth and a bird in the snare, all combine to help us visualize the problem facing Israel. We don't know exactly which struggle was remembered here, and that's okay, because we know what happened. God stepped in.

Anger is probably the emotion I struggle with the most. For a host of reasons, nothing shuts me down like being around an angry person. And there is no emotion I have a harder time expressing. So as I've memorized this Psalm, I haven't had any trouble at all personalizing the deliverance.

But this Psalm also reminds me of another type of deliverance: spiritual. When I look back over my life and the person I was 20 years ago, I know without a doubt that "the snare has been broken, and [I] have escaped." I also know that "if the Lord had not been on my side" ... I wouldn't even want to finish the sentence. I don't want to know where I would be.

One thing God's been teaching me this year is wholeness. A new insight for me is that freedom in Christ doesn't truly come until there is wholeness. Deliverance from a besetting sin or captive situation doesn't equal freedom until something healthy is embraced instead. For example, I've been struggling to lose weight for years now. I've embraced the concept that overeating is a sin and that I need to be healthy. But my "default" until recently has been unhealthy choices. I would eat healthy because I "had" to, not because I wanted to. But on a vacation my husband and I had trouble finding a meal with veggies one day due to limited choices in the small towns we visited. By the next day, we both wanted salad. I knew then that I had turned a corner. I knew that true freedom was coming because I had replaced an unhealthy desire with a healthy one.

Wholeness is a critical concept. There are a lot of false teachings out there about freedom. One places everything on "the devil". I call this "devil made me do it" theology. There's a demon around every corner, and an entire industry exists to help you get rid of them. There is a much stronger focus on the enemy than on God.

Another false teaching about freedom is a belief shared with Buddhism; it's the idea that the desire itself is the problem. Now many Christians would be shocked at being accused of harboring Buddhist beliefs; but the reality is that while we rarely put it in those terms, we act as though desire is the problem. This is especially seen in areas of sexuality but can be reflected in any number of spheres of life. I work at a University and I have talked to Christian students who were taught, implicitly or explicitly, that considering their passions and interests in determining a career choice was wrong and even selfish. They had truly never considered that God had placed within them a unique set of skills and interests and that He might be using their passion to guide them to the field in which He had uniquely designed them to excel.

Another area I've seen this tendency to squelch "desire" - and been guilty myself - is personality. When I began walking with the Lord I thought that my personality had to go. I had to become this "ideal Christian woman" which meant quiet, unopinionated, always spiritual, and loving to work on crafts and shop at Branson malls on the way home from retreats. Well, none of those things are me. I'm frequently loud, very opinionated, growing spiritually but not always spiritual, hate crafts, and would pull my hair out if after 3 days with a group of people I had to stop and shop at a mall. I had to learn to quit denying who God made me to be. I had to embrace my personality to be free - and whole.

Freedom is a journey. If the Lord had not been on my side, I wouldn't have even known I was in a snare. He set me free. I could list the ways for hours. But tonight, I am most grateful that when He freed me from that fowler's snare, He didn't just turn me loose. He cupped me in His nail-scarred hands and began the lifelong process of making me whole.

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