A Psalm for It

"As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God." (Psalm 42:1)

As the deer pants for the water, so the soul pants for God. That is not a psalm of arrival. It is a psalm of thirst. The man writing it is not describing a full cup but a dry mouth, and he is describing it while remembering how things used to be, how he once went up to the house of God with the sound of a festival crowd. He is not there anymore.

And then, twice, he turns and speaks directly to his own soul. Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God. He is arguing with himself, out loud, on paper, in a hymn we have kept for three thousand years.

That is the whole reason the Psalter exists. There is a psalm for every condition a person will ever be in. The rage and the doubt, the guilt and the exhaustion, even the morning you did not want to be alive, it is all in there, and it is all in there on purpose. God saw to it that when you walked in on the worst day of your life, you would find that someone had already stood exactly where you are standing, and had left a flower for you to find. So do not face the dry season wordless. Go into the garden, find the psalm planted for your thirst, and let a man three thousand years dead teach your soul how to talk to itself again.

No Third Category

"Death and life are in the power of the tongue." (Proverbs 18:21)

We have to become mindful of what our words are doing to people, because they are doing something, always, whether we intended it or not. We can use words to speak life. We can use words to speak death. There is no third category. There is no neutral. There is only what is happening in another person's chest after you have stopped talking, and you do not control it, and you cannot take it back, and very often you will never even find out.

And here is a question worth not putting down. If Jesus is truly in us, would not our words also speak Jesus out of us? Take it not as a flourish but as a test. If the Spirit of the living God has taken up residence in a person, and if what fills a heart is what finally comes out of the mouth, then the things you say when you are tired, and the things you say when you are angry, and the things you say in a low voice about someone who is not there, are all telling you something true about what is actually in you.

Not what you hope is in you. What is in you. The mouth is the most honest instrument you own. It reports the true contents of the heart, especially when you have stopped guarding it.

Most of us do not always like what our mouth reports. But the answer is not to argue with the report. It is to let it drive us back to the only One who can change what is in the well, so that what comes up out of it is life. Ask him to fill the heart with himself, and then listen this week to what your words reveal is really there.

The No That Love Says

"Fear of man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is kept safe." (Proverbs 29:25)

Do you have trouble saying no? There is a particular powerlessness in it, where the word is right there in your mouth and simply will not come, and you hear yourself agreeing to the thing even as your heart sinks. Somebody asks, and you say yes, and you are already tired. And it always traces back to the same fear. What would they think of me if I said no.

So we end up buying whatever anyone is selling. We say yes to the errand, the committee, the favor, the fourteenth thing this month, and we do it because we would rather be exhausted than disliked, and then we tell ourselves that this is what love looks like. But love is not the same thing as the inability to refuse.

Consider that God says no to us all the time. He says it often and plainly, even to things we wanted badly, even to things we were sure were good. Does that mean he does not love us? We know it does not. God is love, and sometimes love is precisely the thing that says no. No to what would harm you. No to what would hollow you out. A no is not the absence of love. A no can be the shape love takes when it sees further down the road than you can.

Which means your endless yes may not be kindness at all. It may be fear wearing the costume of kindness. So before you answer the next request, ask what is actually moving you. If even God, who is love, can say no in love, then you are permitted to, and the fear that would not let the word out was never love to begin with.

The Only Two Masters

"Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? ... If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ." (Galatians 1:10)

In the middle of an argument about grace and performance, Paul stops and asks a question that has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with the heart. Whose approval am I working for. And he does not leave it hanging. He lays down two options and makes them plain, and in the end they are the only two there are. You will be a servant of God, or you will be a slave to the opinions of other people.

Notice that both of those words put your life in someone else's hand. Neither one is independence. There is no third door where you finally become self-sufficient and beholden to no one, because that person has never existed. You were made to be held. The only question is by whom.

It is a harder choice than it is usually made to sound. Long before Christ ever broke into the hardness of the heart and began to warm it, most of us had already spent years living for the approval of others. It is the water we learned to swim in, the first language we ever spoke. It is entirely possible to go on today and tomorrow and every day after, calculating what the room thinks, managing how we are seen, keeping our standing carefully in repair, and to call the whole exhausting business faithfulness.

Paul says that if he were still doing that, he would not be a servant of Christ. Not a worse servant. Not one at all. Let that sentence cost you something, and then choose your master on purpose, before the room chooses for you.