Psalm 107: Through Thick and Thin…

Maybe it’s because sport is so performance orientated. Maybe it’s just the natural tendency of the human heart to judge things on the basis of external appearances and circumstances. Whatever the reason, all Christians are tempted to evaluate their relationship with God on the basis of how their lives are going.
 
So as we’ve already noted in earlier weeks, when we’re injured we feel that in some way God’s love has deserted us. Or if things are going well in our lives then we feel that God must be pleased with us and is blessing us. Similarly we think that God is like this also; that as Christians his favor is with us when we are keeping his ways, and he is angry with us when we don’t. However, one of the great ‘take aways’ (something to take away think over, and to let it change you) of this psalm is that God’s love is just the same whatever our performance and whatever our lives look like.
 
This though is not to say that God won’t intervene in our lives, or that he won’t discipline us, but it is to say that God’s discipline is not a sign of him loving us any less. God does sometimes give us over to the consequences of our wrong moral choices to cause us to come back to him, but this is the act of a loving Father; ‘Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father?’ (Hebrews 12) This is what the psalmist points out; whether through difficult times – ‘then their numbers decreased, and they were humbled by oppression, calamity and sorrow’ (vs. 39), or whether through good times - ‘he turned the desert into pools of water and the parched ground into flowing springs’ (vs. 35), God’s love is constant. Whatever patterns are weaved into the tapestry of our lives, the golden thread of God’s love is present throughout binding the whole together. ‘Whoever is wise, let him heed these things and consider the great love of the Lord’ (vs. 43)
 
And yet part of what we’re being taught is that sometimes in life when we look by sight we can’t see God’s love obviously at work. When bad things happen – as they inevitably will do – it can be foolish to tell someone that ‘behind it all is God’s purpose of love’; it may be true but it won’t help them cope with the difficulties they’re facing. Instead the psalmist would tell us to look to the surest sign of God’s love; the way that through Jesus Christ he delivered us from our distress and redeemed us into security, freedom, life and peace. This supreme act of grace stands like a majestic tribute to love in time and space and should be the marker post for our hearts.
 
So whatever comes your way; rain or shine, success or failure, injury or health, look to the cross and reorientate your feelings of how much God loves you on this sure sign, and rejoice in the security, freedom, life and peace that is yours in Christ.
 
‘Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love, for his wonderful deeds to men’.
 
Pete