“Bless the Lord” (Psalm 103)

Bless The Lord

Psalm 103

One of the challenges of life—and I think this is a lifelong challenge—is that we live with a gap between what is true and real and what our hearts understand to be true and real. We live in a kind of unreality.

When I was in high school after I got my license, I think I honestly came to believe that I had a talent for evading speed traps. I was regularly running late to things, and that meant I was not infrequently driving too fast. And for quite a while I didn’t get caught—and at a subconscious level I just thought I was lucky, that I was not one of those people who would get pulled over. Until of course I did, which was awful. And then I had to tell my dad, which also wasn’t fun. Reality broke through. In the end, reality always breaks through.

Probably most of us don’t have this particular superstition. But each of us have areas in our lives where internally, often not even consciously, we live in a kind of unreality, disconnected from what is true. We hide our faults from our eyes, or maybe we shut our minds to problems believing that if we ignore them, they’ll go away. We all do things like that.

I believe the area where this disconnect from reality is greatest has to do with what we believe about God. Scripture tells us that one of the tricks that sin plays on us is that it causes us to shut our mind to the reality of who God is. This is a truth that lies underneath this morning’s passage. If we could see God rightly, the Bible tells us, we would bless him. “Bless the Lord,” it begins. 

Unless you live in the south, “bless their hearts” you generally don’t use the word bless very much. The idea of blessing is fairly simple: it is to wish good upon someone. We bless people all the time without thinking about it, “Have a great trip! Have a nice day—or, if you want to be especially casual, “Have a good one.” That is to wish good upon someone.

Our Psalm is saying that living in reality involves an earnest, joyful desire for God to continue to be glorious and powerful: our souls should be able to say, “We are glad that you are God and we are not. We desire for you to continue to be the one who has all the power and all the glory. We want you to be in control.” 

Is that something that is easy and natural for you to say? Isn’t it the case that often, a part of us deep down would say, “God, you might be in control of the world, but I’d rather not have you be in control of my life. I would kind of prefer to be king of my own territory, thank you very much.” Which is crazy thinking, if we just pause for a moment to reflect upon it. Why do we think we would do a good job being in complete control of our lives? We forget things we need to do, we make bad decisions, and if we’re honest with ourselves we don’t really have a good idea as to what would make us happy.

And yet, because of our fears and uncertainty, a part of us struggles to say, “God, I am really glad you are God and in control.” We struggle to bless God. We are living in unreality. 

And this Psalm addresses that challenge head on. Do you notice who David, the Psalm writer, is speaking to here? It’s not to God as a prayer. And it’s not to us as learners. No, the audience throughout the Psalm is David himself. Notice who he’s speaking to, “Bless the Lord, my soul, that is, “Bless the Lord, self.”  

“Self,” David is saying, “we need to have a conversation.” He keeps talking directly to himself throughout the first few verses, every “you” is to his own soul, and that’s where he ends as well. Throughout this Psalm, he addresses the part of him that is living in unreality and seeks to bring it to the truth.

The British preacher David Martyn Lloyd Jones says that one of our problems is that “We allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self…Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problem of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. You understand what he’s saying right? What does your self tell you when you’re waking up? “This day is going to be terrible–I don’t know how I’m going to get through it. Today feels overwhelming, I’m going to fail.” Or whatever—our self speaks to us, and can it really be trusted? He goes on to say that when this happens: when it feels like our soul is crushing us, sometimes the best thing to do is to stand up and say, “Self, listen to me for a moment. I will speak to you.”

What I love about this is that so often we feel like if our thoughts are telling us something, we have no control. We just have to accept it. If I feel some morning like God isn’t real, then maybe I’m losing my faith. 

But no. You can talk back. And that’s what we see here: “Self,” David is saying, “You are living in unreality.” Self, let me help you to understand why you should be able to genuinely say, “Lord, I am glad that you are in control.” 

David wrote this as a Psalm, not just for himself, but for us as well, so that we can work to lead our own hearts into reality. So this morning, I’d like to encourage each of us, as we hear these words, to engage in an internal conversation—speak these things to your self.

Some of you might already at one level believe what this Psalm tells us. But perhaps for you this would be a good time to remind yourself of them again. Others of you might not yet be convinced—and I’d like to encourage you to open yourself up to hearing these things and consider that they might be describing a reality that to this point you have not understood.  

What He Does for Us

David says, “Self, I want you to understand: you should bless the Lord.” Why? Well, you need to remember what your God does for you. “Forget not all his benefits.” In other words, “Self, you need to remember what you can expect from our God in his relationship with you.”

What can you expect from God in this life? That’s a pretty important question, if you think about it. Really, your entire life hangs upon that question. Verses 3-5 offer an answer, repeating the idea that “your God is the one who, your God is the one who.” And perhaps the heart of these statements is in verse 4. Here’s what your self needs to know: your God is the one who redeems your life from the pit.  

We don’t have many pits in our day, but when this was written, they were everywhere. People dug cisterns for getting water or traps for animals. Often it would be something around 6 feet at the top, which would then considerably widen as it went deeper, often 15 feet or more down. Because these pits were hidden, it was a relatively common problem for livestock to fall into them, or even for people to do so.

And imagine that, imagine falling into a pit like this. You’re in the forest, perhaps looking for a lost animal; you don’t look where you’re stepping, and suddenly you crash down into this deep, dark hole in the ground. The mud softens your fall just a bit, but you’ve likely broken something. As you look around at the mud and rock walls surrounding you and at the small opening high above, panic begins to surge through you. You struggle to find a way out through climbing or digging, but there’s nothing. You cry out for help, but nobody hears you. For hours, days, you sit hopelessly in the darkness, unsure if you’ll ever be able to live again. That’s the image here. 

Do you know what it’s like to be stuck in a dark pit? Do you know what it is to be in a moment of helplessness, of pain and difficulty and it seems like there isn’t a way out? A moment that feels dark and often very alone. Perhaps some of you even right now are in the pit.

Tell yourself this: Even when nobody else hears, or nobody else can help, your God is watching and sees that you have fallen into the muddy pit. Tell your soul, “Your God is the God who will redeem your life from the pit.” He comes near, takes a ladder and climbs down and pulls you up out of it.   

This is what your God does. And he does this no matter why you got yourself in the pit. Sometimes when you’re in the pit, it’s not your fault at all. You are diagnosed with cancer and have no idea how you’ll move forward in life. Or you experience evil from another person and the trauma completely upends your life. You are powerless to move forward. But God is able to do what you can’t: he is the one who, as verse 3 says, “heals all your diseases.” He will pull you out of that pit.  

Sometimes, though, the pit you fall into is a pit that you have dug for yourself. Sometimes you have just absolutely blown it. You made a choice or even a series of bad choices, choices that you thought would give you happiness, even though God said it wouldn’t. Perhaps it didn’t even feel like a choice at the time: you just flew off the handle in anger, or you failed to act because you were so overwhelmed. The pit you are in is a pit that you dug for yourself, and now you are stuck, and all you can do is recognize your own failure—that you deserve to be here.

But even in the pit we have made for ourselves, still we see the ladder being set down and God climbing in and reaching out his hand. Because your God is the God who, verse three, “forgives all your iniquity.” 

And when he brings you out, what then? He crowns you with steadfast love and mercy. Which is pretty great, and far better than niceness. Niceness is for a moment, it’s shallow. But steadfast love is like a mother’s love for her child: it is deep and it lasts. And that is how your God is; beyond just rescuing you, he surrounds you with an enormous divine embrace with deep everlasting commitment and compassion. He treats you like a son. You are never alone, never need to worry about someone not knowing, not caring.

Forget not all his benefits. “Self,” we’re invited to say, “Even when you’re in the pit precisely because you disobeyed him. When you find yourself crying out in darkness and guilt and hopelessness, you can be sure that God hears and that God will come into the pit with you, that your God will shine his light in your darkness. And that he will bring you out, out of despair and hopelessness. And every year you will discover more what it means that he surrounds you with his life and mercy. Until at the end of life, at the end of this world, God will pull you completely out of sin and death; he will crown you as his royal son or daughter; he will fill your days with God. Because this is who our God is.”

Tell your souls, David says, this is why you should bless him.

Who He Is

Now this is hard to believe, because we don’t yet fully see it in this life that at time in its entirety feels like a pit. When we hear these words, there’s a part of us that responds, “How can I be sure that this is how God will act toward me? It’s hard to trust this: How can I be sure this isn’t just wishful thinking and that God really doesn’t care in this way?

Which is a legitimate question. We want to avoid just projecting what we want to believe upon God—we want to live within reality. How can we know what to expect about God’s involvement in our lives? How can we be confident about what he will do for us, especially in those moments where everything feels unclear?

I know of only one way we can have this kind of knowledge: for us to know anything about God, we need God to reveal himself to us. That’s the focus of 6-9: “The Lord made known his ways to Moses, and his acts to the people of Israel.” verse 7 says. When the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt, hopeless, oppressed, they were in a pit, and God came near. Verse 6 is a remembrance: “The Lord works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed.” You can know that how God is, this Psalm is saying, because that’s what God did.

If we were to be writing this Psalm rather than David, we could make this point even more strongly. This very Advent season we remember how while the entire human race was opposed to God, lost, in darkness, sentenced to death, God stepped into the mud with us in the person of Jesus. Jesus identified with us in our suffering and even in our sin, and then he went to the very darkest, the very lowest place, enduring death on the cross, so that in rising from the dead he could lift us out of sin and death as well. How can we be confident in our lives that God will rescue us from the pit? Because he has proved that this is how he acts.

And it’s not only in what God has done, but also in what he has said. Verse 8 isn’t just a statement. It’s a quote. On Mt. Sinai, Moses said to God, “Show me your glory,” essentially asking God, “Let me know what kind of God you really are.” And when God appears before Moses, he says, “I am the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” This is who I am.

What that is telling us is that when we say that God crowns us with steadfast love and compassion, this isn’t just something we’ve made up—these are the very words that God has said to us. And he says it even more clearly when he declared for us once and for all who he is, in his Son. Every healing by Jesus, every time Jesus dines with those rejected by society, every time Jesus expresses his love and invites people to join him, again and again, this is God saying, “this is who I am.”   

Self, this is how you can know that God will rescue us. Because God has shown us and he has told us that this is true.

Doubts

And yet, perhaps there is a part of your inner self that is still not convinced. “But wait,” it might be saying, “you haven’t considered all the facts. Be honest with yourself for a moment. Don’t you know what you are? You are on this earth for just a moment, like a wildflower. For a few days, maybe a few weeks, you might look kind of good. But then we shrivel up and die—as verse 16 says, “the wind passes over it and it is gone and its place knows it no more.” That’s your life. It’s so small, so short, so insignificant. Why in the world would an eternally glorious God care about a single wildflower of a person?

But even more troubling, don’t you know that you’re not really the nice and put together person that you pretend to be? Just take a look for a moment at what you really have done and at who you really are, all those things you hide from everyone else and most of the time even yourself. Can you honestly expect God to want to do these things for you? God might be everything this says for some people. But not for you.

But the Psalm says, “Well, you would have a point if God’s attitude toward you was based on what you deserve. But here’s the crazy thing:  Verse 10: “He does not deal with us according to our sins or repay according to our iniquities.” In fact, here’s how much our behavior and our failings has to do with how God treats us: verse 12: “as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.” Stand on a mountain and look as far as you can in one direction, way off in the distance; and then turn around and look in the opposite direction. However far that is, in God’s attitude toward you, your failures are even further away from you than that.  

Because God relates to us on a very different basis from what we deserve: verse 13: “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.” If you are a father and your child does something wrong and even hurts you, do you care for them any less? In your best moments, is there anything you wouldn’t do for your son or daughter? God says—that’s what you should think of in your soul when you are trying to understand how I am towards you. Put another way in verse 11: look high at the stars in the heavens, how far those stars are from you—that is how great my love is for you. And, verse 17, though you might have only a brief life, God’s love for you is eternal: “The steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him.”

It doesn’t matter how small or insignificant your life feels. It doesn’t matter how deeply you have failed and how terribly you have hurt others and wronged God: the bigness of God’s love overcomes your smallness, and the power of God’s love overcomes your failure. God loves you. It doesn’t matter how twisted and confused and selfish you are in the most hidden part of you: God sees you as a son, as a daughter, and delights in your good. He does not treat you according to your sins. He is the one who rescues you from the pit.

And that means a very simple thing. Once you have considered all the facts, once your soul has truly paid attention to all that God has shown you, here’s what you can know. In God, you are secure. In God, you don’t need to fear—you don’t need to fear what will happen to you, and you don’t even need to fear your own mistakes. Because God is committed in love to you. He is committed to bringing you out of the pit, surrounding you with his life, and filling your life with good things.

This is reality. When our soul can begin to grasp this, when we can remember who our God is for us, then our hearts will join in this invitation to the whole world, “Bless the Lord all his works in all places of his dominion. Bless the Lord, O my soul.”

Let’s take a moment in silence to listen again to what this Psalm is saying, to perhaps acknowledge our sins before God and take hold of the reality of his forgiveness.