Soul Work: Devotionals from Psalms

Soul WORK Q

Devo ti o n a ls

from

P salm s

by Patrick Lafferty

a weekly devotional

Originally published as

every thought captive from Park Cities Presbyterian Church

Soul Work An Every Thought Captive devotional collection Š 2009 by Patrick Lafferty All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America Sixth Printing, 2010 Park Cities Presbyterian Church 4124 Oak Lawn Avenue Dallas, Texas 75219 http://everythoughtcaptive.pcpc.org

Contents Psalm 51:4 Psalm 51:10 Psalm 51:12 Psalm 51:16–17 Psalm 119:136 Psalm 19:14 Psalm 107:31, 43 Notes

4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18

February 19, 2009 a weekly devotional

every thought captive from Park Cities Presbyterian Church

Against You, You only, have I his treachery? Was not Bathsheba sinned and done what is evil seduced? Joab compromised? in Your sight, so that You may Uriah murdered? Uriah’s wife be justified in Your words and deprived? Nathan deceived? How blameless in Your judgment. can David see the Lord as the Psalm 51:4 “victim” of his designs?

There is only one sin, only one.

And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft… When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.

None would argue that David excluded from his remorse what he’d done to them. But beneath every evil he committed lay an outright mistrust of the Lord’s goodness and provision. Each was a replication of the very first sin of biting on the serpent’s equivocation, “Did God actually say. . . ?” (Gen. 3:1).

Whether in seduction, conspiracy, murder, deception, David made himself his god by completely dismissing the promises of his real God. His remorse overflowed because every sin was a variation of mistrust in the Lord.

So intones Baba, an alternately brusque and gentle father, to his son, Amir, in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Seizing upon a teachable moment, Baba identifies what he believes to be the common thread running through all human offenses. And who can quibble with his wisdom?

So every sin has the Lord in its sights. While that may be of some theological importance, is it necessary to establish that truth whenever I sin? Must we probe the underbelly of our offenses, as David did, to recognize their true grievousness?

King David finds another commonality to every sin, and an even more profound one: every sin is ultimately directed against the Lord, Himself. In the lament for his sin involving Bathsheba, David acknowledges, “Against You, You only, have I sinned”—his pathos leading him to repeat the identity of the One he’s offended. But how can the Lord alone be the target of

For two reasons we must.

Seeing all our sin as directed against the Lord brings us to the root issue of our struggle with 4

sin. Can we really own up to the harm we do to another person without recognizing Who they belong to—that they are made in the image of God? A simple “I’m sorry” doesn’t get to the root of the issue until the belief that led us to act in this harmful way is seen as a mistaken belief about God. If I really believed Him to be good and sufficient, I wouldn’t have acted in this way to get myself a kind of satisfaction that was false and fleeting. The cycle of harm can be broken when at last I recognize the harm I do is a clenched-fisted arrogance toward my heavenly Father—a refusal to believe He is enough.

When we dig more deeply into the motivation for our sin we find something more than mere weakness in us. We find wickedness.

Therein lies the second reason for scouring our souls as David did.

Seeing all our sin as directed against the Lord leads us to the proper solution for our sin. David began to grasp the depth of his wickedness when he saw the true object of his offense. Then also he saw his only hope as being in the steadfast love of God whom he had offended. Seeing the depth of his offense helped him see the even deeper love of God in His willingness to restore unto David “the joy of His salvation.” As Jesus spoke in the Sermon on the Mount, David “mourned” his “poverty of spirit” before God, and then was made humble and “meek” in receiving God’s grace to restore

him to favor. God alone was his solution to his offense.

I cannot grasp the fullness of the Cross of Jesus unless I see my earthly sins as having a heavenly trajectory. For I do not understand Jesus adequately unless I see that He came to do more than atone for my offenses—He also came to restore true, loving fellowship between me and my Father whose love is steadfast. He shines His searing light upon our sin not merely to expose its reality to us, but to reveal even more brilliantly His willingness to die for our sin!

We’re left with no one but Jesus when we, like Eli, discover: “If someone sins against a man, God will mediate for him, but if someone sins against the Lord, who can intercede for him?” (1 Sam. 2:25).

In which circumstance can we be more confident of another’s love: in their willingness to flatter us or their willingness to forgive us? “God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).

If David’s precedent must become ours, then any strife in a relationship that remains within your power to address is a sin against God. Any love withheld on the basis of self-interest is a sin against God. Though it may be arduous, consider the true object of your offenses as you confess them today or this Sunday. In that is our hope of getting to both the root issue and solution for our sin.

Patrick Lafferty

February 26, 2009 a weekly devotional

every thought captive from Park Cities Presbyterian Church

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

Psalm 51:10

Sunday revealed David’s longing for a new heart built on a renewed sense of the Lord’s presence: Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. If you were reading from the English Standard Version, you may have noticed an asterisk next to the word “right” in verse 10 with a corresponding footnote explaining how it might also be translated as “steadfast.” Elsewhere in the Psalms, that same Hebrew word is used to connote “established,” or “secure,” or “steadfast.”

The word fad originates from the confluence of the two Latin words for “foolish” and “vapid.”

To say ours is a faddish world is a laughable understatement. Our collective attention tends to dart this way and that way with the appearance of every new event, story, idea, or product. (A current example—soon to be labeled, “oh so February 2009”—is the flash mob: you hover over your social networking account until someone organizes a spontaneous gathering for everyone within network range to flock to.)

So if by “right” David meant he desired a steadfast spirit, why would a clean heart, which is parallel to such a spirit, connote something unwavering, unyielding, and undistracted? Steadfastness is a function of, among other things, vigilance and discernment.

Had David’s heart been vigilant, he’d have forgone a foolish second glance at Bathsheba, and thereby kept the episode from cascading into deceit, treachery, and murder. Had discernment been present, he’d have seen what was of true value and what was only vapid.

As attention goes, so goes our devotion. In this climate of faddishness, we’ve been trained to have low expectations for whatever object we fix our erratic attention upon. Most things that gleam at first glance soon pale with a longer look, so we, in effect, learn to dispense with devotion to anything. Add to our low expectations a palpable sense that we’re missing something if we devote ourselves to anything, and fidelity as a category seems an antiquated response to modern life.

It would be anachronistic to ascribe faddishness to David’s world, but what David needed 6

then we still need now: a spirit—a deeply rooted inclination—that is steadfast, anchored not to the alluringly faddish but to the enduring. How is that steadfastness found?

It’s a principle of gardening that the less you water, the shallower the roots will form. Watering more sends the roots deeper, for they know there’s more water to be found there. The deeper the roots, the more robust the grass or plant, because its rootedness enables it to withstand more above ground.

Publican (Luke 18:10–14), the Two Brothers (Luke 15:11–32), the Last Judgment (Matt. 25:31–46), and the teaching on Forgiveness and Fasting (Matt. 6:14–21). If faddishness imposes upon us where steadfastness is needed, could we not benefit from the same directed attention to what endures?

It’s late February and this principle of gardening applies to your spirit. It’s possible that whatever vows you made in January to soak in the scriptures may have evaporated just a bit slower than an ice coating in Dallas. Fortunately, it’s never too late to begin again, to renew the soaking so that spiritual roots grow deeper and steadfastness begins to bloom. It is precisely this lack of steadfastness that the Lord Jesus came to redeem. If a bruised reed He will not break and a smoldering wick He will not snuff out (Isaiah 42:3, Matt. 12:20), He is most willing and able to rescue us from our seemingly incorrigible faddishness.

Lent is now upon us, what our Orthodox friends call a time of “bright sadness.”1 In preparation for this time of fasting and reflection, they’ve soaked in the stories of Zaccheus (Luke 19:1–10), the Pharisee and the Patrick Lafferty

March 5, 2009 a weekly devotional

every thought captive from Park Cities Presbyterian Church

Restore to me the joy of Your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.

Psalm 51:12

with the experience of those who’ve lived through Northern Ireland’s tumultuous history?)

But is it a stretch to suggest that what’s common to the human condition—and thus why these two songs resonate so deeply with so many—is the unremitting longing for something veiled in mystery whose reality to us is not diminished by its hiddenness?

Something that would center us, ground us, and sustain love in us so that we might carry each other perseveringly? Both songs involve what C. S. Lewis referred to as Sehnsucht—the German word for “longing”—that “inconsolable longing for we know not what.” It’s a longing that seems to indicate the existence of a true, but hidden, home for all those who yearn for it.

This week U2 released its latest album, No Line on the Horizon.

Even in the unlikely event listeners find the new tracks substandard, the fan base of the band has reached such a critical mass that it nearly guarantees astounding sales of the album.

A poll last week1 by a British social networking site asked which was the most enduring song of the band’s almost 30-year legacy. At number 3 was “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” a 20-year-old anthem to a quest for something captivating but elusive.

At number 1 was, appropriately, the song “One”—allegedly inspired by an intramural squabble in the band several years ago. The song’s theme is that despite the things that seek to divide us we are all “one love / one blood / one life... we’re not the same / we get to carry each other / carry each other.”

For a few weeks now, we’ve sat with David in his lament over his sin, couched in the language of longing in Psalm 51. He’s longed for reconciliation with the God who, he’s recognized, was most offended by all his sin (v. 4). He’s longed for a clean, steadfast heart, undistracted by lesser allurements (v. 10). This Sunday we heard his longing for joy, that “deep, abiding confidence that all is well regardless of circumstance or difficulty.” This is what all people

It’s a stretch to infer something sociological from an unscientific poll. (Wouldn’t we expect songs about unity and longing to connect 8

are looking for—just scan the bookstores, the conferences, the magazine racks.

The joy David longs for, however, isn’t a generic contentment with self or circumstances. It’s centered specifically on the Lord’s salvation; it sees David’s true condition before God and the pains God has taken to salvage the relationship. The salvation which David knew only in part was more fully and powerfully wrought in Christ: the Lord’s coming to us (John 1:14), His looking past our offenses (2 Cor. 5:19), and His taking us to Himself to fit us for life and eternity (John 14:2).

The contentment that such a joy brings would’ve kept David from being lured away and enticed by his own desire, as James puts it (James 1:14).

But quite unlike many joyseekers, David knows this joy is entirely dependent on the Lord’s work. That he requests the Lord to uphold him with a willing spirit testifies to that sense of dependence.

There is no greater or more enduring need than having the joy of our salvation. Without it we risk discouragement when we lose what we have or don’t find what we need. But such joy is necessary in times of plenty and in want. When resources are multiplying, without such joy we risk losing sight of Him who enriched us (Deut. 8:11–14).

David’s (and by extension Jesus’) lesson for us is that whatever our pursuits, they must be circumscribed by the more fundamental pursuit of the joy of our salvation. Pursuit of the latter is not instead of the former; Jesus said, “seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things [food, drink, clothing] will be added unto you” (Matt. 6:33). But as we seek to pay our bills, feed our kids, and attend to our afflictions, unless we seek the joy of our salvation, all those other pursuits will either consume or callous us.

If you realized how desperately you needed that joy, what might you deprioritize to find it? If you realized how dependent you were on finding it, how desperately would you seek to abide in Him so you could know the joy that bears much fruit? (John 15:1–11).

How might the season of Lent be transformed in your mind from a time of giving up something to a time of going after something— namely, the joy of your salvation?

His blood. His love. Our life. With Him. That’s what we’re lookin’ for.

And those who find it carry each other, because they know that they’ve been carried.

Patrick Lafferty

March 12, 2009 a weekly devotional

every thought captive from Park Cities Presbyterian Church

For You will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; You will not be pleased with a burnt offering.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; A broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.

Psalm 51:16–17

another night bingeing, Jess tries to take matters into her own hands to get her mother to stop.

Erratic and angered by Jess’s hopeless attempt at intervention, Alice strikes her child.

The next morning, reeling from the stupor that led to the incident, she tearfully tells her husband upon his return, “I hit her hard.”

Alice is a buoyant, vibrant school counselor. Her airline pilot husband, Michael, sports both a steely eye and a warm grin.

Together they form a blended family with two daughters, a precocious nine-year-old, Jess, and her adoring four-year-old sister, Casey. We’re introduced to the Greens, who seem by all appearances an affable, affectionate family in the 1994 film When a Man Loves a Woman.

So much harm done so quickly.

What could be done to begin the healing? It would’ve been obscene for Alice to come to her daughter with gifts or treats, or to promise her lavish trips. Something had to precede such offerings. Only contrition—transparent, brokenhearted sorrow—could start the reconciliation. Only with anguish for the harm done, honest appreciation for the one she’d harmed, and an adamant desire to bring healing to the relationship could the process begin. There is a sequence to reconciliation; and no gift can substitute for contrition.

In short order, though, we learn not all is well with the Green family. Alice has a drinking problem, eliciting from her both the sophomoric and flamboyant.

When Michael begins to challenge her intemperance she, as alcoholics are wont to do, denies a problem, and soon seeks to conceal her addiction, which even she knows is growing unmanageable. One night, as Alice takes advantage of her husband’s absence by spending

King David says as much in his own process of restoration before God. Though the Law prescribed animal sacrifices of various kinds for sin, no sacrificial gift could replace what it was only meant to represent—namely, contrition. To 10

offer a sacrifice without having come to terms with the magnitude and significance of the sin was to short-circuit the process of reconciliation by putting it out of sequence. David had inflicted immense harm in rapid fashion, and, with time and rebuke, recognized that sequence. He knew the Lord would “not delight in sacrifice” until there was first a sacrifice of brokenness—an honest appraisal of the harm he’d done and of the value of those he’d harmed. David, too, knew how obscene it would’ve been to bring gifts to Bathsheba, or a burnt offering to the Lord, without evidence of brokenness for his sin.

Unless contrition preceded offering, David and Alice would’ve believed they could have genuinely compensated for their respective sins. Yet nothing could compensate! What gift could bring back Uriah? What treasure could wipe the memory of Alice’s blow from Jess’s memory?

Why make much of the sequence and substance of reconciliation?

We live in a culture that highly esteems the power to purchase, to lavish others with gifts. How tempted are you to circumvent the process of reconciliation with those you harm by putting forth expensive offerings instead of laying your heart bare before them, acknowledging your regret for doing them wrong? Have you ever bought a flower when a heartfelt admission of folly was really called for? Have you ever opted for an

expensive purchase rather than an extensive apology? How David sought reconciliation with the Lord is not unlike how we must seek it with each other.

We live before a Lord who would accept no gift from us until a right Sacrifice had been made acknowledging the harmfulness of our very nature. He would take no delight in any offering of our time, treasure, or talent from us without a prerequisite expression of sorrow for sin. This burden he laid upon His own Son. Jesus wept for us. He was contrite for us before the God who sent Him to that cross, and thereby models that sequence of reconciliation.

He does more than model, though.

By His sorrow we’re reminded that we live not before a philosophy, but before a Father who knows our “inward parts” (Psalm 139:13) and our “weaknesses” (Heb. 4:15). Contrition—or in Paul’s words, godly grief (2 Cor. 7:10ff)— removes any illusions about our sin but also restores us to a Lord who is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love (Ex. 34:5). For those reasons must we make much of brokenness, for the sake of our fellowship with the Lord and with each other.

Patrick Lafferty

March 19, 2009 a weekly devotional

every thought captive from Park Cities Presbyterian Church

My eyes shed streams of tears, because people do not keep Your law.

With due credit to Psalm 139:13, every feature of the human body owes its shape, structure, and function to the guidance of the 23 pairs of chromosomes inhabiting every human cell. The 46 chromosomes together are composed of some 32,000 genes, each governing a particular expression of a human trait. The genes represent the intricate, delicate synthesis of over 3 trillion DNA molecules.

Though the process of human development occurs innumerable times every moment, that in no way mitigates how astounding it is. And when so much can go so wrong so easily, it’s nothing short of miraculous when formation of the human organism goes right.

the attendant fortitude (2 Tim. 3:5); and there are those whose rectitude expresses itself not in merciful love but in condescension (Luke 7:36-40). These form a spectrum of what can go wrong in the formation of a soul.

What then would a rightly formed soul look like? How would it function? Sunday unfurled for us the Psalmist’s effusive regard for the Law of God and the benefits of submission to it. Later in the Psalm, in a single verse, he distills one prominent feature of a soul properly formed by that Law: “My eyes shed streams of tears, because people do not keep your law” (Psalm 119:136).

A well-formed soul loves the Law of God; it sees and savors its intrinsic wisdom. But that soul also loves the people that Law applies to—i.e. everyone— sometimes with deep anguish over their blindness to its wisdom.

The formation of a human soul is no less wondrous and no less susceptible to malformation.

Scripture notes several expressions of a soul whose formation didn’t go quite right: there are those who have a zeal for God that is sorely lacking in knowledge (Rom. 10:2); there are those in whom godliness seems to be present but who sadly lack

We perhaps know people who know so much about the Law of God but whose hearts are at the same room temperature as the theological books they’ve pored over. Or those whose admirable offerings of help are guided by something less than wisdom. Or still others whose efforts at godly 12

guidance seem motivated more by an interest in domineering than serving. Perhaps we’ve seen those dysfunctional inclinations in ourselves from time to time as well.

Yet, one who knows the law will love the Law, and people who love the Law will naturally long for its appreciation, not only in themselves, but in everyone.

They won’t seek to coerce another into loving the Law—no love is coerced. But neither will they remain indifferent to their neighbor’s ignorance or intransigence before the Law. The Law isn’t a matter of taste but a matter of truth. How then can one simply look past another’s indifference to the Law as simply “not their cup of tea”?

The loving lament of the Psalmist in verse 136 typifies what our Lord deemed the greatest, twopronged commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). What He proclaimed He also manifested.

The right formation of His soul led him to express vehement anguish toward the Pharisees whose blindness was rivaled only by their arrogance (Matt. 23:27). It led Him to express an unyielding but compassionate directive to the rich ruler who could not part with his many holdings (Mark 10:21), and an impassioned lament over Jerusalem as He neared her for the last time before His crucifixion

(Matthew 23:37). His soul was the perfect synthesis of love for the Law and love for the people it applied to.

Paul reminds us that in Christ we have died to the Law, that its demands no longer condemn our failures of compliance, because Christ has satisfied its demands.

But though God has done in Christ what the Law, “weakened by the flesh, could not do” (Rom. 8:3), the Law remains “holy…righteous and good” (Rom. 7:12). And with the help of the Spirit in us who believe, we shall appreciate that Law by seeking to fulfill its “righteous requirement” by walking according to the Spirit (Rom. 8:4).

Even with our new relationship to the Law through Christ, the synthesis of love for that Law and for its expression in our neighbor remains intact.

How goes the synthesis in you?

Do you so treasure the Law’s goodness that you long to see it evident first in you, and then also in your friend, your spouse, your child—even your enemy? If that synthesis seems impossible in you, consider Zacchaeus’s encounter with Jesus (Luke 19:1–10): the Lord rejoices at even our embryonic expressions of love for Law and others. Then as you devote it your time and attention, the Law can overtake you with appreciation. By prayer and the Spirit’s strengthening of our inner being (Eph. 3:14–19) we will be able to love our neighbors with the Law as we ought.

Patrick Lafferty

March 26, 2009 a weekly devotional

every thought captive from Park Cities Presbyterian Church

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Psalm 19:14

Sunday explored what God’s candor through the heavens and His law reveals of Him. Psalm 19 concluded that a person with a right apprehension of God would sense His majesty, His goodness, and His graciousness— redounding to a life of praise, humble pleading, and an enduring pursuit of God’s pleasure. John Adams, in his own words, exemplifies someone who has ordered his life around Psalm 19’s celebration of the knowledge of God.

John Adams, America’s second president, was raised as a farmer, trained to be an attorney, and propelled into political life following his heroic service in the cause of the American Revolution.

His incisive analytical skills and trenchant oratory led him to become ambassador to France, England, and the Netherlands, before becoming vice president under George Washington and later succeeding him in 1796.

In an invitation to a friend to visit him and his family in their coastal Massachusetts home, Peacefield, Adams extolled the majesty of his surroundings: “I am an atom of intellect with millions of solar systems over my head, under my feet, on my right hand, on my left, before me, and my adoration of the intelligence that contrived and the power that rules the stupendous fabric is too profound to believe them capable of anything unjust or cruel.”1 Having worked and lived off the earth for all his life, his appreciation for the world was effusive. That “the heavens declare the glory of God” was not lost on Adams.

In the afterword of his biography of John Adams, Pulitzer-Prizewinning author David McCullough celebrates the papers from which he compiled the book as nothing short of a “national treasure.” So much had been preserved of their letters, diaries, and family papers, McCullough contends, that those who peruse them are enabled to know John and Abigail Adams like they can know few of their contemporaries. The couple’s written candor reveals them most vividly.

Neither was the psalmist’s humble acknowledgment of 14

his susceptibility to sin. To his dear friend and fellow patriot Benjamin Rush, Adams conceded having “an immense load of errors, weaknesses, and sins to mourn over and repent of.” But just as the psalmist confessed his need of grace for any hope of becoming blameless before God (Psalm 19:13), Adams, too, found any hope of perfectibility impossible if the pursuit was “abstracted from all divine authority”—as the Enlightenment version of perfectibility had been.

“Who can discern all his errors” (Psalm 19:12) was rhetoric Adams found resonant with reality.

As both McCullough’s biography and the miniseries2 portrayed, John Adams was often inordinately preoccupied with how he was being (or would be) perceived.

It was a fault of character in him that Abigail graciously but resolutely ministered to. After years of arduous work, battles military, political, and personal, and the loss of three children, Adams realized one truth that, in retrospect, would’ve most served him—particularly in regard to his most abiding fault.

his son, “Rejoice always in all events, be thankful for all things is a hard precept for human nature, though in my philosophy and in my religion a perfect duty.” Like the psalmist, Adams believed the life well lived was one of “rejoicing evermore”—a life in which what rose to one’s mouth and life, and what was buried deep in one’s heart, were all pleasing to the God who saved and sustained one.

The psalmist’s words would have been a fitting epitaph for Adams: “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”

Rejoicing evermore: Psalm 19, the apostle Paul, and John Adams all think it not only possible but requisite. Do you? What, if anything, is stifling your joy? How might the knowledge of God’s majesty, goodness, and grace in Christ serve to restore joy to your soul? Why not ask for the kind of knowledge He loves to give?

Long after the end of his presidency, and nearing the end of his life, Adams composed a letter to his son, John Quincy (then the American ambassador to Russia) in which he shared what he considered to be the most important feature of a man’s character. From the words of the apostle Paul, Adams told Patrick Lafferty

April 2, 2009 a weekly devotional

every thought captive from Park Cities Presbyterian Church

Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for His wondrous works to the children of man!…

Whoever is wise, let him attend to these things; let them consider the steadfast love of the Lord.

their way down to our brief moment in time. If there is a God, then every breath, every moment, every sight and sound, is sheer, unadulterated gift. And as our mothers taught us, when someone gives you presents like this, the only appropriate response is to thank them.1

How important is thanksgiving?

Whether in a human relationship or in relationship with God, does thanksgiving merely express the beneficiary’s acknowledgement of benevolence from the benefactor?

Is it for the purpose of gratifying the giver, so that he receives at least a little something for his expression of help? Does it merely enhance the recipient‘s prospects of receiving further help? Or is there more to thanksgiving?

Only with belief in God, Wilson says, does thanksgiving have any meaning. If there’s no one to thank, gratitude is merely misdirected sentiment for fortuitous actions that had neither design nor intention behind them.

Should God exist, though, and all that we are, have, or receive finds its ultimate origin in His will, then not to thank Him is to be as oblivious to one’s surroundings as a dead man in a field of blooming bluebonnets.

Doug Wilson goes so far as to say that thanksgiving is bound up with belief in God. To his “antitheist” philosophical sparring partner, Christopher Hitchens, Wilson claims:

Still there’s more to giving thanks than simply validating your faith in God. Psalm 107, as we heard Sunday, claims any joy from that belief in God is also bound up with thanksgiving. It recounted at least four stories of rescue from affliction—rescue by the hand of God in response to a plaintive cry for help. Whether their plight was due to rebellion against God or to the oppression of wicked men, His deliverance demonstrated

The issue of thanksgiving is really central to the whole debate about the existence of God. On the one hand, if there is no God, there is no need to thank anyone. We are here as the result of a long chain of impersonal processes, grinding 16

His steadfast love. And they couldn’t help but thank Him! Their experience strengthened their faith that God exists, but also liberated their joy that He is good in being so steadfastly loving.

Is it your habit to reflect, as the Psalmist does, upon the various acts of rescue the Lord has entered into on your behalf?

Does not Paul remind the church at Ephesus how they were once “dead in trespasses and sins” and following “the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh” (Eph. 2:1–3)? Only to likewise recount, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (2:4–6).

Were it not for the grace of God in Christ, we would all still be objects of wrath (2:3). Reflection upon that truth alone would be enough to elicit joy-bringing thanksgiving.

But the grace of salvation is only the pinnacle of all other rescue operations He undertakes for us.

Paul wants the church at Ephesus to recall how Christ brought them to Himself, but also how He is continually burnishing their souls—a slow and painstaking process of refinement. To that

subsidiary help we must give our attention too.

So, what confusions has the Word of God delivered you from?

What follies? What idolatries and addictions has He replaced with satisfying, God-honoring affections? What did you once love that you now see, by God’s grace, wasn’t worth the love?

Reflection upon His past gifts of rescue are intended to be nourishment to us. So too His present works. What rescue operations are ongoing? What are you beginning to see as evidence of His attempt to get you to trust more in what He promises than in what you thought you could trust?

Dwelling on the loving rescue of God in generic fashion will not do. The concluding command of Psalm 107 is to consider His steadfast love (v. 43). This the psalmist practices by recounting God’s specific acts of rescue.

Such considered reflection leads to an understanding, a comprehension of God which leads to thanksgiving, and which we must pray for (Psalm 119:34).

So will you consider again even just a few of the trials and follies He’s rescued you from? Those who do, the psalmist says, will gain wisdom by what they discover. What’s more, your thanksgiving speaks mightily to those who hear your stories: “The upright see it and are glad.”

Patrick Lafferty

a weekly devotional

every thought captive from Park Cities Presbyterian Church

Notes February 26, 2009 1. Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha (Yonkers, NY: 1974).

March 5, 2009 1. Maureen Coleman, “What will be the One song that U2 fans love the most?� The Belfast Telegraph, February 27, 2009, http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ entertainment/music/news/whatwill-be-the-one-song-that-u2-fanslove-the-most-14206887.html.

March 26, 2009 1. David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, Touchstone, 2002).

2. John Adams. Television miniseries. HBO Films, directed by Tom Hooper, 2008.

April 6, 2009 1. Christopher Hitchens and Doug Wilson, Is Christianity Good for the World? (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2008).

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About Every Thought Captive Every Thought Captive is a weekly e-mail devotional based on the previous Sunday’s sermon at Park Cities Presbyterian Church. You can sign up to receive these e-mails at www.pcpc.org.

About Patrick Lafferty Rev. Patrick Lafferty is Pastor of Spiritual Formation at Park Cities Presbyterian Church. He is a graduate of the University of Texas and Dallas Theological Seminary. He and his wife, Christy, live in Dallas with their two children, Seamus and Savannah, and a dog named Boomer.

Park Cities Presbyterian Church 4124 Oak Lawn Avenue Dallas, Texas 75219 214-224-2500 www.pcpc.org