The Lifter of My Head

"But You, O LORD, are a shield for me, My glory and the One who lifts up my head." Psalm 3:3

I walked about in my own fog this morning, as fog also hid the sun outside. I watched the morning news for a half hour as I tried to wake up, but could not shake off the sense of despair at the events that are unfolding around me. People being beheaded in America, mysterious plagues becoming pandemic, the White House invaded, and the lack of security coming to light. I decided I'd had just about enough, and turned instead to my usual "first sighting" in the morning: the Word of God.

God has been surprising me lately with passages that seem to "pop out" at me. I have read them before, but suddenly something new and fresh strikes me in a way I had not seen it before. I read in I Peter 1:13 a verse of encouragement for these troubled times:

"Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ." (emphasis mine)

Hope. Anticipate the fact that Christ is coming soon. That brought comfort to my troubled soul. I decided to look up some cross references and I found this gem from I Corinthians 1. Keep in mind that Paul is addressing the carnal Corinthians, getting drunk at the Communion service and tolerating a brother who was in an incestuous relationship. Before he attempted any words of correction, he said this to them:

"I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus,that in everything you were enriched in Him, in all speech and all knowledge,even as the testimony concerning Christ was confirmed in you,so that you are not lacking in any gift, awaiting eagerly the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ,who will also confirm you to the end, blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.God is faithful, through whom you were called into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord." I Corinthians 1:4-9

My eyes were being taken off of me, off of my surroundings and put back onto the only right thing in the universe: God Himself. I began looking up verses concerning the attribute of His faithfulness.He was faithful to the Old Testament saints, He was faithful to provide Christ as Substitute for all mankind, and He will be faithful to come back again, just as He promised He would. As long as I fix my hope on that, I cannot go wrong. If I look at what I see around me, then I will have what Jesus described would happen to men's hearts in the last days:

Luke 21:25 “There will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth dismay among nations, in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves,men fainting from fear and the expectation of the things which are coming upon the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

My heart will faint from fear and anxiety if I look to what is happening all around me. I know that I can be informed of trends and current events to be prudent, but I don't have to be occupied with them. Instead I can look to the only solution to all the problems: Christ's soon return to this planet. He will come and set things right and He will need no adviser to tell Him what to do.

I cannot help but think of Psalm 2:

Why are the nations in an uproar
And the peoples devising a vain thing?
The kings of the earth take their stand
And the rulers take counsel together
Against the LORD, and against His Annointed, saying,
"Let us tear their fetters apart
And cast away their cords from us!"

He who sits in the heavens laughs,
The Lord scoffs at them,
Then He will speak to them in His anger
And terrify them in His fury, saying,
"But as for Me, I have installed My King
Upon Zion, My holy mountain."

"I will surely tell of the decree of the LORD:
He said to Me, 'You are My Son,
Today I have begotten You.
'Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations as Your inheritance.
And the very ends of the earth as Your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron,
You shall shatter them like earthenware.'"

Now therefore, O kings, show discernment,
Take warning, O judges of the earth.
Worship the LORD with reverence
And rejoice with trembling.
Do homage to the Son, that He not become angry, and you perish in the way,
For His wrath may soon be kindled,
How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!

And so, now more than ever before, it is time for us set our hopes fully on the grace that will be revealed to us, as the Apostle Peter encouraged us to do. As we look into His Word and consider God's attributes, we will find our hearts taking courage. This is something we must do for ourselves, to get the strength required to get through these perilous times.

Even the prophet Jeremiah, weeping after he saw the devastation of his beloved country, found hope through this very thing:

This I recall to my mind,
Therefore I have hope.
The LORD’S lovingkindnesses indeed never cease,
For His compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
Great is Your faithfulness.
“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,
“Therefore I have hope in Him.”
The LORD is good to those who wait for Him,
To the person who seeks Him.
It is good that he waits silently
For the salvation of the LORD.

Lamentations 3:21-26

Like Newborn Babes...

"Therefore, laying aside all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all evil speaking, as newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is gracious." I Peter 2:1-3

I recently became a grandmother, and came home from my trip to see my beloved grandson. The first time I held him, I felt this overwhelming sense of love and the reminder of how helpless a newborn baby is. It is interesting that Peter asks us to be like newborn babies. I am reminded of how much we are like them by watching my grandson.

He could not hold his little head up, but had to be supported when we transferred him from one lap to another. Isn't that like how we must depend on God to lift our head? In Psalm 3, we find David's lament when he had to flee from his own son who wanted to steal the kingdom from him. He, like my grandson, needed help from outside of himself. He says:

"But You, O LORD, are a shield for me, My glory and the One who lifts my head." Psalm 3:3

The next verse says, "I cried to the LORD with my voice, And He heard me from His holy hill." This also reminds me of how we are like babies. My little grandson makes a lot of cute baby noises: squeaking and what I call "rooching" as he fusses a bit and squirms to settle and calm himself. And when his little tummy starts to rumble, he cries. Just like God the Father, his needs are met with his feeding, which is promptly made ready for him.

For us, that milk that we hunger for is God's Word. At first, we may not recognize that it is the substance we are truly longing for. But when we become new creations in Christ, we receive the Holy Spirit and this spirit is not satisfied with the things of this world. Sure, there are so many distractions, but none of them will fill us like the Word of God will.

But Peter gives us a clue as to when we will want the milk of the Word of God, and that is if we have tasted that the Lord is gracious. It is easy to avoid the Word of God if we are fearful of being condemned, but Peter says we must know the Lord's grace to desire the Word. I believe the more we look into the Word, the more gracious we will know Him to be.

But we must approach Him like that newborn baby. The baby doesn't have any pretenses.Their little belly is growling;that's all. So we must approach God's word as needing it as desperately as the baby does its milk.
I have a habit of reading the Word in the morning and sometimes I feel as if the enemy whispers that I am just going through a daily ritual. But not if I ask the Lord to reveal Himself to me in a fresh new way, that I might know more of His gracious kindness.

"Open my eyes, that I may see
Wondrous things from your law." Psalm 119:18

Is the Bible wondrous to us? It is if we know it speaks of grace from Genesis through Revelation. God's very first action after Adam and Eve sinned was to clothe them with skins, which tells us how our sins were covered when Christ bore them on the cross for us. David, who did not have the completed canon of Scripture, understood this when he said:

"Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, Whose sin is covered." Psalm 32: 1

If the Word seems stale,we can read through Psalm 119, where the Psalmist continually is asking for more revelation of the Word. We can ask of God the petitions just like the Psalmist did. If we see that God Himself has provided everything we need, then we can be just like little babies who cry out for our daily feeding of God's Word. God will answer, and provide that milk, in which we find our heart's deepest longings have been met through the Person of Jesus Christ.

"Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good; Blessed is the man who trusts in HIM." Psalm 34:8

We admit that we can do nothing without Him. Just like my grandson, who slept peacefully in my arms after his feeding, we too can rest in His complete provision, which we learn of daily through the gracious milk of the Word of God. Corrie ten Boom once wrote a book called: Don't Wrestle, Just Nestle. That title seems to sum up the privilege we have as God's helpless little children.

Now we too can rest: "Return to your rest, O my soul, For the LORD has dealt bountifully with you. For You have delivered my soul from death, My eyes from tears, And my feet from falling. I will walk before the LORD In the land of the living." Psalm 116: 7-9

and finally, Psalm 23:1, 2 "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures...

I am weak- but He is Strong!!

In many pulpits you may hear that God wants to fill your pockets and nothing more than to make you a huge success in the eyes of men. Problem is...ahem..if you study your Bible carefully... that isn't what happened to God's choice servants... (think Jeremiah in the pit, or John on the island of Patmos)... and that most certainly isn't what happened to Jesus on the cross, our prime example.

Why do so many believe it then?

A while back, at church, a guest pastor filled in with a message about our utter dependence on God and mentioned the Beatitudes. I may have blogged about this already but in the first Beatitude Jesus says:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 5:3

He explained that the word for poor in the Hebrew Greek Lexicon is #4434 "ptochos" In my Spiros Zodhiates Hebrew Greek Key Study Bible (KJV), (a wonderful study Bible which explains from the Hebrew and Greek definitions the meanings of many words) means:

"poor and helpless; one who in his abjectness (ptosso) needs lifting. One who has fallen from a better estate.
{A different Greek word-my explanation}(penes- 3993) may be poor but he earns his bread by daily bread by daily labor; but the PTOCHOS is so poor he can only obtain his living by begging. The penes has nothing superfluous, while the PTOCHOS has nothing at all."

Do you like being described as "ptochos"? That is the way the whole lot of us are, the whole boatload of us human beings on this earth, whether we like it or not. Did you see the second sentence in the definition? "One who has fallen from a better estate?"

That is an offense, my friends, unless you are rightly adjusted to the grace of God and know it is all of HIM. It is the offense that keeps many from receiving Him, to think they are poverty stricken before Almighty God. When we come to Christ, we have to admit we have nothing to give Him. He must do all for us. When I read this, I had an "Aha!!" moment flash into my soul.

The world has its little slogans and maxims that blind the eyes and dull the ears of people to the Truth of the Word of God. How many times have I heard this lie from the pit,

"God helps those who help themselves."

I challenge anyone who reads this to comment and show me one place in the Bible where it says that. I believe the first Beatitude says just the exact opposite. "He is so poor he can only obtain his living by begging."

But David knows God doesn't delight in watching us grovel. Once we come to Him, admitting that we have nothing to offer Him, He is like the father in the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15: 11-32, who kills the fatted calf and throws a party for his long lost son. The angels rejoice over one sinner coming home!

"The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." Ps. 51: 17.

That is only one verse, you say. Here is another I found in my Psalm study today while not even looking. In Psalm 6, David is very sick. He speaks of being "sorely vexed" even in his bones. The bones (Strong's Hebrew Lexicon #6106) "etsem" refer to his bodily essence, substance, or frame.

In Psalm 6: 2 David pleads with the Lord:

"Have mercy upon me, O Lord; for I am weak: O Lord, heal me; for my bones are vexed."

Well, since I knew what the Lord said about the poor in spirit, I was curious to know what the word weak meant in this verse. I looked it up on the Blue Letter Bible website (blueletterbible.com) to find the meaning of the word. It is Strong's #536, used only one time in the Old Testament, 'umlal. It means to languish, to droop, to hang down the head.

http://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=H536&t=KJV

David said he was hanging his head down, he was weak. But that was in and of himself. Because just a few Psalms before, in Psalm 3, David said that the Lord was the lifter of his head, and that was when he running from his own son Absalom, trying to steal the Kingdom from him!

"But Thou, O LORD, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head." Psalm 3: 3

The Apostle Paul also was afflicted with some affirmity after receiving a heavenly revelation in II Corinthians 12. He prayed three times for God to remove it. But God did not remove it. He let Paul remain in the state of utter weakness. Paul ended up saying that God's strength was made perfect through weakness.(II Cor. 12:9) I wonder what those prosperity teachers would tell Paul if he were to be in their congregration.

I breathe a sigh of relief. To me, this is good news. I am weak and I know it. I can sing the little song from my childhood days, "Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so. Little ones (like me) to Him belong, they are weak (PTOCHOS-but that is OK, because....) He is STRONG!!!!