Saturday rolls around and you
wake up 30 minutes earlier than normal because you want to utilize the morning
to wash and wax your black Escalade.
It’s not that your rich, by no
means, and that you want to show off your Escalade to your neighbors, but you
have saved for three years to buy this beast and you have finally saved enough
money to purchase it, and so for the last 8 months, you have dedicated every
Saturday to take care of your toy, keeping it in pristine condition.
Many of us have our Escalades,
metaphorically speaking, in which we have that one thing that is near and dear
to us. It may be your vehicle, your
house, or maybe it is a talent that you have worked so hard on perfecting.
Hold on to that thought, as I
want to connect it and you to Psalm 69 and a tough time David was having with
his enemies.
How has life been treating
you? Are your children in line with the
Lord, your finances prosperous, do you have some enemies that are making your
life miserable? How is your
marriage? Is it holding together, or do
you seem to go through spouses almost as often as you change the tires on your
car?
If you can resonate at all with
the above situation, meaning, if your life seems to be falling apart, then you
can identify with David in Psalm 69.
Here is a peek into David’s life, as revealed in Psalm 69:
1 – Save me oh God for the waters
have come up to my neck
2 – I sink in deep mire
3 – I have become weary from
crying out
4 – More in number than the hairs
of my head are those who hate me.
David’s issue was his
enemies. He always had enemies that were
out for him. David wanted nothing more
than for his life to be at peace. And he
knew that this peace ultimately came from God.
He realized this as he wrote the latter section of Psalm 69;
30 - I will praise the name of God with a song; I will magnify him
with thanksgiving. 31 This
will please the Lord more than an ox or a bull with horns and hoofs.
David knew that the key to
worshiping God and earning God’s favor was ultimately the worship of his heart
and not his hands.
Sacrificing your bull or ox or
your Escalade, your house, or your time to God does not please God as much as
worshiping God from the depths of your heart.
David, in his time of need says,
“What I really need to do right now is to worship God with my heart not my
hands. It is more important to magnify
God in his hour of need with words of thanksgiving and songs of praise, than to
give to God a physical sacrifice.”
Maybe you have tried this before;
you have tried to get God to move to action by doing some sort of good
deed. Going back to the Escalade in the
beginning, let’s say you have hit a rough spot in life, and it was impressed on
your heart that if you do something nice or good that God will be pleased with
you and will begin to make your situation better. So you decide you are going to straight out
donate your Escalade to an orphanage in Romania so they can sell it and use the
proceeds to provide much needed meals for the children. After making the donation, you sit back and
wait for God to now return the favor by alleviating your pain in life.
Yet, David, and much of Scripture
says you have it backwards.
Preceding your sacrifice or in
place of your sacrifice is something more significant; a sacrificial
heart. Before the sacrifice should come
a time of getting on your knees in worship and praising God by magnifying (make
big) his name in and offering up thanksgiving for all he has given you.
Our God is much more pleased with
a heart of sacrifice rather than a physical sacrifice designed as a religious
duty or obligation in hopes that we evoke a response from God.
Please don’t misread this, your
Escalade donation is a wonderful thing, but that should come out of a heart of
worship, not from a mindset that that is how you worship God, by giving Him
stuff. Rather worship starts in your
heart.
I encourage you today to ask
yourself, “Am I giving God the worship of my heart and of my hands? Is what I do for God my attempt to make God
be pleased with me or is it a result of my heart worshiping, rejoicing, and be
thankful towards my God?”
Hebrews shows us the importance
of worshiping God with our hearts and our hands, but how the heart worship
precedes the hand worship.
15 Through him then let us
continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips
that acknowledge his name. 16 Do not neglect to do good and to share what you
have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.
It is usually in our times of
need that we become desperate for God to move.
This Psalm shows us that in our time desperation, it behooves us most to
spend time in worship with our God than by scrambling to do things in hopes to
get him to move.
