“Let
me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust.
Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.
Deliver me from my enemies, O Lord! I have fled to you for refuge!
Teach me to do your will, for you are my God! Let your good Spirit
lead me on level ground.” -Psalm 143:8-10 [Read Psalm 143]
Psalm
143 is another of David’s petitionary prayers in which he
unashamedly pleads for the Lord’s help. This is the last of the
“Psalms of Penitence” in which the one who prays asks for the
Lord’s forgiveness and help. The others with this definite theme
are Psalm 6, 32, 38, 51, 102 and 130.
As
one who has prayed most of my life (I became a Christian at age
nine), I can identify with David’s prayer. Although I did not have
to hide in caves as David did when he fled for his very life before
the wrath of King Saul, nor did I have the enemies David knew, even
after he became King of Israel before he conquered the enemy nations
and could settle into relative peace, still the challenges I faced in
life sometimes loomed as impossible to deal with, much less to
overcome. I can certainly identify with David’s prayer, “Let me
hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust.”
Many have been the mornings throughout my long life when I have
prayed that God would direct my steps and my work throughout the day,
and “make me know the way I should go.” Likewise, verse 10 of
Psalm 143 became a constant prayer of mine: “Teach me to do our
will, for you are my God! Let your good Spirit lead me on level
ground.”
In
the mountains where I lived in my growing up years, and for many of
the years of my career as a teacher and as the wife of a minister of
the gospel, we did not look out to see “level ground” in the
mountains that surrounded us. Likewise, the “unlevel ground”
became a metaphor for the challenges we often faced in living. To be
Christian leaders responsible for teaching others and for setting an
example for others to follow often put us on “uneven ground.” It
was only through remaining close to our source of strength, the Lord
Jesus, that we had any hope of accomplishing the will He desired for
us to accomplish in our lives.
As
David ended his prayer in Psalm 143, so we would yield to the
inevitable call of the Lord upon our lives and pledge to do the best
we could with God’s help: “for I am your servant, Lord!” (v.
12b). A Vacation Bible School motto learned very early in my
Christian life remained with me, even until now: “I will do the
best I can with what I have where I am for Jesus’ sake today.” I
also learned, thanks to the wise counsel of a marvelous pastor, the
Rev. Claude Boynton, to “pray Scriptures.” “The scriptures are
the Word of God,” he told us. “And God likes to hear His own
words prayed back to Him.” So many of the petitions and pleas of
David, as these in Psalm 143, became familiar to me and sincerely
repeated by me in my prayer life. How better to begin a day than to
pray: “Lord, let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love,
for in you I trust. Make me to know the way I should go, for to you
I lift up my soul.” Pair these words with the marvelous message
from Psalm 118:24, and every day begins with thoughts of the Lord and
turning our day over to him: “This is the day which the Lord has
made; we will rejoice and be glad in it!” Selah! -Ethelene Dyer
Jones 05.22.2016
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