Revival

From 7/18 – my computer kept crashing, so I gave up trying for the day.  :)  It was one of those days….

Psalm 119:25

My soul clings to the dust; Revive me according to Your word.

Psalm 119:28

My soul melts from heaviness; Strengthen me according to Your word.

This is how I feel today.  Yesterday was one of those days where I wished I could have crawled back in bed and started over afresh.  Everything seemed to go sideways!  Of course, looking back, maybe God was trying to do something, and I completely missed it!  That would kind of be icing on the cake…  I tend to be pretty schedule-oriented and yesterday nothing went according to “the plan.”  I need to remember that Kairos time interrupts my plans, and when it does I need to remember to look more closely at what’s going on, instead of getting frustrated.

Anyway,  these two verses are surprisingly similar.  I wish I knew what the pictoral meaning of Daleth is, since that’s the letter that this portion of the psalm falls into.  Anyway, there were a couple of things I found interesting:

1.  The Hebrew word for dust in verse 25 also means garbage/trash.  So the author realizes that his being (nephesh) clings to garbage.  How often do I do the same thing!  Like my schedule…  Hmmmm.  I hold onto things that are passing and, truly, worthless in light of greater things.   Verse 28 is more literally saying that my being (nephesh again) drops or drips from sorrow/grief/heaviness.  The load is too much to carry; my being (even my spirit) is about to collapse.  I wonder if this kind of sorrow/grief can be over the blindness of the world around the author?  I wonder if it applies to the state of the church.  There are certainly days when I am overwhelmed by what I’m learning, and even some days when I wish I’d never stepped out onto this path.  Ignorance is bliss, in theory.

2.  There are two qualities of God’s words that are mentioned here: the ability to revive and the ability to strengthen.  To revive is to give it life again, to restore life or prosperity to something or to refresh it.  At the beginning of the book of John, it says that the Word is God, so (as one of my friends pointed out), this is also a quality of God!  It certainly sounds like something He loves to do.  He gives back life as it was meant to be (that doesn’t mean it’ll always be a cake walk), He refreshes (maybe that breath of fresh air is the breath of YHWH breathing life again to refresh you)!  He makes all things new, restoring life!

Strengthen is to establish, endure, persist, to confirm, to fulfill.  Again, all things that God is.  He endures, as does His word, so through Him I am able to endure or persist, even when I’m overwhelmed.  His word confirms His plan for us, giving me the ability to trust Him.  And He fulfills His Words because He is true, and again, that enables me to trust Him more.  He is the rock, and strong and mighty fortress.  When I stand in Him, I am strong because He is strong.

I’m LOVING this Psalm!