Year 5, Day 210: Psalms 69-70

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Up, In

• In: This is the word we use to express our relationships with our spiritual family.  These are often the people who hold us spiritually accountable.  They are the ones to whom we typically go for discussion and discernment.  These are the ones with whom we learn to share leadership.  They are the ones with whom we become family on mission.
• Up: Up is the word we use for what we worship.  If we are following God’s will, God will occupy the Up position.  Our life, our identity, our mission, our family on mission is all derived from Up.  This is why God needs to be in our Up position.

I think Psalm 69 may be one of my new favorite psalms.  Can you hear David’s turmoil within the words?  Of course David is in trouble.  David is pursued by his enemies.  In fact, he feels like there are more people who hate him than he has hairs on his head!  For the record, the same is true with the opening of Psalm 70, too.  Why does this resound within me?  I know that feeling.  I know what it feels like to be an outcast and feel like more people hate me than who desire to be associated with me.

And then we get to Psalm 69:9 and understand the true source of David’s pain.  Zeal of God’s house has consumed the psalmist.  Or even back to Psalm 69:7 where the psalmist says that it is for God’s sake that the psalmist has borne reproach.  He is the source of the psalmists pain.  He has chosen God.  In choosing God, the world around him has rejected him.  That’s a brand new perspective on what Up means to me today, and it is a perspective that resonates deeply within me.  Jesus says that if the world hates Him then the world will hate His followers, too.  The psalmist knows this feeling and out of his sense of Up he bears it well.  We’ll come back to Up a little later.

What I absolutely loved about this pair of psalms is the incredible depth of emotion that the psalmist achieves in Psalm 69:6.  Do you see where David turns?  He has borne reproach.  He has the world against him.  What is his concern?  His concern is that the few people in this life who are his friends will bear the same persecution.  He is afraid that because of the world’s hatred for him that other people will feel that same hatred.  That’s a true sense of In, too.  David feels his place in community and he doesn’t want them to know what he has known.

However, all of this brings the psalmist back to Up.  Look at how both of these psalms end.  Both of these psalms end with praise for God, His name, and His work.  In spite of the persecution, David worships.  In spite of his concern for other people, David worships.  Lifting up God is his final and ultimate priority.

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