To be fully HUMAN — A Daily Reflection

 

 

Restore to me the joy of your salvation
       and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.

 

From the moment David took that rooftop stroll and saw Bathsheba bathing, he started on a downward spiral of sin.  He had taken his eyes off the Creator and had focused on His creation instead.  He had committed adultery and murder.  And through the process, he had become cold toward God and hardened toward his own sin.  All David’s life, he had been in a close, warm and intimate relationship with God.  But his pattern of compounded sin had driven a wedge between him and the Lord that had widened into a gulf.  Then he was confronted by Nathan the prophet with what he had done.  Suddenly, he was not only aware of the horrors of his own guilt, but the fact that he was so far from God that he couldn’t feel the joy of fellowship… the joy of salvation… the joy of being loved by God.  David needed to have his heart restored to where it once had been.

 

How is your relationship with the Lord doing?  Do you feel close and warm and intimate with Him?  Are you filled with the wonder and awe and joy of your salvation?  Or do you have trouble praying?  Do you find it difficult to relate anything in your life to Jesus?  Do things that once filled you with a deep feeling of regret… or of guilt… or of righteous anger… now create no reaction in you at all?  When you say the name Jesus, does it leave you cold where it once made your heart leap with joy?  When you see the world turning more and more away from God, does it bother you?  Or have you started to agree with all those "politically correct" views that seem so humane, so logical, so human?  Has sin in your life driven a larger and larger wedge between you and God?  Does the gulf between you seem so wide you’ll never get across it?

 

That’s how David felt when he wrote this Psalm… so very far from God, not only in his actions, but in his heart.  The joy was gone.  The warmth… the intimacy… the deep feelings of affection… all were gone.  But he remembered them.  He remembered the closeness he had shared with God all his life… the feelings of joy his many victories in the Lord had given him.  He remembered what he had once experienced with God… and he wanted it back.

 

You can do the same thing.  You, like David, can ask God to help you come back to a close relationship with Him.  You, like David, can have the joy of your salvation restored.  All you have to do is ask.  He’s waiting.  Why don’t you do it right now…