Psalm 63

 When I sit down each morning to pray, the first thing I do is to recite Psalm 63:

O God, you are my God; at dawn I seek you;

For you my flesh is pining,

like a dry weary land without water.

 

Your faithful love is better than life;
my lips will speak your praise.
I will bless you all my life;
in your name I will lift up my hands.
My soul shall be filled as with a banquet;
with joyful lips my mouth shall praise you.

 

When I remember you upon my bed,

I muse on you through the watches of the night.

For you have been my strength;

in the shadow of your wings I rejoice.

My soul clings fast to you;

Your right hand upholds me. 

This morning it dawned on me that Jesus had to have prayed this same psalm at some time or times in his life.  Yesterday I wrote about finding God, or belief in God, from the experiences of our life -- and I thought about Jesus praying this psalm remembering how the Father had delivered him from the clutches of Herod as an infant.  Surely Mary would have told him that story as he grew up.  

And then, when the crowd at Nazareth wanted to toss him from a cliff because of blasphemy, he passed through the crowd without harm.  Surely, while fasting in the desert, he may have prayed this psalm....my flesh pines for you like a dry weary land without water.... my soul clings fast to you; Your right hand upholds me!

We almost cannot pray this psalm ourselves without recalling the times when God upheld us, when God became our strength.  Certainly we cannot praise Him with thanksgiving without recalling those times.  So praying this psalm each day is almost like watching my life in review, recalling those times when I was saved from certain death or disaster -- the time I was almost kidnapped as a five-year-old, the time I was warned of impending danger as I sat in the park, the time I was diagnosed with lung cancer after five or six years of constant coughing.  I think of these times and "with joyful lips my mouth shall praise you!"

One psalm that expresses our experience is better than a thousand others that mean little to us!  Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he cautioned us against multiplying words without meaning.