Daily devotion – Wednesday 14th April 2021
“Psa 73:17 Until I went into the sanctuary of God; Then I understood their end.”
Psalm 73 is one of my favourite passages of Scripture. It reveals the thoughts and struggles of one who loves the Lord, and yet something has thrown their thinking at this moment in time. The writer of Psalm 73 tells us about a particular experience he had passed through. He tells us that he was severely shaken and that he very nearly fell.
What was the cause of his trouble? Simply that he did not quite understand God’s way with respect to him. He had become aware of a painful fact.
He was living a godly life; he was cleansing his heart he tells us and washing his hands in innocency.
In other words…he was practising the godly life. He was avoiding sin; he was meditating upon the things of God; he was spending his time in prayer to God; he was in the habit of examining his life, and whenever he found sin, he confessed it to God with sorrow.
But in spite of living a godly life he was struggling …, “For I was envious of the boastful,
When I saw the prosperity of the wicked.” Verse 3.
As you read through the rest of the Psalm, he shares his innermost thoughts about how to reconcile that the ungodly seemed to be doing well, yet they did nothing to honour God in any way.
Of course, we tend to think that God should be blessing His own children always, and they should never be chastised, yet the ungodly seem to be not struggling at all, so it seems. The Psalmist goes on to say, “ I am living a godly life, and this is what happens to me. These other men are blaspheming God, and with ‘lofty utterances’ are saying things which should never be thought, let alone said. Yet they are very prosperous; their children are all doing well; they have more than the heart could wish. Meanwhile I am suffering the exact opposite.” How can this be he cries?
Self is always the centre of the problem! The first thing to do is stop this preoccupation with self and stop going around in circles in your thinking on the natural level.
But then….verse 16 “When I thought how to understand this, It was too painful for me—
17 Until I went into the sanctuary of God; Then I understood their end.”
Church, God’s house is far more important than we often think. Often you will simply find deliverance by merely coming into it.
Many a time, I have thanked God for His house. I thank God that He ordained that His people should meet together in companies and worship together.
The house of God has delivered many a cast down spirit of God’s children by their merely entering its doors. How does it work?
The very fact that there is a house of God to come to at all tells us something. How has it come into being? It is God who has planned and arranged it. To realize that in itself puts us immediately into a more healthy position.
Then we begin to go back through history and remind ourselves of certain truths.
Here are we, April 2021, with this terrible problem, but the Christian Church has existed all these long years.
The house of God goes back through the centuries to the time of our Lord Himself. What is it for? What is its purpose and significance? And the cure of our thoughts has begun!
We go to the house of God, and we find other people there before us. Here are people who think it is worth continuing with, and their mere presence is having an amazing effect on us as we gather and meet with them.
The healing process is going on…but there is more.
We look around the congregation and suddenly find ourselves looking at someone whom we know has had an infinitely worse time than we have been having. We thought our problem was the most terrible problem in the world, and that no one had ever suffered as we had!
But we see someone who has lost a loved one, and they are still there. It puts our problem into a new perspective immediately.
“1Co 10:13 No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.”
Satan is always trying to make us believe that the trial we are experiencing, no one else has been dealt with one as bad as ours. But as we begin to study the history of the church throughout the ages, we begin to understand that some of the greatest saints have experienced trials, troubles and tribulations that cause our little problem to pale into insignificance.
The house of God reminds us of all that, and immediately we are beginning to climb, and we are going upwards, we have our problem now in its right setting.
The house of God teaches us all these lessons!