21 Days of Prayer in Psalm 119 (Day #22)

Read Psalm 119:169-176

“Seek”

I didn’t want to leave the last stanza of Psalm 119 out. Even though it has been a long-haul journaling and posting each day on each successive stanza over the last three weeks, it has been a sweet time as well. So here is Day #22, an encore!

Today, in church, we read this final stanza together and thought about prayer as modeled by the psalmist. He begins with a prayer to be heard in verses 169-170,

Let my cry come before you, O Lord;
    give me understanding according to your word!

Let my plea come before you;
    deliver me according to your word.

He is concerned with the need for the Lord to hear his pray, be it cry or plea. Isn’t that what we want as well—to be heard? Secondly, beyond being hear the psalmist is seeking understanding and deliverance.

Understanding is what we so often need when we consider our circumstances or those of others and we just don’t get it. Things just aren’t working out how we expected and as they should (in our opinion). It is in times like this that we wish God would speak order, clarity, and purpose into the world. The psalmist recognizes that this kind of understanding is found in the Bible. Have you ever had one of those moments when as you read you know a passage was revealed to you in a way that answers your cry for understanding? I have, and I cherish those moments.

In asking for understanding he is asking for the Lord to do something in him through the Scriptures. In deliverance, he is asking the Lord to do something for him—likely a physical deliverance from the ongoing and acute threat of his enemies. It is in God’s word that we find not only his promises (and conditions) regarding deliverance but the revealed character of God with which such deliverance must accord.

These requests move me, as does the psalmist’s commitment to the law/ precepts/ statues of the Lord as an assurance that his prayer would be heard and that the Lord would do something about his circumstances. However, despite his repeated commitment to delight in God’s word and to be helped by it, he confesses his own wanderings, for he ends the longest psalm in the Bible with verse 176

I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek your servant,
    for I do not forget your commandments.

This is a prayer of confession (“have gone astray”) and repentance (“seek”)

The reason he is praying this way is because of his trust in God’s revelation (“I do not forget”). I am reminded of the old gospel hymn, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing written in 1757 by Robert Robinson that so poignantly describes our tendency to wander like a lost sheep. I quote verses 1, 3, and 4.

1. Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount, I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy redeeming love.

3. Jesus sought me when a stranger,

The Good Shepherd,
painted by Richard Hook

Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood;
How His kindness yet pursues me
Mortal tongue can never tell,
Clothed in flesh, till death shall loose me
I cannot proclaim it well.

4. O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

When Jesus suffered and died on the cross some 2000 years ago, it was for our wanderings. Isaiah 53:6, in the midst of a larger section describing the suffering Messiah, says,

All we like sheep have gone astray;

    we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him

    the iniquity of us all.

And Jesus, in Luke 15, facing criticism from the Pharisees and teachers because he spoke to sinners, tells the parable of the Lost Sheep,

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

Then Jesus told them this parable: “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’ I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.

Can we end this study of Psalm 119 the same way, willing to confess our wandering and ask Jesus our Good Shepherd, to seek us out and deliver us? We too are wanderers who need to turn back to the Lord in relational repentance and bring as many with us as possible.

Dear Lord Jesus, seek your servants and turn our hearts back towards you. Help us to see your beauty and steadfast love and may we be filled with awe and wonder at your deliverance! Fill our hearts with praise so that it spills out in our speech and songs day by day. May we share your love with others and may we rejoice with heaven over each sinner that repents! Thank you for a marvelous contemplation on your word!