“O God, listen to my cry! Hear my prayer! From the ends of the earth, I cry to you for help when my heart is overwhelmed. Lead me to the towering rock of safety, for you are my safe refuge, a fortress where my enemies cannot reach me. Let me live forever in your sanctuary, safe beneath the shelter of your wings! Interlude For you have heard my vows, O God. You have given me an inheritance reserved for those who fear your name. Add many years to the life of the king! May his years span the generations! May he reign under God’s protection forever. May your unfailing love and faithfulness watch over him. Then I will sing praises to your name forever as I fulfill my vows each day.”
Psalms 61:1-8 NLT
In some ways, Psalm 61 seems like circular reasoning. David praise God because he praises God. He asks God to take care of him because he acknowledges that God will take care of him. However, this is not circular. It is faithful. David knows to him whom he is offering praise. He knows that his present praise can be applied to future action because God is a faithful God in whom it makes sense to place faith. In other words, David’s experience with God is that God will follow through with his actions, behaviors, blessings, and curses. He knows God’s stances to be unbreakable and a surety in his own life. He knows that an inheritance from his a guaranteed future. When you consider that Jacob, from whom Israel came, wrestled with God to receive that inheritance, rather than waiting upon him, this seems like a perfected faith. Our faith ought to be similar. We ought to count upon God’s promises to be fulfilled in our faith journey. We ought to know that his blessings have a meaningful impact on the present and not just the future and we ought to praise him for it. We ought to ask him to bring us closer to him as we wait for those blessings to be fulfilled in real time and space.
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