Monday, June 17, 2024
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget none of His benefits... Psalm 103:1-3
A Father Who Deserves to be Praised
Yesterday was Father’s Day, and just as Mother’s Day can be hard for some, Father’s Day can be hard for some as well. Whether your father has passed already, was never a part of your life, was present but absent, or was a very painful part of your childhood, Father’s Day may be a really hard day for you. The good news is that we have a heavenly Father who is a Good Father, a Father to the fatherless, and the Father that can heal every wound of your childhood. We can focus on the Good Father we have now, and David gives us a great picture of Him in Psalm 103.
Bless the Lord, O my soul, And all that is within me, bless His holy name.
When we praise God, He is blessed and honored. The truest and purest worship to God comes straight from our soul and is focused directly on Him and His holiness. In church on Sunday morning, we can be distracted by 1000 different things and Satan loves for us to be distracted during worship. At home its even worse. Getting up early to have quiet time, or whenever we have it, we can be distracted by lots of things as well. It is important to protect our time with God, because Satan will try to disrupt it.
True praise may be the most personal way we connect with God. True praise comes from our soul organically, not from our mind or actions. When we give Him our undivided and undistracted selves, true praise happens. Distraction is the enemy that will keep us from having that very personal and deep connection with Him.
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget none of His benefits...
David repeats the first part of verse one again and then adds that we should not forget His benefits.
Verses 3-7 tell of those benefits:
· v.3 - Who pardons all your iniquities… He heals all your diseases.
· v.4 - Who redeems your life from the pit… He crowns you with lovingkindness and compassion.
· v.5 - Who satisfies your years with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle.
· v.6 - The Lord performs righteous deeds and judgments for all who are oppressed.
· v.7 - He made known His ways to Moses, His acts to the sons of Israel.
Of course, these are not all of His benefits. His benefits are endless, and we have all felt the benefits of our Heavenly Father in our lives. Sometimes it is easier to see the gaps in our lives, such as unanswered prayers, than it is to remember all the blessings God has given us. But we need to remember the benefits, or blessings, He gives us, and we need to praise Him for them every day.
How is God a good father and how can we be assured that trusting in Him will bring victory?
The remembrance of the goodness of God in our lives is literally what gets us through. It is what brings hope in the most hopeless places. We know God is faithful. We know He loves us. We have seen His benefits in our lives. No matter how we feel because of all that rages around us in difficult times, we can trust our faithful and worthy Father. He keeps his promises - he has kept his promises and we know that he has already won the victory in all our hardest circumstances. We don't know what the victory is - and it probably does't look like we think the victory should look like. If we truly want to lay it all down and trust him, we have to surrender our definition of victory just like we have to surrender all the burdens we are carrying. Because God loves us and is faithful, we know we can trust him with whatever that victory looks like in our lives.
