Healing Rays of Righteousness

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day. For what in your life will you give thanks to God. How grateful are you for memory? Why do you think God gifted us with memory? What memories of past experiences will feed your grateful expressions on this day of “Thanks-giving”? I suspect that many of us give little thought to how much memory shapes our experience of relationship with, and worshipful response to God.

Memory plays a significant role in Psalm 103. Listen for memory’s role as you read these first se verses from Psalm 103: “Praise the Lord, my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits – who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s. The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed.”

For the psalmist, memory inspires his grateful praise to God. From the first word, we learn that this is a psalm of PRAISE. The psalm does not speak explicitly about praising God, but instead, it piles up reasons that show God is deserving of our praise. I encourage you to read the entire psalm.

The form of this psalm is that of a hymn or meditation since it contains no direct address to God. The psalmist begins his words of thanksgiving by addressing his “soul,” which is better understood as his “inmost being” – or the “all” of who a person is. It is the Hebrew way of addressing oneself.

So, when we say, “Praise the Lord, my soul,” we are worshipping with our whole being, both our physical body and our inner spirit. This means our physical expressions will mirror what is happening deep within us, as we express praise to our loving and compassionate God.

Question to self; How frequently do I personally experience praising God with both my body and spirit?

The psalmist remembers and stacks up the many things God is doing and will continuing doing for his soul. These memories inspire his gratefulness and praise. Read the psalm again and underline those specific memories or reasons the psalmist gives as a reason to praise God. And note that these memories are from both individual experiences and shared collective experiences.

Note the psalmist’s shift in verse seven from a listing of God’s actions in healing, redeeming, satisfying, enacting justice, to his extended descriptions of God’s love. In doing this, the psalmist reminds us that it is not only God’s action on our behalf, but also God’s consistent loving character should inspire our continual praise.

We praise God, then, not only because of what God has done for us in the past but also because of how God will love us into the future.

The Bible consistently and frequently says that we are to praise God because of what God has done and continues to do and will do. And often the word “remember” accompanies this counsel, suggesting that our praise will be minimal and lacking emotion, unless we remember God’s many acts of goodness and mercy to us. Thus, God gifted us with memory for the purpose of inspiring our praise to him and deepening our love relationship with himself.

For that reason, I say that memory and gratefulness are twins. Both are needed in shaping a meaningful, life-transforming relationship with God.

It is easy to say, “Thank you, God” for the big things and significant events in our life, but do we also give God thanks for the little things in life. I suspect that we tend to take such for granted, expecting God to provide these daily necessities to us because he should do so as our Creator. We forget that such attitude and behavior in failing to express our gratefulness and praise, hinders and diminishes our daily relationship with God, which he so greatly desires.

I agree with James Waltner who writes in his commentary on this psalm, “Forgetting and turning away from God begins when we no longer praise.”(Believer’s Church Bible Commentary).

And so, I am encouraging us to thank God for his gift of memory and pray that he will enliven our memory for the purpose of our more meaningful praise of goodness and in transforming our relationship with him.

The apostle Paul encouraged the early Christian church, “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18).

On the tombstone of her husband’s grave, a southern mountain woman had chiseled in rough and uneven letters this epitaph, “He always appreciated.”

I hope that same tribute can be said about me and you after our deaths. This “Thanksgiving Day” let us join the Psalmist in remembering our blessings and expressing our thanks with “Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits.”

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“Healing Rays of Righteousness” – November 23, 2022

www.geigler13.wordpress.com

Ray M. Geigley