These couple of weeks, we went through a confidence roller coaster. We don’t know who or what to trust anymore. Folks who invested hard-earned money face prospect of losing every cent. Trusting parents found out their babies had been drinking tainted milk. Now we can’t be sure what milk produces, ice-creams, 3-in-1 coffee mix we can safely consume! At a recent gathering, my friends from Malaysia and Taiwan lamented they don’t know which government political leaders to trust anymore. It seems human discernment, decency and morality has gone seriously wrong.
This morning, Psalm 131 has a powerful and relevant message. It is very short, with only three verses. Charles Spurgeon says it is “one of the shortest psalm to read, but one of the longest to learn.” Let’s learn it.
Psalm 131: O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high: I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time for the and evermore!
Weaning verses Weaned 断奶了没？
Weaning is the process whereby a child transits from feeding milk only to other forms of nourishment. After a certain age, milk alone is not enough to provide all the nutrition for a growing child; he needs solid foods. I was weaned the bottle quite late. My mother was very liberated and felt no pressure to stop using the milk-bottle. I was weaned around age 7, so I remember the experience vividly. Every night, like opium addicts, I need to suck the bottle or else I won’t be able to sleep. Sometimes we had visitors who stayed late. These were agonizing moments. My mother was unable to smuggle the milk bottles to us. I would be very distressed throughout the night.
A weaning child is fretful. It is a traumatic experience of saying good-bye to something that we have become attached to. When forced to give it up, we all reflexively struggle. But actually it can be a liberating process, as we are introduced to newer and maturing experiences.
A weaned child, in contrast, is calm and quiet as described in verse 2. His outward tranquility reflects that deep inside he is both confident and contented. The first 2 verses of the psalm tell us what “weaned soul” is not. The last verse says what it is.
1. Not sophisticated arrogance 不傲
2. Not infant-like dependency 不赖
3. Sabbatical rest 回归安息
1. Not Arrogant 三不、何谓虚心、知信
First verse has three “not”s. In original Hebrew, each sentence begins with “not” for emphatic effect. Hebrew for “no” is lo: Lo, lo, lo! Not high my heart, not up my eyes, not walking in ways too great. My heart is not exalted, my eyes are not haughty. I do not persist in things too beyond me. In short, the writer says “I am not arrogant”.
Often we are not even aware of our arrogance. But it easily shows up in our attitudes. E.g. we are domineering towards others; sarcasm and contempt crop up in speech and behavior; we are impatient to listen; we too quickly brush off others’ opinions; we reveal savior mentality etc. I realize I harbor a wrongful perception of superiority when I open my mouth to criticize others. “Oh my dear, I don’t do things like that, please it’s so plain stupid!” May the Lord help my in my weakness, to learn “humility that consider others better than myself” Philippians 2:3b.
Is pride is the root of all evil? I recently attended a counseling course and the lecturer asks us: what is the root cause of all misery– self-love or self-hate? Pride or low-esteem? I must confess I was stumped. Which is more detrimental to human growth?
In this sense, I realize it may not always wrong to be “proud”. Depends on what kind of pride we are talking about, how we define what pride is. E.g. we can proud of who we are, take pride in what we do, we can take pride in our countrymen etc. The Bible is not against such “pride”. God has created us to govern the world; we will even judge angels in end-times. If God values us so greatly, there is no reason to belittle ourselves. I know of people who tend to uncritically heap praises on others while exaggerating our own inadequacies 长他人的志，灭自己威风They like to compare themselves with so-called super personalities or mega organizations. I feel this is uncalled for. If others are good, appreciate and learn from them. At the same time we must believe that we will always have something unique that others don’t have, and in this sense we can contribute toward others, however trivial.
Here the psalmist is not talking about this kind of pride. We must distinguish the difference. Here describes the kind of pride that elevate ourselves to status of god, or even greater than God! E.g. when we refuse to accept our rightful place before God, refuse to acknowledge that He is creator while we are the created; that He runs the universe – including our lives – that we are just His stewards. Ultimately, God lays down the rules and boundaries, and we obey.
In this sense, the bottom-line of being a Christian, the most preliminary change of heart is this: accepting that the only meaningful fulfilling way to live my life is on God’s terms. This is big struggle! None of us like someone else to run our lives. Given the choice, I want to be my own boss, or boss over others, even boss over God. To accept and obey higher authorities is not humanly natural. Even if its so clear that obeying is for our own good. Already we find it so difficult to obey and cooperate with our parents, spouse, kids, colleagues and teachers! Surrendering to someone else is not easy, even if that Someone is God. The whole Christian journey is about this life-long pilgrimage process of struggling and submitting. Every day we discover something we have not surrendered to God and we let these go one by one. It doesn’t mean our lives is fated and static. Rather our life is a continuous dynamic relationship with the Creator – with potentials and possibilities freely open. Like a chess-game of moves and counter-moves, responses and corresponding responses etc. God invites us to participate and grow in His image day by day.
The human trouble is: deep down inside, we think we are smarter than God. “If I am God I will the universe better!” My own struggle has been the need to ask “why” all the time and expect God to give logical defenses. Why do you let such things happen? Why make the universe this way? We challenge God’s wisdom and strategies. When our immediate need for answers are unmet, we become frustrated and our hearts are unrest. We are perplexed and fretful like a weaning child whose milk is withdrawn.
The psalmist says “I keep my feet on the ground; I don’t meddle where I have no business, or occupy myself with stuff that’s beyond me.” To me this suggests that the prerequisite for a weaned soul is to settle that “God knows better”.
I believe it doesn’t mean we stop deep theological reflections, or stop seeking answers into the complexities of life and faith. God is not so insecure to forbid such explorations. But as we ask, let’s do so with a rightful humbled disposition, seeking truly to understand and not undermine, nor to justify our own arguments. It’s great that Jubilee has various discussion groups that we can meet to openly share our struggles, as we seek what it means to live as authentic disciple of Christ.
The humbled heart accepts the reality that we may not have rational answers for all our questions. People who expect to comprehend everything will never be satisfied – at least not on this side of time and space. The fact remains that many truths of God are far above and out of human reach e.g. those paradoxical deep things about origin, evil, God’s sovereignty, human free will and responsibility etc.
Imagine a child, just got off his mother’s knees reading a fairy-tale, and expects to understand a book on trigonometry. Or a kid who had a dip in the ocean – he got upset because he was unable to contain the whole Atlantic in his little hand. If we harbor such mindsets, we will always remain demanding, fretful and unsatisfied. Being humbled before God really means accepting our limitations and choosing to submit. At the endpoint of the horizon of questionings, a leap of faith awaits us. If we are looking for logical answers to our Christian faith, we will never find it. Instead, we should hold fast to what we do know – truths already revealed to us – and live on these.
So here are some practical principles:
• I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others, that is God’s business
• I will not try to invent meaning of the universe but accept what God has shown its meaning to be.
• I will not strut about demanding that I be treated as center of attention in my family, church, neighborhood. Instead I seek to discover where I fit and do what I am good at.
2. Not Immature 初熟的信心、该断的务必要断、受教的心
If verse 1 talks about shifting our confidence from self to God, verse 2 talks about a kind of maturity that comes with certain independence. Humility doesn’t imply we are to be forever attached to the mother’s breast – insecurely clinging on desperately for dear life. The word for “weaned” in Hebrew גמל is actually “ripe”. Like a ripe fruit that drops off the tree, the weaned child is mature and ready to embark on new experiences.
We mentioned “faith” just now. The teenager is too rebellious and the adult is too sophisticated to fully surrender and obey God. The baby is too terrified to let go of the tangibles and trust the un-tangibles. The weaned child, on the other hand, is neither arrogant nor unduly dependent.
Imagine an older child with his mother. He may feel somewhat thirsty and hungry when his needs are temporarily denied. But he isn’t unduly flustered. He doesn’t need to be satiated urgently, so he doesn’t cry non-stop at her. He is able to bear the waiting. The awareness of his mother’s alone is his comfort, not the sensation of milk or breasts. He has learned trust. God doesn’t indulge our incessant whims and whining. But He wants us to be assured that we can trust Him with our destinies, despite present perceived uncertainties. The psalmist describes his soul as “smooth and quiet”.
We may all have outgrown the milk bottle. But in many other ways we can still be childishly immature. E.g. we expect God and all things to always work to our favor; we demand that others attend to our every need immediately and complain when they don’t respond.
Actually, the Christ-like way is opposite! We are called to bear responsibilities and to serve others without complaining and comparing!
This morning, let us seriously think: what destructive attitudes do we need to wean off? Some of us need to be “needed” in order to feel “worthy”. We get very distraught when we have to be left alone, or when don’t hear any words of approval. Some of us are overly dependent on other people’s recognition – we are so afraid of failures, afraid of performing poorly in front of others. In the end, we are too paralyzed to attempt new great things for God. Truth is: the world is lousy evaluator of our true potential. Let’s wean off from such unreliable reliance. Christian faith is not neurotic infantile dependency but childlike trust. The thing about the child is not his helplessness but his openness and willingness to be led, taught and blessed. Those with such yielded disposition sense the invisible hand of God at work – teaching, leading and guiding them – in our visible world.
3. Weaned Soul – Sabbatical Rest断奶的灵、安息
How shall we describe this “weanedness” and how may we experience it? The enlightening word יהל is wait – with hope. “Hope” in God – now, always, repeatedly, regularly and forever. We have a glimpse of that in our world in the God’s provision of the Sabbath. In Sabbath, God invites us to regularly exercise “wait in hope”.
Hebrews 4:9-11 “There remains, than, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from His. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience.”
For six days of Creation, God asserted His creative power over the universe by actively engaging in it. Then on the seventh day we are told God “rested”. On that day, God didn’t “stopped creating”. Instead He created Rest – something that doesn’t quite “belong” to the ways of the world. God invites us to participate in His rest. We do so by relinquishing our “active work” on Sabbath.
The ancient Jews developed a ritual whereby they wouldn’t even strike a match to cook on the Sabbath. Even the most trivial act of interference with creation was considered “work” and a violation of the Sabbath. To the Jewish mind, work is the meaningful activity whereby man uses his God-given skills to exercise dominion over the world. Rest, in the Sabbath sense, is temporarily withholding such human control over our circumstances. Instead, we let “nature” run its full course. In other words we learn to let God intervene.
When crisis strike our reflex response is frantically scramble to “do something” to rectify. Even as we sit here, each of us has our personal crisis. Some of us are battling for our health. Others are bearing the impact the financial crisis – the uncertainty of loss of employment and income. We have complicated family and relationship issues. We wonder how or whether we will ever eventually make our way out of all these.
This morning, God reminds us tBov.! Having done whatever is you can possibly and responsibly do, cease! Stop all your incessant worrying, activities and interferences. Let investments, body, relationships etc. run their “natural” course as God wills. Wait, allow and let God create a new good out of your mess. Enter that dimension of Sabbath tranquility that God has created and provided for us. May God lift us out from our turmoil, to behold the reality of eternity and the glory of God’s Kingdom. May we emerge with renewed confidence to take up our present challenges.
Conclusion – Yielded Rest 降服的安息
We conclude. This morning, we are reminded to let our souls be like a weaned child. We need to rid sophisticated arrogance and childish dependency. We spoke about entering a type of God-given Rest that comes with Yielding to God.
Friends, many perplexing questions in life eventually find their answers in Jesus, who says, “Come unto me, and I will give you rest”. Amid our frantic anxious efforts to make things happen or change, Jesus says, “Be still and know that I am God.. Your heavenly Father knows all the things you need even before you ask.” May all who are yielded today depart with God’s blessing of a stilled weaned soul.
