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Delighting to Bless

Writer's picture: RebeccaRebecca

I’m memorizing Psalm 109 this month. It’s a rather dark psalm, one of the imprecatory psalms. Imprecatory psalms are the ones that call down judgment and curses on the psalmist’s enemies. Psalm 109 is one of the strongest of all the imprecatory psalms. So, why am I memorizing THAT psalm?? Well, I didn't choose it for any spiritual reason. I was looking for a psalm that was 31 verses long. Since January has 31 days, I wanted a psalm of the same length that I could memorize in that amount of time: a verse a day. Psalm 22 has 31 verses, but I memorized that psalm in December, another 31-day month. The ONLY other psalm with exactly 31 verses is Psalm 109. So even though it is dark and very negative, even though I wasn’t sure even how to feel about it, given Jesus’ commands to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, to bless and not curse, and even though it didn’t seem uplifting at all—especially for the beginning of a new year, I decided to memorize it this month. After all, it is Scripture!

            I have prayed that God would reveal Himself and His truth to me through this psalm and teach me how I ought to pray in light of this psalm. This morning I looked up a few short YouTubes on imprecatory psalms. I gleaned four important truths from them:

1)    We must always remember that ALL Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for us in teaching and training us in doctrine and righteous living. We must not choose to ignore or throw out any part of it.

2)    Before each imprecatory psalm or imprecatory prayer are other psalms or verses calling for repentance and extending the grace of God. This is the great desire of God: that all people should be saved and come to know the magnificent and magnanimous love God has for them (I Timothy 2:3-4).

3)    Scripture is full of paradoxes and tensions. We must always keep truths in proper tension or we fall into error on one side or the other. Every truth has its counterbalance truth. God and His Word are wondrously balanced. For us, walking that balance beam is not easy, and it requires carefully holding truths in tension.

4)    Truth and grace always go together. While we pray for the salvation of the wicked, that they might turn from their evil ways and become brothers and sisters in Christ, our hearts also long for the day when the justice and righteousness of God prevail over all the earth. Then the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. The psalms in the 90s even talk about the trees and mountains and rivers shouting for joy when Christ comes to judge the earth and all will be set right. Oh, what a day that will be! As Job said, “How my heart longs for this!”

But all of that is not the main point of why I decided to write this blog. Each day it seems that God highlights for me some particular verse or verses that lead me to prayer for myself, others, and the world. Today the verse that caught my attention was the second half of verse 17: “As he did not delight in blessing, so let it be far from him.” He did not delight in blessing. It was with the word delight that the Lord captured my thoughts. And the question I had to ask myself was this: Do I delight in blessing others?

I think back over my years as a mother when my children were growing up. Did I delight in blessing them, or was I primarily correcting them? I grieve now to admit this, but I was, I think, mostly focused on correcting them and often overlooked blessing them for the good and right things they did. Those things were expected. How I wish I could rewind the clock and change the focus to delighting in blessing them.

Even as I think back over the whole scope of my own life, I realize how much my own heart longed—and still longs—for blessing. Don’t we all? And maybe, just maybe, we need to realize that God’s blessing doesn’t come to us just when or if we do good and right things (as when we might be inclined to “bless” our children), but He blesses when we don’t deserve it. Isn’t that the essence of the Gospel? God demonstrated His own love toward us when we were still sinners and His enemies. When we were powerless to do the right things, God set His love upon us, reached down to us, and sent His Son (Romans 5:6-10). He looked beyond our faults and saw our need, as a song my husband loved says. He also looks beyond our faults and sees and knows what we can become when His grace takes hold of us and sets us free.

So I’m praying that God will teach me to delight in blessing others, not only those I long to bless but even those who might not seem in my estimation to deserve it—just as God has blessed me though I continue to not deserve it. Will you join me in that prayer? Psalm 109:17 seems to indicate (as do other Scriptures throughout the Bible) that as we bless others, the blessing will come back to us. It’s a win-win.

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Bonnie Pittman
Bonnie Pittman
Jan 16

That I might bless others that is quite a thought! Thank you because I still correct my kids more that bless them because it seems more important, I will think about how I can do that and ask God to help me. Thank you!!

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