“But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had well nigh slipped. For I was

envious of the arrogant, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.”

(Psalm 73:2-3)

As we grow older we grow more apprehensive about tripping or losing our footing and falling. The older we get, the more dangerous a fall becomes. Our bones become brittle and we have farther to fall than little children do, who think nothing of taking a tumble and jumping up to run merrily on.

The Psalmist in the 73^rd Psalm discusses the most dangerous fall a person can suffer at any age, young or old, the fall of faith: when one loses not just his physical balance and crashes to the ground, but where one loses his grip on God and tumbles into the pit of unbelief.

The sight of the prosperity of the godless, the good-fortune of the irreligious, the immunity from trouble enjoyed by those who paid no attention to the laws of the Almighty, posed a terrific problem to this pious soul who wrote the 73^rd Psalm. Being a man of faith, he had believed that God ruled in His universe and that it was only reasonable to expect His sovereign to reward obedient and devoted servants and to punish those subjects who, in open rebellion, flouted His commands.

But the facts of his own personal experience had not substantiated this faith. He, a conscientious and devout man, who tried to worship his God in word and deed, encountered trouble and sickness and want, while all about him the godless enjoyed health, prosperity, and good fortune. All this conspired to put the feet of his faith on slippery steps. He was about to lose his balance and plunge into the pit of unbelief.

Now our theology is a bit more sophisticated than the Psalmist’s. We know the rain must fall on the just and the unjust. We realize that suffering, even of the righteous, has a value in the world. “Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.” We aren’t too envious of the prosperous wicked. We know that in time the income tax collector and the treasury department investigators will take care of them.

But are we not one with the Psalmist in that desperate, despairing feeling of being one “whose feet had almost stumbled, whose steps had well nigh slipped”, when things have not worked out to suit us? Not the success of others, but our failures in business ventures and in well-intentioned community or church activities have about tripped us up. When we have been misunderstood and our motives questioned, then our feet have almost stumbled. Have we not been tempted to shrug our shoulders and give up the way of faith? How not to falter or fall under burdens and responsibilities when we feel there are none who understand or care about our efforts or the sacrifices we think of ourselves as making?

Now the Psalmist found a solution to his problem. He managed to keep his balance of faith and not fall. How? Why, he went to church and that turned the trick. Sounds like too pat an answer from a clergyman, doesn’t it? Something like the marvelous relief from headache and neuralgia pains shouted at us by the TV commercials. But here it is — the personal testimony of a man who freely admits that he was about to give up the faith entirely: “When I thought to understand this,” namely, a way to reconcile the justice and the goodness of God with the prosperity of the wicked and the suffering of the righteous, “it was too painful for me, until I went into the sanctuary of God.”

The gospel writer tells us that Jesus, on going into Gethsemane, was in an agony, a wrestling, a battle of His soul. Here was the crucial moment of His life, the hinge of all history. Salvation for the world was in the balance. He could have turned back from His missions. His feet might have slipped. He could have refused the cross. But He began to pray. Surely He met someone. He came away in calm courage.

“A famous pianist said of Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp Minor, ‘I must tell you about it. Chopin told Liszt, and Liszt told me. In this piece of music all is sorrow and trouble. Oh, such sorrow and trouble, until he begins to speak to God, to pray, then it is all right.” (William Barclay — Commentary on Luke)

This is the way it was with Jesus:

Into the woods the Master went,

Clean forespent, forespent.

Into the woods the Master came,

Forespent with love and shame.

 

Out of the woods my Master went

And He was well content.

Out of the woods my Master came,

Content with death and shame.

This was the way it was with the Psalmist when the feet of his faith had almost slipped, until he went into the sanctuary of God. One Sunday morning during my vacation I was in a monstrous mood. My feet had well nigh slipped, my faith was momentarily eclipsed. Have you ever had one of those waves of suicidal despair, when you are ready to chuck it all, run away to anonymity, or plunge into oblivion? The whole meaning and direction of my life was on the skids that morning. But I went to church in a distant city, in a congregation of total strangers. Now it was not just the sermon, nor the text, nor the music, nor the fellowship. Not any one thing, but all in all the service somehow contrived to bring me to what some call “an encounter with God”. That did it. My turbulent mood was transformed to inner calm. My embittered spirit of resentment and touchiness and hurt feelings and fractiousness was soothed and sweetened and straightened out by worship. I had a real problem before church. When church was out my problem was gone. As with the Psalmist: “When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me, until I went into the sanctuary of God.” Samuel Terrien says that the man who begins to pray, whatever his problem, is already out of the pit. And William Barclay writes that: “Life’s hardest task is to accept what we cannot understand, but we can do even that, if we are sure enough of God’s love.”

Now the Psalmist, with amazing psychological and theological insight, tells us in this Psalm just how his worship experience saved him from falling when his feet were on slippery steps. The first thing worship did for him was to help him see that his problem of unbalance was within rather than outside himself. It was not slippery steps but a sour heart that plagued him and threatened to topple his faith.

“When my heart was grieved,” says the man, or as Dr. Moffatt translates from the Hebrew: “When my heart was sour, literally, in ferment, did my troubles begin.”

“The sour heart is one of the commonest and most insidious forms of heart disease,” said Dr. Halford Luccock. “When the heart sours, when the moods of gnawing resentment, or whining melancholy, blot out both fortitude and gratitude, as a steady drizzle shuts out the sun on a cheerless day, then the organs for making a harmonious adjustment to life and a mastery of circumstances are impaired. The heart can go sour in any circumstances, in wealth or poverty, in calm as well as distress. The sour heart will spoil anything.

“The causes are many, but usually the sour heart is due to a clamorous insistence on oneself, one’s own prestige, right, one’s divine claim to be the center of every stage. When that becomes life’s major drive, and it is frustrated, as it is bound to be, then the mind, the heart, the affections go sour.” (Luccock — Preaching Values in the Old Testament — p. 163)

The Psalmist came to see it was his sour heart manifesting itself in envy and jealousy at the prosperity of wicked men that threatened his faith. And of course it is invariably our self-centeredness that turns on the poisonous streams of jealousy and envy to sour our hearts. For jealousy and envy are the results rather than the cause of self-centeredness. And our jealousy and envious spirit does not exhaust itself in lusting after great hunks of money and what others have in luxury and good fortune, but also in demanding great hunks of affection, time and attention.

One of the most nagging problems in our high pressure age is that of parceling out our time and energies to those who have a claim upon us; the various members of our families with their differing needs, our business associates, our friends, our clients, customers, patients and parishioners. How conscientiously to do our duty to each and neglect no one — that is a task. I can’t solve it for you, nor you for me, but this I have found. One of our biggest hindrances is the “sour heart” which turns our interests and emotions and energies from others to self, knocks us off the service line, incapacitates us for hours, even weeks, and sometimes for a lifetime of disability. And, of course, there is no greater boon than getting hold of something which will save us from the sour heart. That the Psalmist discovered was genuine worship.

The second thing worship did for the Psalmist in solving his grievous spiritual problem: it made him see his fellows, not as the objects of his venomous hostility, but of his pity and mercy. Now that he was in church, he saw not only himself, but others, even those upon whom he had cast a jaundiced eye, in the light of eternity and imperishable values. Now it was they whom he clearly saw upon the slippery steps.

“Viewed from the angle of the present, those godless, untroubled rich were firmly established and secure, but viewed from the point of outcomes, and life under the administration of God, their feet were actually standing on slippery places where their foothold on reality was anything but firm. He sees them living in a dream world of seeming security.” (Leslie Weatherhead– The Psalms on text) Why should he envy them? Would not pity be more appropriate?

This he saw in church when he could not realize it before. And it was possible for his attitude toward the godless wicked to change from resentment to yearning pity only after he had been acquainted with the problem of his own sour heart. Now he sees himself as standing with the sinful. Before he had thought, in his own self-righteousness, that by his good behavior he had put God in his debt and was disgruntled because payment to him had not been made on time. Now, with the understanding of genuine worship, he could say with St. Augustine: “No one can be so foolish as to imagine that God is profited by any oblation of property or even of righteousness. A fountain is not benefited by our drinking from it.” (The City of God)

The third thing worship did for the perplexed man whose faith reeled on slippery footing — it gave him a new understanding of his life’s most valuable possession — his relationship with God. “I am continually with Thee, O God,” says the Psalmist. “Thou hast holden me by Thy right hand.”

A minister, attempting to explain to his congregation what it means for one to feel his life to be in God’s hands, recalled a moment when as a small boy he came to Memphis with his grandfather. He lived in a small Mississippi town. There life was simple and unhurried. The city of Memphis was filled with so many exciting things. The little boy’s eyes darted here and there in eager anticipation of thrilling adventures. Poised on the curb of a busy street where the traffic swirled by, a vagrant impulse swept into the lad’s heart, and he lunged to dash heedlessly across in the path of the whirling wheels, but his grandfather’s steady hand held fast the little fist. That’s what it is like to be in God’s hands.

That is what the Psalmist felt in church. As he catalogued all his and others’ blessings with an overwhelming sense of gratitude, this blessing loomed bigger than all else in the world for him and he cried: “Whom have I in heaven beside Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My flesh and my heart fainteth; but God is the strength of my heart forever.”

“In all probability the poet still faced a hostile world. The outward circumstances of his life remained unchanged. Nothing is told of a material salvation, a healing from disease, a restitution to honor or riches, when church was over. He may be just as poor now as he ever was, but he has grown into a wealth which compares with no earthly or heavenly possessions. He has received in the delights of God’s companionship the grace which sufficeth.” (Terrien — The Psalms)

The riddle of the prosperity of the wicked may still remain for neither here nor elsewhere does the scripture give a satisfying solution. “But now he knows that however great their possessions they are truly destitute, while the man who has found fellowship with God is rich, though he possess nothing. That is the real solution — not an answer to the riddle, but a state of mind in which there is no desire to ask it.” (William Temple — Nature, Man, and God)

But the Psalmist’s blessings from worship go even farther. By the clearer vision of a reinforced faith he is convinced that this companionship with God will never end. “Thou shalt guide me by Thy counsel and afterward receive me to glory.” His intimacy with the divine person is such that it cannot be at the mercy of death. It possesses the quality of permanence, nay, even of eternity. What else, then, could be asked for?

Be still my soul, the Lord is on Thy side.

Be still my soul, the hour is hastening on,

When we shall be forever with the Lord,

When disappointment, grief, and fear are gone,

Sorrow forgot, love’s purest joys restored,

Be still, my soul: when change and tears are past,

All safe and blessed, we shall meet at last.

 

PASTORAL PRAYER

Blessed be Thou, most gracious God, that again Thou hast brought light out of darkness and caused the morning to appear. Blessed be Thou that Thou dost send us forth in health and vigor to the duties and doings of another day. Go with us, we beseech Thee, through all the sunlit hours, and so protect us from every evil way that when evening comes we need not hide our heads in shame.

Hear us as we pray for the sick, the suffering, the bereaved and the wandering among our friends and relations. We commend to Thy loving care especially this day, O Lord, the family of Thy faithful servant Wilda Holmes, whom Thou hast called from our midst to enter into Thy place of light perpetual.

Give us open eyes, O God, quick to discover Thine indwelling in the world which Thou hast made. Let all lovely things fill us with gladness and let them uplift our minds to Thine everlasting loveliness. Forgive all our past blindness to the grandeur and glory of nature, to the charm of little children, to the sublimities of human story, and to all the intimations of Thy presence which these things contain.

Let us never think, O Eternal Father, that we are here to stay. Let us still remember that we are strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come. Preserve us by Thy grace, Good Lord, from so losing ourselves in the joys of earth that we may have no longing left for the purer joys of heaven. Let not the happiness of this day become a snare to our too worldly hearts. And if, instead of happiness, we have to suffer this day any disappointment or defeat, if we must encounter sorrow where we had hoped for joy, or sickness where we looked for health, give us grace to accept it from Thy hand as loving reminder that this is not our home.

We thank Thee, O Lord, that Thou hast so set eternity within our hearts that no earthly thing can ever satisfy us entirely; and above all we thank Thee for the sure hope of an endless life which Thou hast given us in the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord, who taught us to pray saying …