Monday, September 7, 2026
Teach
me, Lord, the meaning of your statutes, and I will always keep them. Help me understand your instruction, and
I will obey it and follow it with all my heart. Help me stay on the path of your
commands, for I take pleasure in it. Turn my heart to your decrees and not to
dishonest profit. Turn my
eyes
from looking at what is worthless; give me life in your ways. Confirm what you said to your servant, for
it produces reverence for you. Turn
away the disgrace I dread; indeed, your judgments are good. How I long for your precepts! Give me life through your righteousness. Psalm 119:33-40
But
to Israel he says, All day long I have held out my hands to a
disobedient and defiant people. Romans
10:21
We start early with learning, sending our 5-year-old
children to kindergarten. In North
Carolina there are roughly one and a half million children in the public
schools. With a $19.4 billion-dollar
budget, that works out to an investment of more than $12-thousand dollars per
year in each student. If the old maxim
of follow the money holds true, we believe in learning.
That statistic makes me cringe when I think
of my attitude towards learning when I was in elementary and high school. I thought getting up every morning before the
sun was fully up, getting cleaned-up, fully dressed, and riding in the yellow
torture chamber to the brick building, and being forced on threat of having my “permanent
record” sullied with red marks, was a form of imprisonment; I was warehoused
for seven hours while my parents danced-off to whatever they cared to do in
their free time. It’s odd, isn’t it…how
my attitude got a severe corrective when I became a parent, responsible to
house, clothe, and find a good school for my little prisoners?
If you re-read that passage in Psalm 119, you
might catch the shift in King David’s attitude.
I caught the complete flip when he said he asked to be a good student, obeying
God’s ways and commandments; he went so far as to say he takes
pleasure in it. (I wonder if
that included the year-end finals?) This
could only have been written by a man who had sinned long enough, and big enough
to understand the pain he was heaping up on his life. If you’ve never taken a trip through David’s
sins, let me give you the cliff notes, he did qualify as an adulterer, and co-conspirer
to murder his mistress’s husband, and a cover-up that invited Watergate in Jerusalem’s
palace. David was a king with all sorts of
power, but he was also a sinner standing in need of forgiveness from Sovereign God,
Who, by the way, holds people accountable for their sins and rebellious
defiance.
Fast
forward a thousand years from David to Apostle Paul who quotes the prophet
Isaiah, pointing the long, bony finger at Israel and saying that God says: All day long I have held out my hands to
a disobedient and defiant people.
Again, the cliff notes on Paul and Isaiah…they’re pointing out that God
is gracious, loving, and forgiving, but Israel was like a petulant school child
pouting over having to ride the bus, sit through boring classes, and (gulp!)
study for tests.
Life’s
not fair! But “fair” isn’t the point of
learning. And neither is “learning” the
point of learning. It’s all about
learning all about living…and living a life that is worthy of the gift of
living. It’s all about finding the
center of God’s good will for our lives and camping out there as He gives us opportunities
every day to serve Him, by serving others.
That’s the point!
For You Today
You
chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!
[1] Title and Other
Image
by Sabrina Eickhoff from Pixabay
Unless noted, Scripture quotes The Christian Standard Bible©
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