The pandemic has been compared to the war experience of a previous generation. There are obvious differences but sometimes the comparison as been helpful. For instance, the need to fight against fretting over what has been lost and deal with the circumstances before us. And for Christians the need to acknowledge that while things might seem to be spiralling out of control we are always in the hands of the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
It is here that we can relate to Psalm 60. We are brought into a time of war when the land is shaken, torn, fractured and the people are in despair. The enemy has overcome and it seems to God’s people that they have been rejected by Him, that in the words of the psalmist He no longer goes out with their armies. It is a time when the judgement of God has burst upon the people to the extent that they are in need of rebuilding as a nation.
Comparison with the lives of nations at this time are obvious. But a strict application should be with the people of God in this generation, the Church. We have been shaken, torn, fractured. Some might say this was true before the pandemic. We stand in need of renewal, refreshment, rebuilding. The psalmist shows us the first step forward: to acknowledge our God and to realise our need of His strength. The psalmist is praying, crying out, realising that there is no future apart from the aid that only God can supply.
We have heard many calls to follow in this line through the years and still there is a sense of something lacking in the life and witness of the Church. God is no longer going out with us. This is when the roots of devotion need to be uncovered once more. Follow the voice in Psalm 60. This is angry, despairing, accusing prayer. But it is prayer. Then a promise is received from God which needs to be trusted. In the end there is assurance in the ultimate triumph of God.
Alister McGrath has a book called Roots That Refresh. It is a call to return to the basic resources that refresh and renew the Church. Reading it I had a sense that these are things I already know. But then the nagging question, has it all really penetrated to the place where authentic renewal in my life can actually take hold?
Do I pray in response to the God revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ?
Do I take seriously God’s spiritual fitness schedule, to mould my life according to that of Jesus?
Do I expect an encounter with the Living God when I open His Word?
Do I anticipate a gathering up in the life of the Holy Spirit when I join with other Christians in worship?
These are the roots that refresh. Without them, channels through which the Spirit pumps His life into the living organism that is the Church, we are moribund.
Do you baulk when you read passages like Psalm 52: 8-9:
‘But I am like an olive tree flourishing in the house of God:
I trust in God’s unfailing love for ever and ever.
I will praise you for ever for what you have done;
In your name I will hope, for your name is good.
I will praise you in the presence of your saints.’
Who me? Flourishing like an olive tree? But maybe it is time for us to take this more seriously. To accept that this is God’s will for us, that we flourish spiritually, that we keep in step with the Spirit, that the life of Christ is seen and experienced in us all. He has given us the means whereby this can be realised in our lives, incompletely in our human and conflicted state, but a foretaste of the completeness we will know in the Eternal Kingdom with ‘the former things’ behind us.
You see where we have gone with this. Starting out with what is lacking in the life and witness of the Church but coming to what we lack as individuals. Paul wrote to Christian communities where there was division, jealousy, lack of compassion but he never lost the vision of each individual being a citizen of heaven, looking to the transforming power of Jesus to create a colony of heaven here on earth. Whatever plans and aspirations we have coming out of the pandemic we must receive from the roots that refresh.
