Prayer with psalm 95

The initial approach to the Lord is made with thanksgiving. And that thankfulness pertains to God’s reach.

Verse 3 thru 7 says in the King James version," For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all the gods.

In his hand are the deep places of the earth, the strength of the hills is his also.

The sea is his, and he made it, and his hands form the dry land.

O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our maker.

For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.

Here the extension or reach of God’s hand includes his pasturing of us, his creation of us and the HIs full extension from and towards seas to lands, from valley’s to hills and mountains and to the inner depths of the earth.

Later in verse 8 it says, “ If today you hear his voice, harden not your heart, as in the day of temptation in the wilderness."

It is interesting some of the goals that people put upon themselves these days, such as maybe hard to achieve financial goals, I have to have x amount of dollars accumulated in this period of time. But there are countless reasons, that we can miss the shepherd’s voice, including even those reasons that are laced with good intentions.

Things to think about within the psalm, is the hardening of the heart, which would seemingly include a bit of stubbornness, I want to say here when the Shepherd’s voice is calling you to another point of pasture.

It is easy enough to say, I haven’t hardened my heart, but can I be so sure, even despite good works on my imaginary report card, that in some ways I haven’t hardened my heart. This psalm, is saying, that you might have to be willing to change course in a day, if you are called to. You may have had great plans, set elsewhere and involving good things. This by putting in the pasture and shepherd image, is seemingly saying that this voice, isn’t going to be so radical that it is asking to do the nearly impossible or to go off pasture, but the voice can be missed and it has to do with issues of the heart.

Verse 10 says, “ Forty years long I was grieved with this generation, and said," It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways."

Here we have a two fold mentioning of matters of the heart, an errant heart and a hardened heart. In matters of difficulty, we might as the Lord to soften our hearts to his voice and communications to us, that we are ready for his answers and that we are listening.

And then as far as an errant heart, we might know all to well that we are starting to go astray and distance ourselves on the pasture from the Good Sheperd.

We can ask God for help with our hardened heart and our errant heart. His reach is so far and so wide, that it can come into the matter, including the inner recesses of our heart, and heart in fact He made. He made the sea, as per verse 5, and he made us as per verse 6. As we go to him in prayer and contemplation of his works, which is mentioned in verse 9, we should be contemplating his reach. Verse 9 says, “ When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work."

What it is saying here, is that with all that is out there to contemplate and all that they had already seen with their own eyes directed right to them, they were still asking for proof, or prove it to me. Think about it then, what you do see, that can already be counted upon as proof. This can be in and through a myriad of ways and within any number of possibilities. But there are interpretations that you can make that lend themselves to the idea of proof and in that also God’s reach has to be there for this to have been possible in the first place, right here, right now, right in front of you. For example, if someone get’s on the Karaoke machine and get’s the highest score, and their voice sounds good even to themselves, here is some proof that God wants you to sing. Realistically, you have some proof. If you think it is not cool to sing, then it may be a matter of softening your heart to this idea, and correcting an errant heart. The reach of God, the hand of God has given you a legitimate voice, which can be at times properly used for singing.

And isn’t it a beautiful thing, that you can hear not only your own voice, but God’s voice calling you in the day. This verse, is also an admonition, because it may be a longer road, a deeper calling that God is giving to you to act on rather currently. In the Gospels, Jesus said a number of times to a number of people, basically drop everything, right then and there and follow me. The call to prayer might come suddenly in the day itself and you might have to drop something you were doing in the day right then and there and go into prayer. Within this, we can contemplate and believe, although we may never be physically present to the people we are called to pray for or the issues we are praying about might never reach into our lives, the reach of our prayer goes beyond these natural boundaries and thru the hand of God comes into the presence of who and what we are praying about. This is why we legitimately believe if we are praying for someone or everyone in India, the reach of this prayer is altogether valid and proper as a prayer and extends thru the power of the same hand that authored the universe.

Then we might feel so alone and obscured within our own personal difficulties, but the great reach of God also extends into the minutia of our problems and the reach of our problems. It's all about reach. And then, reverting to verse 2, the thanksgiving is about how God has brought us into a reach that was beyond our initial reach and initial view of what we thought was possible, until his answering of our prayer brought us into renewed pasture, to higher places that we thought initially would have been beyond our reach and beyond the reach of what we first thought was indeed possible. God sees beyond, hears beyond, takes us beyond.

There is a beautiful song by Sarah Brightman, called Ocean Away from her album Eden which I am listening to right now. It says on refrain, “there is an ocean between us, you know where to find me, you reach out and touch me, I feel you in my heart." And it concludes “I’ll always remember your only an ocean away.’ God seems like he might be an ocean away, but as this psalm says, his hand is upon the ocean and reaches past it and to us and his call for us and his voice for us to the reaches of the individual heart.

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