Cry of My heart

It is the cry of my heart to follow You, It is the cry of my heart to be close to You
It is the cry of my heart to follow, All of the days of my life
Teach me Your holy ways, oh Lord, So I can walk in Your truth
Teach me Your holy ways, oh Lord, And make me wholly devoted to You
Open my eyes so I can see, The wonderful things that You do
Open my heart up more and more, And make me wholly devoted to You. 
[Terry Butler]

Teach me Your way, O LORD; I will walk in Your truth; Unite my heart to fear Your name. I will praise You, O Lord my God, with all my heart, And I will glorify Your name forevermore. [Psalm 86: 11 – 12] 

avid requests two things in this Psalm, one, that the Lord would instruct him in His ways and two, that the Lord would grant him a united or pure heart, a heart focused only on God.  So frequently we have distracted and divided hearts.  That is when we try to cling to Jesus with one hand but reach out for something else in this world with the other hand.  That David reduced his needs to two things, to have God teach and grant…is interesting when you realize that God’s goodness manifests itself in two things, He gives and He forgives. 

When we ask God to teach us His ways, both our expectations and our estimations of others as well as ourselves will be viewed from His vantage point.  A totally different view than the world has.  The world’s value-system which is based on performance and prestige doesn’t fit into God’s value system for He values the condition of our hearts and our obedience.  Once we realize that our value to God is based on what He grants us when we ask Him to teach us His ways, the peace that He grants is a gift and a manifestation of our faith. 

Faith is simpler and yet grander than we believe, we tend to think of it as psyching ourselves into believing something that is unbelievable, something too impossible to be true.   But true faith is the capacity of seeing beyond our reality and view the unseen reality of God at work in our lives, even more important, it is having an eternal viewpoint when everyone around us may only have a “here and now” viewpoint.

Yogi Berra noted that you can “observe a lot by seeing,” and CS Lewis observed that “seeing depends upon where you stand and it also depends upon the sort of person that you are.”  Both observations are correct, but CS Lewis’ observation is reflective of having a pure heart for purity of heart allows us to have perceptions that others cannot have or copy, pure hearts get glimpses of God where divided or distracted can’t see His work in their lives, believe that He hasn’t answered prayers or worse yet – has left them.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” [Matthew 5:8] The main thing is to grow faith eyes that can see the wonderful things that He does.

-c anderson

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