Our Graciousness as a response to God's Grace
Bible Readings:
Psalm 8
2 Corinthians 9:6-15
Psalm 8 is to all
intents and purposes a harvest hymn. Many of the commentators believe this psalm
was sung during the festival of tabernacles or Sukkoth , which celebrated the autumn
harvest so it is for all intents and purposes a harvest hymn. And it asks the
question of where do people fit into the whole picture of God’s creation.
It’s also prophetic
in that it’s used by several NT authors to point to Jesus and how Jesus would
restore us to our rightful position as children (read handiwork) of God.
So what does the
Psalm say:
Firstly, it’s a
psalm of praise. And it places the questions that it asks in the context of
worship and then uses that worship as a way of demonstrating the Lordship of
God.
‘Through the praise
of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against
your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.’
And then David asks
the questions of who and why?
‘Who am I in relation
to all this?’
‘Why does God care for us?’
It has been
suggested that this psalm was written during David’s time in Gath of Philistia,
when Saul was trying to kill him. In the beginning of the psalm, we have the phrase
‘according to the Gittith’ and you can imagine David asking these questions as
he is in exile asking some deep existential questions.
And maybe that’s
the important thing here. In the presence of God when we kneel in worship,
what is our position and our role.? When we see ourselves in the light of God’s
wonderfully glorious, beautiful creation who are we and why God does what he
does for us become really important questions.
It’s interesting
that David doesn’t give a direct answer to those questions. He simply describes
our position as he sees it. It may be that like his son Solomon says in the
book of Ecclesiastes that trying to answer these questions is futile or maybe he
wants us to come to our own conclusions as a response to our experience of the
God of the universe.
And how we answer
those questions for ourselves will determine our response. Not only to God but
also to each other.
In our 2 Corinthians
passage Paul is writing to the Corinthian Church about the gift that Paul is
asking the Churches to collect for the Church in Jerusalem. The Church in Judea
at the time was in the grip of a severe famine. The crops in Egypt had failed
and so the impact was felt throughout the area. Paul had written to the Church
in Corinth previously and was writing to them to reinforce his message about
generosity in response to God’s grace. He was also chasing a stingy church in
comparison to others.
NT scholar Paul
Barnett says that God’s grace towards us reproduces his graciousness within us.
And we see this in Paul’s word to the Church. Paul writes in our Corinthians
passage ‘This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of the
Lord’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God.’
I mentioned to the young
ladies earlier that Psalm 8 is all about our position in God’s creation and I
asked them three questions:
What is the right
thing they can do now?
How can we demonstrate
God’s love?
What’s the one
thing you can do to look after God’s creation?
I want to change
the questions slightly because I believe that as we look at our response to God’s
grace we need to ask ourselves some very important questions. So here are the
three questions I want us to think about this week in light of God’s Grace.
1) How do I demonstrate God’s love?
2) What’s the right thing to do today to
demonstrate God’s love?
3) How do we continue to care for God’s
people?
I appreciate that
today is Harvest and today is about celebrating the bounty that God has given
us but as we worship God for his goodness let’s make sure we are reciprocating
it back because it is that that we demonstrate true worship.
Amen
