Day 11. Counter intuition.

Psalm 86:11
Teach me your way, Lord
that I may rely on your faithfulness;
give me an undivided heart,
that I may fear your name.

Sometimes Biblical poetry is very clear in its parallelisms. For example, you may get a verse like, "The righteous man rises above troubles; the unrighteous man falls into a very deep, inescapable pit." ...ok maybe not exactly like that, but you get the point. And then there are verses like this one where the connection isn't as intuitive.

Being taught God's way = I rely on his faithfulness. This is especially encouraging for me right now, because I feel like I've gone so far away from what faith really is. I really wanna relearn everything. I wanna be retaught, and I'm hoping that can bring me back to relying on God.

I feel like the church has given me so many mixed messages and I just wanna get back into the Word for myself and rediscover what Christianity is all about at its core, away from all the structure, all the ministry, all the music, all the other junk that comes along with organized religion.

The second part of the verse is just as crazy... undivided heart = fear. To me, this means that when we focus on God with everything we have and when he's the center of our lives, we see him as he really is, in all his holiness. I imagine a scene like Isaiah 6. I think if we truly understood how holy and how BIG God really is, we would have so much more respect for him...

This verse is crazy. I think we all need a little bit of this...