URC Daily Devotion 1st October

Psalm 17 implies that the routine of praying at the beginning of the day (verse 15), and at its end (verse 3), is a worthwhile ‘holy habit’. It can be so steadying an anchor as we are buffeted by all that contemporary life consists of.

Psalmists are often very frank about themselves and about the world in which they live. Today’s author is, too. Whilst as individuals we will often candidly confess our flaws and errors, this psalm helps us accept that there is also a time to tell God how we have tried to be ‘innocent’. It’s not about boasting, but rather acknowledging gratefully how good it is when, amidst temptation and distraction ‘my feet have not stumbled from your paths’ (verse 5).

Setting our personal life within its proper place, ‘out there’ at the heart of society, maybe we also recognise the psalm’s language for depicting the state of the world: ‘callous’, ‘ruthless’, ‘proud’, etc. Moreover, despite that ‘righteous plea’ in line 1 of today’s metrical version, we don’t need to buy totally into the psalmist’s suggestion that it’s only ‘the wicked’ who err; too often we will be able to see such shortcomings in ourselves. Psalm 17 offers us the opportunity – alone and together – to pray for wisdom and strength that we might stick to God’s path. Above all, though, the psalmist pleads for the wonders of God’s hesed, expressed above as ‘display your steadfast love and save with your right hand … in shadow of your wings hide me in times of strife; and as the apple of your eye preserve and guard my life.’ How precious a prayer that is, for ourselves, for the Church and for the world. Contemporary life can vex us. Despair, though, will only make things worse. The Christian’s vocation is to replace despair with prayer, through Jesus Christ, in whose living, dying and rising that hesed of God finds its perfect expression.

Most of us are either larks or owls, better in the morning or the evening. Whichever it is, every day has a start and a finish when we can pray, looking in ‘faith, hope and love’ to the one ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’. So it is that even the alarm clock becomes a helpful tool for ‘walking the way, living the life of Jesus today’.