Psalm
103 (NRSV) Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all
that is within me, bless his holy name. 2 Bless the Lord,
O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits— 3 who
forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, 4 who redeems
your life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, 5
who satisfies you with good as long as you live so that your youth is renewed
like the eagle’s.
To bless the Lord is to give Him something He
decidedly wants from you. The Hebrew word for bless literally means “knee,” and
“to bless the Lord” is to kneel before Him in acknowledgement that He is God.
The word bless is the opposite of the word “pride,”
which literally means “to rise up.” Pride is usually seen as standing up
against God, a rising up in a spirit of independence from God, in defiance of
His will, and in a determination to disregard His rightful place in our world
and in our life.
To bless the Lord is to kneel before Him in the
brokenness of our pride. It is to lay at His feet the driving push to have our
own way. It is to recover the jubilant freedom from the demand that everything
always goes to please us.
It is from the kneeling position we can best
distinguish genuine issues from those of stubborn self-will. From the kneeling
position, we gain confidence in God’s power to be at work and to hear His call
of responsibility to our life. Freed from the rigidity of self-determination we
begin to recover our ability to live naturally and spontaneously to be our best
selves, wallowing not in our failures nor bathing ourselves in the glory of our
successes.
What then can bend our risen pride to this kneeling
position before God? Bless the Lord, O my Soul, and forget none of His
benefits. We kneel before Him when we remember His forgiveness that erases
regret over past failure, when we remember His compassion that has spared us
paying for our mistakes, His power that has brought us hope, His healing that
has brought wholeness to our hurts, His providence that has brought us to the
right place at the right time with the right person or people.
And if our memory still fails us, then we need only
to look to God’s Son, where all of these ways are found and focused. In His Cross
is power to heal our worst disease, which is death. And, in His Cross is the
power and the hope that draws us up out of the pits of hell we make for
ourselves and that others try to make for us. The desire to bless the Lord, to
kneel before Him grows through repeated awareness of all His benefits to us.
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within
me, bless His holy name.
From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope July 20,
1986
© Rhonda H. Mitchell
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