Psalm Meditation 783
Father’s Day
June 21, 2015

Psalm 134
1 Come, bless the LORD, all you servants of the LORD, who stand by night in the house of the LORD!
2 Lift up your hands to the holy place, and bless the LORD.
3 May the LORD, maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.
(NRSV)

At some point we have done something so that God will do something for us in return. We believe somehow that we can get ahead of God in terms of actions and favors. A psalm like this one even opens up the possibility that maybe we can get ahead. If we bless God and lift up our hands, we will have earned a blessing from God. It sounds possible only because we leave out an important first step.

We bless God because of all that God has already done for us. Everything we do is in response to something that God has already done in our lives. Our blessings of God do not earn us favor, they serve to remind us how dependent we are on God for all that we have. We can’t get ahead of God when it comes to blessings bestowed on the other.

We will continue to look for ways we can get ahead of God so that we are owed something out of the rich storehouse of God. We will also continue to come up short in out doing God. It is because of who God is and what God does that we offer our blessings to God just as it is that God continually blesses us.

June 15, 2015
LCM