Higher Ground
Monday (November 10)
Higher Ground
Psalm 61:2
From the end of the earth I call to you when my heart is faint. Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.
Perspective is vitally important to understanding who we are as people. If we believe the common idea that man is inherently good, then we won’t understand our innate need for divine grace. This was wonderfully exposited in an interview I watched recently with Rosaria Butterfield, an ex-civil rights activist for both the feminist and LGBTQ movement, who became a believer thanks to the unbending resolve of a neighboring pastor who lovingly opened his home to her and gave her a Bible. Butterfield tells how reading the Scriptures broadsided her, how the testament of people being sinners before a holy God had never occurred to her; how she’d thought of ‘sin’ her entire life as a sort of societal flaw, or a corruption in politics, rather than an inborn failure to live up to a divine standard; how her whole life she’d assumed that people were basically good and that simply giving every person freedom to express themselves would lead to societal flourishing. But the gospel cut through that idolatrous ideal like a double edged sword, stinging her conscience awake, inspiring her spirit to cry out in humble confession something like, “I am not okay—I am not good there is no good in me apart from You—Jesus, save me!”, and her life was turned inside out and right-side up from that moment onward.
David doesn’t know the scientific theory of gravity, but he understands that just as his feet are constantly being held down by an external force, his heart is being pulled down by the internal forces of sin and emotional instability and mental fatigue and demonic lies being whispered relentlessly, and there’s only One Who can bring relief. The wisdom of sages and advisors and priests can’t go that deep. The strength of political allies, charioteers, and armies can’t either. All are stuck in the same quandary. All are in the valley, in the trenches of a finite mortality, needing help from higher up—from the One who has incarnated beneath the tug of our human condition, and risen above it, and overcome it.
Friend, no matter what forces try to pull you down today, none are as strong as the love that lifts you up!