the old becomes new

I didn’t really feel like going to Bible study tonight. I was tired, and the study was on Psalm 139, an old familiar Psalm, about which I was sure I already knew everything. By 4:00 this afternoon I was literally teetering on the fence, about ready to fall on the side of just going home and knitting the evening away. But, for some reason still unbeknownst to me, I decided to actually go.

This might never happen to you, but sometimes I get caught up in thinking I already know a lot. I am a classically trained missionary, after all. I’ve had some of the best Christian training money can buy, and even been tested by fire through my years in China. Its true that my spiritual growth was rampant during that time, and I am grateful for the great lessons God taught me. They are still very real in my life today.

But I need to be reminded now and then that those years in China didn’t teach me everything, and I don’t know it all. Not by a long shot. But for just one or two other women in the room, everybody at the study tonight was over 50. Though I missed some of the girlfriends I usually sit with at events such as these, I was reminded what a blessing it can be to be in a room full of women full of wisdom, wisdom hard won through years of both easy and hard times. The combined knowledge and experience in that room, was rich. And though we studied a Psalm we’ve all known since childhood, it came alive for me again tonight.

Psalm 139 is filled with the basic truths of our position in God’s eyes. Tonight I find myself in awe, and humbled, as I recognize that in spite of my wickedness and sinfulness, I serve a God who loves me, thinks of me, cares for me, and guides me. And more than anything, he forgives me my depth of sin, and when he looks on me he sees a perfect and holy child of God. How arrogant am I to place these things under the “ho-hum” category! I realize I can’t go around every minute of every day lost in the deepest sense of awe and gratitude for what God has done for me, but I’ve certainly let some of these truths slide to the further reaches of my heart of late. I’ve relied much on what I learned in my years in college and in China. I haven’t taken much effort to renew that stride of growth in my life now. And as I have ceased to spend quality time with God, those lessons of old become relegated to narrow streams of knowledge, and nearly completely lost from my heart.

Tonight I am thankful that something, whatever it was, got me to Bible study. Regardless of what passage we might be studying, God’s Word is ALIVE. It speaks to us, if we’ll only let it. I was not an avid studier this summer, and several weeks of this short 6-week study I didn’t even bother to do the short study beforehand. But I was there, every week, and though I didn’t remotely deserve it, God honored it, and revealed himself to me once again. Just being in the presence of those women, and delving into God’s Word, however familiar it might be, has made Him real in my life … real in a way I haven’t known Him in a while. And I am more grateful than I can express.