Salutation
... in the name of the Father, and
of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
Amen. Through the prayers of our
holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us and save us. Amen. Glory
to You, our God, Glory to You.
O Heavenly King: Prayer to the Holy
Ghost
O
Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of truth, You are everywhere and fill
all things, Treasury of blessings, and Giver of life: come and abide in us, and
cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls, O Good One.
Come, let us sing to the Lord. Let us make a joyful noise
to the rock of our salvation. Let us
come before His presence with thanksgiving. Make a joyful noise to Him with psalms: for
the Lord [is] a great God, a great
King above all gods. In His hand [are] the deep places of the earth. The strength of the hills [is] His also. The sea [is]
His, and He made it. His hands formed the
dry [land]. Come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our maker: for He [is]
our God. We [are] the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand.
Today if you will hear His voice, harden
not your heart, as in the provocation, as the day of temptation in the
wilderness: when your fathers tempted Me, proved Me, and saw My work. Forty years long was I grieved with [this] generation, and said, “It [is] a people that err in their heart, They
have not known My ways.” To whom I swore
in My fury, that they should not enter My rest.
________
If you have been
blessed or helped by any of these meditations in Psalms, please repost or share
all of them.
[1]
What a joyous hymn of praise. I suppose
that most of us have sung it; sing it pretty regularly. It sticks in the heart and feeds the
soul. However, we stop singing at the
end of the first paragraph: there is nothing joyous in the warning this Psalm
expresses. The joyous meditation is
founded on God’s saving work in the Exodus, on His power in the Creation, and
on His ongoing providence in pasturing His people in the wilderness and
beyond. The Lord’s prayer notes, “You
gave us our angelic, blessed, or heavenly bread today.” You, Lord have been giving us manna in the
wilderness of our lives for thousands of years.
You, Lord have been feeding us with the bread of heaven, the food of
angels, Jesus, the Savior of our souls.
There is only one thing that can keep us from this festal table: an evil
heart of unbelief. The Israelites of the
Exodus failed to enter into the rest of God, because they stopped believing in
Him. They were a saved people. They were on the very brink of entering into
the rest of God. They threw away their
salvation, because they stopped believing that God had the power to accomplish
His covenant promises to them. How did
they get to such an estate? Mostly by
complaining, grumbling, ingratitude, and unthankfulness. Yes, they lost their salvation through
unbelief.
Salvation has two aspects: a past aspect, being saved from
something; and a future aspect, being saved to something. Just because you have been saved from your
sins is no guarantee that you will be saved to the heavenly rest of God. We too, can fail in the desert of our souls,
through an evil heart of unbelief. This
is the very definition of unforgiveable sin.
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