Originally published Saturday, 01 August 2015.
I call out to High God, the God who holds me together.
Psalm 57:2 (MSG)
This may come as a shock – or relief – to some of you but I don’t read my Bible every day.
I used to, for years. Then I got married and my quiet time in the mornings became less routine.
Depending on your point of view, this might sound like a bad thing but it has actually been quite freeing for me.
I’m a very structured person. I like staying within the boundaries, obeying the rules, doing what people expect so removing the "law" of reading the Bible has helped me to experience God in new ways.
Sometimes I’ve pulled out my Bible in the middle of the day anxious to hear what God has for me.
Other times, I’ll think of a verse I memorized years ago and look it up.
And sometimes I’ll be doing nothing related seeking God when a thought about how God is in everything and connected to everything will go through my mind and I’ll end up googling madly for a chapter in the bible that speaks to that moment.
I’m sure many of you are the same.
Now that I’ve shattered any ideas you might have had about me spending hours reading the scripture I’m free write what I found in the Bible this morning.
I’ve challenged myself to read the Bible everyday for two weeks. I'm doing my normal method of reading until God speaks to me.
This morning I started with a chapter about David. I read through the whole thing but I didn’t feel God was speaking to me there.
I flipped to the Psalms and started reading Psalm 57.
This one line caught my attention:
I call out to High God, the God who holds me together.
I loved that. I loved the way it made me think of how before my parents even knew I was there God was knitting me together in my mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13).
My mind went back to all the times I wanted to fall apart during Xylon’s cancer treatments the last few years but I didn’t. Not because I was strong but because God held me together.
Since I was reading the Message version of the Bible I was interested in what the other versions said. They mostly said something along the lines of:
I will cry out God most high,
to God who accomplishes/performs all things for me.
Then I dug a little deeper and looked at a few discussions around the translation of these verses. The one I loved the most was by Charles Spurgeon:
Our translators have very properly inserted the words, "all things," for there is a blank in the Hebrew, as if it were a carte blanche, and you might write therein that the Lord would finish anything and everything which he has begun.
More modern versions seem to have replaced “all things” with “his purpose”.
I wondered what would have happened if the translators had just written:
I will cry out to God Most High,
To God who performs [fill in the blank] for me. (tweet this)
To God who performs miracles for me.
To God who accomplishes job hunting for me.
To God who performs healing for me.
To God who accomplishes fighting for me.
I don’t know about you but sometimes I wonder if God finishes what he starts.
As I read this verse I was reminded that when God who begins good work in me is faithful to complete it (Philippians 1:6)
God who performs all things is holding me together.
When all things try to make me fall apart, God holds me together through all things.
Ponder: This is the bible verse that got my attention on God today. What bible verse have you read recently that did the same?
Prayer: Thank you Father, that when I’m falling apart I can rely on you to hold me together.
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- This was orginally published on my site in January 2014. To read more devotionals like this go to ilovedevotionals.com
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