AP

Psalm 56:12-13  

I am under vows to you, O God; I will present my thank-offerings to you.  For you have delivered me from death and my feet from stumbling, that I may walk before God in the light of life.

As part of my devotional reading this month I have been using Tim and Kathy Keller’s ‘The Way of Wisdom’, Hodder & Stoughton, 2017, and they have been writing on the topic of ‘Marriage’.  The devotional for September 4 (p.247), based on Proverbs 2:16-17, includes:  “A marriage is a legal bond solemnised by vows.  A wedding is not so much a claim of present love as a promise of future love.  The vows keep you together despite the ups and downs and changes that would end a normal relationship.  Without a covenant that keeps you together, you will be cut off from the peculiar riches of lifelong committed love that survives though thick and thin.  There is a self-interested kind of relationship in which each party says, ‘I’ll be with you as long as the relationship is fulfilling me.’  What matters then is ME more than US.  But a covenant relationship is one in which each party says, ‘I’ll be there for YOU.’  Jesus, our true spouse, loved us not because we were lovely and fulfilling to him but in order to make us lovely (Ephesians 5:25-27).  The wise person knows that fulfilment does not come from seeking it directly but is, paradoxically, a by-product of keeping promises and sacrificial service.’”

In Psalm 56, David reminds us that if we are in a covenant relationship with God, we are bound to him by binding vows.  In the NT, this means that when we come to Christ in repentance-and-faith, we become his ‘Wife’, and the Covenant which then binds us to him is a covenant that was sealed by his own precious blood!  Moreover it enables us to ‘walk before God in the light of life.’  Let us never forget, or just take for granted, the blessing and privilege this is for us in these very dark and dismal days.

I am also reading through the books of Samuel in my M’Cheyne program and am reminded that King David’s reign was so powerful and spiritually productive, and such a blessing to his nation, because “from that day on [when Samuel anointed him] the Spirit of the LORD came upon David in power” (1 Samuel 16:13).  Let us all pray earnestly and often that God might be pleased to do the same for King Charles III as he faces the daunting task ahead of him in the present godless media-driven culture of the West.
– Bruce Christian