EDITOR'S NOTE: 2010 marks the 75th anniversary of Forward Day by Day. To commemorate this milestone, the meditations from February 1, 2010 through January 31, 2011 feature reprints of the most outstanding meditations from our past 75 years. The year each meditation was originally written is included at the end of the meditation. To learn more about our anniversary and the selection process for these meditations, click here. We encourage you also to share your comments about these classic meditations below. Our editor, Richard Schmidt, will be responding to comments for these meditations.

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Psalm 69. Zeal for your house has eaten me up.

 

There is an insistent quality about God and his demands which we often forget, often allow to be hidden from us by other things.

 

The biblical word for this is "jealous." God is a jealous God. Of course, he is not jealous in the green-eyed sense, but he is jealous in the sense he will not be satisfied with the normal subpar allegiance, the half-hearted commitment. He is not satisfied because such a halfhearted commitment will only bring us grief and misery and, ultimately, death.

 

God loves us, and knows that our true good, happiness, and even genuine human life itself, depend on our relationship with him. Of course he must be jealous for us (not of us).

 

The Good News is that Christ's bitter death, in some way we do not understand, is the help that leads us to and lets us make that full and growing commitment. The zeal for God's house ate Jesus up, and he knew it would, for he was jealous for the people of God with God's own kind of jealousy.

 

Through his zeal, grace. Through his grace, our commitment to life. (1964)

 

PRAY for the Diocese of Aru (Congo)

 

Ps 69:1-23(24-30)31-38 * 73; Genesis 24:1-27; Hebrews 12:3-11; John 7:1-13