Nielsen’s Nook

Nielsen’s Nook
Nielsen’s Nook
Contemplative, reflective, and irenic we pray.
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But I am poor and needy… (Psalm 70:5)

Will Nielsen
June 9th, 2007
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I am preaching on Psalm 70 several times over the next month. This is a psalm that was referenced by many Eastern writers in the third and fourth centuries as a great aid to prayer. In fact the monks included it in their “hours” of prayer. It does seem to be a prayer that one is wise to pray always, whether at the heights of faith or at the depths of despair. No one stays on the mountaintop. We are broken by sin and will take the blessing of God’s presence and grow content. Indeed we are all poor and needy.

It is precisely this idea of repetitiveness that the Enemy uses to torment Christ’s sheep. We fall and fall and fall. We find that we wrestle with the same stinking stuff every day. Satan would have us believe that the struggle is a sign of death and infidelity. Christ has declared that it is a sign of the new Life beating back sin and death in us. So John Calvin comforts those who will hear:

Although I was miserable and poor, God did think upon me. As according to the extent in which any one is afflicted, so is he despised by the world, we imagine that he is disregarded by God, we must, therefore, stedfastly maintain that our miseries in no respect produce on the part of God a feeling of weariness towards us, so that it should become troublesome to him to aid us.1

1 John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries, Ps 40:16.

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