Thanksgiving at times of deliverance

Thanksgiving and Praise: Psalms 33 and 34

Reflect for a moment on times when you have felt relief and perhaps even victory after a long and difficult struggle. Just the other day I had such an experience. There was a person in my life whom I found it hard to forgive for a great many years. One day recently, during a discussion with friends, a special insight came to me: an awareness of how terribly unhappy that person was and how it was easy to understand why things had turned out the way they did. And behold! It was as if I had been set free from the tyranny of resentment and bitterness. I was able to forgive, and was also able to love that person, and, for the first time in many years, I was able to pray for that person with compassion and even with love. I’d been set free! I hadn’t expected it to happen: it was a gift given to me by the Lord at a time He had chosen. Now the war was over and I was at peace, and my soul became that much lighter.

I turned to Psalm 33, the next one in our series, and found out it was a psalm of joy and praise by a nation which had been set free from warfare. How appropriate. Here are some verses that you can use a little prayers at appropriate times. They all speak of our overriding theme in this series: they speak oh how God cares for us.

They are happy whose God is the Lord,

the people he has chosen as his own.  (v 12)

The Lord looks on those who revere him,

on those who hope in his love,

to rescue their souls from death,

to keep them alive in famine.  (v 18-19)

May your love be upon us, O Lord,

as we place all our hope in you.  (v22)

And now we turn to Psalm 34, which is also a psalm of praise:

I sought the Lord and he answered me;

from all my terrors he set me free.  (v 5)

Taste and see that the Lord is good.

He is happy who seeks refuge in him. (v 9)

The Lord is close to the broken-hearted;

those whose spirit is crushed he will save. (v 19)

The Lord ransoms the souls of his servants.

Those who hide in him shall not be condemned. (v 23)

·         This verse in particular sends me to the cross, to the locus of our ransoming. We can draw faith from the reassurance given to us that we will not be damned. Think also of the Good Thief and the salvation we won by his simple statement of faith at the very last hour.

God bless you.

Advent trust

We continue today with our Reflections on the verses of the hymn, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”

I encourage you to continue substituting your own name in place of the word “Israel” in order to make this wonderful hymn your own personal prayer.

Verse 4:

O Come, O Rod of Jesse’s stem.

From ev’ry foe deliver them

That trust your mighty power to save,

And give them victory o’er the grave.

Rejoice! Rejoice!

Emmanuel shall come to you,

O [Israel].

The key word in this verse is trust. Do you, can you, trust that God will indeed deliver you from the enemies of your soul and of your peace, serenity, security and well-being? Ask God continually to increase your capacity to trust him. Look back over the landscape of your life and recall those times when he has, indeed, delivered you from something or someone that threatened to wreck havoc in your life. Give thanks for his great mercy to you, and build your trust in the present time on the realities you discover in your own past. More simply put: he has delivered you, he is delivering you (even if you aren’t aware of it) and he will deliver you.

In his prayer for the Jubilee Year of Mercy, Pope Francis eloquently points out to us the kinds of deliverance that are described in the Gospels. Let the words of his prayer serve to increase our own faith and hope and trust:

Your loving gaze freed Zacchaeus and Matthew from being enslaved by money;

the adulteress and Magdalene from seeking happiness only in created things;

made Peter weep after his betrayal,

and assured Paradise to the repentant thief.

Let us hear, as if addressed to each one of us, the words that you spoke to the Samaritan woman: ‘If only you knew the gift of God.’

Trust that the gift be given to you as well during this Advent season, in whatever way you need it. And, above all, remember that the greatest gift is yet to come: Our Lord is going to give each of us victory over the grave! Our physical death will be a temporary state for us and not the end of existence.

Pray for that trust as well.

Blessed  Advent to you.