"I shall run in the way of Your commandments,
For You will enlarge my heart."--Psalm 119:32
This is not how we think of commandments, on our own. Hear "commandments" and you might be prone to think of chains and drudgery. "Did God actually say...?" the serpent in the Garden asks, incredulously, inviting Eve to draw her own conclusions about the sort of God who would command anything.
Yet this morning I stumbled across this verse in Psalm 119, the Bible's greatest love song to the Law (the one that challenges you to believe love and Law are by no means opposites), and I didn't think "chains." You can't run in chains. Running is for wide open spaces and for lungs fit to take in oxygen and for a heart large enough to handle it. For dedicated runners, running is a joyful thing, something to persevere in even through pain because they just don't want to give up a day of running. Running is freedom.
God enlarges our hearts, making it possible to run with excitement in the way of His commands, to know them as the purest form of freedom. And it doesn't say that He will ever stop growing the hearts, growing us.
The God who commands is the God who equips.
No comments:
Post a Comment