Sitting Before the Lord

“And David the king came and sat (in his house) before the LORD, and said, Who am I, O LORD God?”

In one of his magnificent sermons on prayer, C.H. Spurgeon mentions the beauty of one sitting in an easy chair, with head bowed, lifting his or her heart to the Lord in prayer. I can attest to this fact. I cannot count the times, over these many years, I have walked in on my wife while she was communing with her God, head bowed, the Bible open in her lap, hands clasped, sitting in her favorite rocker, praying to her Sovereign God and Lover of her soul. With the glow of the Glory of God on her face.

Years ago, I listened on the radio regularly to a godly black pastor. I especially liked one particular term he used frequently. “Bow the knees of your heart,” he would say. Your physical posture is of no consequence if the heart is not humbled before Him. A bowed head and a bowed knee count for nothing if the heart is not bowed in reverence. We see darling David’s heart in the first words that came out of his mouth. The greatest king on earth, over the most powerful kingdom, says to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords,  “Who am I, O LORD God?”

If you want to lose that little extra something you have with the Lord that can’t be explained, then you just forget the dung-hill He dug you from. Every saint should read from time to time the story in Luke chapter eighteen of the Pharisee and Publican praying. Also of Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel chapter two. Especially dwell on her admonition, “Talk no more so exceeding proudly; let not arrogancy come out of your mouth.”  Evidently the Pharisee had never read this; if he did, it wasn’t heeded.

“From the hole of the pit to heavenly places. Let us not forget either.”

(rds)