I have Calmed and Quieted my Soul

This is a psalm of David, but there’s no indication when he wrote it.  The subject concerns being in a humble and happy state and that in itself is interesting as David had much he could have been proud of.  Yet there had been major failings in his life.  After years of struggle and hardship, where the jealous King Saul had sought to take his life, he had become King of Israel.  For the first part of his reign he had been a godly King.  Yet after his adultery with Bathsheba which led to her husband Uriah’s murder the consequences were a troubled reign!  Perhaps David is confronting his failure and realizing it’s better to be content in one’s circumstances than to pursue ambition.  It’s possible, due to the subject matter; this psalm may have been sung during pilgrimages to Jerusalem to encourage the Pilgrims to be in the right frame of mind when they came to worship at the temple in Jerusalem.

I’ve always enjoyed weight training.  But to be really successful at it, there are a list of do’s and don’ts.  For example, when it comes to training you train a muscle group hard!  But you don’t train it every day; in fact you allow 72 hours before you’re train it again.  Secondly you make sure that you have plenty of food, but it has to be the right kind of food with plenty or protein and the fat kept low if you want to build real muscle and not just bulk!  In the same way this psalm has a list of do’s and don’ts for those who are looking to grow spiritually!

So David starts off with a list of don’ts as he expresses things in the negative.  ‘O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me’ (v1).  He is not proud and he realises that there are some things are well beyond his understanding.  There’s no indication that David had ever desired the throne, and perhaps that’s why he acted wisely and humbly early in his reign.  However, perhaps power had been seductive and he had become enamoured with the benefits of kingship in that you could get away with practically anything without it being questioned!  And that had led to his downfall!  So what we’re seeing here is that discipline is essential for believers to humble themselves so they might be used by God.

Secondly, David focuses on how the believer can achieve in this happy state that is found in verse 1.  ‘But I have calmed and quietened my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me’ (v2).  He has denied himself so that he might be content.  An unweaned child has a constant craving for its mother’s milk.  But there comes a time when the child is no longer crying out in hunger so much of the time.  It’s happy and content, but still dependent!  That’s the difference that David draws our attention to.  He has a confidence in God but he’s not independent of God.  So this is faith in action, this is a ‘do’, in that David realises faith in the Lord has to be actively entered into, and this is seen in the theme of this verse.  Jesus highlights this kind of thinking in Matthew 18:3-4. “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”  Jesus shows we need to actively make an effort to: ‘become like children,’ in other words, be dependent on him, if we are to receive any real spiritual benefit!  There’s a sense of letting go and letting God, but also the believer actively seeking the Lord’s involvement in each and every area of their life.

In the last verse of the psalm David calls on Israel to put their hope in the Lord.  ‘O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and for evermore’ (v3).  In a sense the psalm has gone full circle.  David’s challenge is simple.  If we want to avoid the pitfalls of pride, which are warned against in verse 1 we need to focus on the Lord.  Israel had a history of looking for solutions to their various problems in all the wrong places.  But David wants them to avoid that mistake by learning from his experience.  David doesn’t just ask Israel (and us) to give it a try; rather he is looking to what the Lord can achieve and asking the Lord’s people to actively pursue it.Because of our human nature this, as Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the great Victorian preacher, once pointed out, this is one of the shortest psalms to read, but one of the longest to learn!  Yet, if we are to be contented and happy in our relationship with the Lord, we would do well to note the do’s and don’ts of this psalm and work at putting them into practice in our Christian lives!