Psalm 67

1 May God be merciful and bless us. May his face smile with favor on us.

Interlude

2 May your ways be known throughout the earth, your saving power among people everywhere.
3 May the nations praise you, O God. Yes, may all the nations praise you.
4 Let the whole world sing for joy, because you govern the nations with justice and guide the people of the whole world.

Interlude

5 May the nations praise you, O God. Yes, may all the nations praise you.
6 Then the earth will yield its harvests, and God, our God, will richly bless us.
7 Yes, God will bless us, and people all over the world will fear him.

"If...then" is an equation common to life. Look carefully at how I wrote this out because the great mystery of life is "how do we connect the dots between if and then?"

We all understand it because we've experienced it countless times. This "if...then" equation is a riddle we are all forced to solve constantly. You see, we're all born into this world with no prior experience so we are unable to naturally draw conclusions about how experiences in life are connected. Immediately after birth we begin connecting the dots. Over time, we successfully solve most of life's riddles. Some of us more quickly that others.

But, its not all trial and error.

God created us with the ability to reason. So in short order we begin the process known as "deductive reasoning." We comprehend a general situation and begin to trace specific steps that led up to the situation.

For example, I notice I am wet. That is a general assessment. If I'm curious, I trace my actions back until I can figure out how I got wet and I draw specific conclusions about how it happened. My riddle becomes "If I jump in the water...then I get wet."

Riddle solved...

I'm not trying to insult your intelligence here...its just that some of us never get real good at connecting life's more critical dots. Usually life's most meaningful and critical riddles have several, very nuanced, dots. We give up trying to unravel them. As a result, we live dysfunctional impoverished lives...financially, professionally, relationally or spiritually, depending on which dots we failed to connect.

Have you ever felt like you're pouring your energy and resources into a bottomless pit? No matter how hard you worked the rewards didn't seem to reflect the investment? That's not uncommon. Nearly always its because we didn't "connect the dots." You know what's even more troubling? This will never, ever, change until we take the time to connect the dots.

So, when our psalmist says "Then the earth will yield its harvests" this is a "then" worth investigating. If we can walk backwards from the general case of the earth "yielding its harvest" we may discover what specifically leads to this end.

Fortunately, God loves us so much that this one doesn't have too many dots. We need only walk back one verse. "May (if) the nations praise you, O God. Yes, may (if) all the nations praise you." Voila! "If the nations praise God, then the earth will yield its harvest."

I can't help but be curious about this one. God, in his loving fatherly way, made this so simple. This is like letting your child stand one foot away from the dart board. Could God have made it any more easy? Yet...how many of us fail to make the connection?

We've heard "insanity" defined as "doing the same thing but hoping for a different result." Well, here's our question today: Are we tired of the general state of affairs in our life? Are we where we always dreamed we'd be, or have we fallen short? Is there so much we hoped for that never materialized? I sure hope its not because we're so stubborn we just want to figure out our own way to mine life's treasures. That would be insanity. Suppose this psalm is true? What if its all lying at our feet waiting for us to connect the dots? "If we praise God...then the earth will yield it's harvest."

I wonder if the psalms are God's dots...

Live boldly out there today...