Light & Truth: “O send out Thy light and Thy truth, let them lead me; let them bring me unto Thy holy hill, and to Thy tabernacles.” Psalm 43:3. If there is any prayer I have prayed most earnestly, most frequently, and with the deepest sense of my own insufficiency, it is this one. And it remains my prayer today. I cannot trust my own understanding; I have misread, misunderstood, and misapplied Scripture enough times to know how blind I am apart from the Lord’s light. I have been humbled, exposed, and proven wrong too many times to place any confidence in my own interpretations. If the Lord does not lead me, I will certainly wander, even while holding a Bible in my hands.
In this psalm, and throughout the Psalms, we behold David, a true believer in the promised Christ, Acts 2:30-31, a worshiper of Christ in spirit calling Him LORD. Matthew 22:43-44. Yet though already bathed in mercy and tasting the sweetness of the Lord, he never outgrew his need for more mercy, more light, more understanding. Grace only intensified this hunger. The more the Lord revealed, the more David longed for greater revelation, crying, “open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law.” Psalm 119:18. Such is the life of grace, progressive not in merit, but in desire, and the more the Spirit unveils Christ to the heart, the more earnestly the child of God prays, “cause me to hear Thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in Thee do I trust. Cause me to know the way wherein I should walk; for I lift up my soul unto Thee.” Psalm 143:8.
David’s valuation of Scripture, and the direction of his thoughts, especially as expressed in the 119th Psalm, are the spiritual instincts of every believer. “I will run the way of Thy commandments, when Thou shalt enlarge my heart. Teach me, O LORD, the way of Thy statutes… give me understanding… make me to go in the path of Thy commandments… incline my heart unto Thy testimonies…” Psalm 119:32-36. David never assumed he had reached the summit of spiritual understanding. He never imagined that yesterday’s visitations would suffice for tomorrow. He sought daily mercies from a daily Christ. This is the very pulse of grace. The Lord Jesus describes such souls in Matthew 5:6: “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”
What God wrought in David, He produces in all His people, a constant yearning for deeper discernment, a pleading for divine light, a desire to be overtaken by the knowledge of Christ. “Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect; but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:12. But this hunger, this thirst, this inward cry, cannot be manufactured, conjured up, or forced by religious effort. It is the Lord who awakens such holy desire. It is the Spirit who stirs the thought toward Christ, who inclines the heart toward the Scriptures, who grants the cry, “Lord, teach me… Lord, lead me… Lord, incline my heart.”
The life of grace is not marked by having arrived, but by always being drawn, always being taught, always being led, always being brought again to the true Temple, the Lord Jesus Christ, “in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” Colossians 2:9. The only light we have on anything is the gospel, which lightens everything with the light of Christ. MPJ