Send out your light!

Send out your light and your truth, let them lead me

Let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling!

Psalm 43:3

When we become a Christian, it is often the case that we imagine that we are now free from troubles. We can have a feeling that we are going to quickly progress to perfection. There have been Christians in history that have imagined that we can achieve some sort of sinless perfection on before Jesus calls us home. Pretty soon though, we begin to realize that we’re not saved completely right now. Instead, God has chosen to refine us to grow us. To refine is this idea of separating the good from the bad through some difficult process. So metals like gold or copper are refined by melting them and separating the bad from the good. There are huge piles of what’s been thrown out at old copper mines in the ancient world. I suppose they’re not good for anything. And so in our lives, I don’t think we realize how much bad stuff is in our selves, and what it will take to refine us. 

I don’t know about you, but when difficult things come, I don’t welcome it. The psalmist also isn’t excited for it. He just said one verse previous to this, ‘For you are the God in whom I take refuge; why have you rejected me?’ You could say, ‘I thought I was trusting in you to save me, but I don’t see it!!!!’ And he begins with the words, ‘Vindicate me!’ That means, ‘Make it right!’ Do you feel that? Have you felt lost in what you’re doing with your life? Then you are not alone since this is often the case with humans and even God’s people. But this is not the end. The reason we have turned to God is because we know hope. All other paths have been exhausted, and it is only in Christ that we have hope. And we enter into this hope through our prayers to God to vindicate us. And we follow his path, we pray with Psalm 43: Send out your light and truth and let them lead me! Where to? To worship. It is in our gathered worship, in the Old Testament that was the holy hill where the temple was, in the New Testament, it is where we gather weekly with the body of Christ, that we enter into worship and that we see God’s light and truth guiding us in hope. 

We celebrate the victory of the resurrected Christ, whose death gave us vindication. He made it right so we can throw off our sin and live with hope of life and worship. The psalm ends with the regular phrase, ‘Why are you cast down? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.’ You see, our salvation from our sins, and God’s refining fire while we walk this earth is leading us in his light and truth to worship. Worshiping the true God aligns our perspective so that what matters to God matters to us, and so we value the things that God made and are good, very good. And we learn hope because we remember our salvation that has already happened but is still in process until Christ returns.