Better Than Life

In 1949 a young man named Jim Elliot wrote a sentence in his journal that students still copy out today: "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." He was twenty-two. Six years later he was killed on a river beach in Ecuador by the people he had gone to reach with the gospel. When he wrote that line, he was not being dramatic. He was working out ahead of time what was worth more, and it is the same sum this psalm works out.

"Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee." Look at what David puts on the scale. He is not weighing God's love against a comfortable life; anybody would make that trade. He weighs it against life itself. And the psalm tells you where he did the weighing. Its heading says David wrote it in the wilderness of Judah, and the first verse describes "a dry and thirsty land, where no water is." In a place where the land itself can kill a man, he compares the two and says plainly which one is heavier.

The order of the sentence matters too. It starts with "because." Because God's love outweighs life, David's lips will praise Him. So his praise is the result of a decision about what is worth most, which is why he can praise with a dry mouth and nothing to look forward to.

Now go back to the journal and the twenty-two-year-old. If you read his line as heroism, it lets you off the hook, because heroes are always somebody else. When he wrote it, though, it was simply a judgment about worth, made on an ordinary day, years before it cost him anything. You can make the same judgment at your kitchen table this morning. It costs you nothing except honesty about what you really think is worth more. And the love you are weighing is the same lovingkindness that held David in the desert, and it holds you now.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 213 is Learned Obedience (Hebrews 5:8).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna