Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 227 · August 15
If Ye Will Hear
“For he is our God; and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. To day if ye will hear his voice,”
For a long time now, nothing has been said to you. You would gladly take a word from God today if one came. You have asked for one more than once, and you have stopped mentioning it to other people because of how those conversations tend to go.
Somebody else reading this has the opposite problem. They know exactly what God said to them. They could write it on a card from memory, and they have spent two years putting off the day they act on it. Psalm 95 has room for both of you. It breaks in half in the middle of a verse, and the second half is for the second person.
The first six verses are a congregation talking about God. It begins, "O come, let us sing unto the LORD," and five verses later it says, "O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker." Then, halfway through verse seven, the psalm turns to warn the people, and by verse nine God Himself is speaking: "To day if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness." In Hebrew, provocation and temptation are place names, Meribah and Massah. There, thirsty in the desert, the people asked, "Is the LORD among us, or not?" and God answered them with water out of a rock. The warning goes to the generation that had seen the most: "When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work."
Lord, the two of us pray this from opposite ends. To one of us You have been silent. We would rather bring that silence to You than to anybody else, and we will not dress it up as patience. The other one heard You clearly and has been holding You off with a calendar ever since. Speak where there has been nothing for years. Where You have already spoken, take the putting off out of us before it sets hard. "Forty years long was I grieved" is how long it ran the last time. Yet we are still "the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand," and You are a Shepherd who keeps speaking to Your sheep. Thank You that it is still today. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 227 is Prayer Not Turned Away (Psalm 66:20).