When They Said

Friend,

It is a wet morning in a car park. The engine is off and the wipers have stopped, but your hand has not gone to the door handle yet. Part of you is still deciding whether to go in.

So let me show you where the gladness in this verse sits. David does not say he was glad to go. He says, "I was glad when they said unto me." Somebody else spoke first, and the words they used were "Let us." The joy in the sentence comes from being invited, from being included in a plan that was already forming without your having to arrange it.

This psalm is one of the songs headed "A Song of degrees," which pilgrims sang as they walked up to Jerusalem together. So the next line comes out plural, and it is about feet: "Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem." Every reason the psalm gives for loving the city has other people in it. It is the place "Whither the tribes go up." There "are set thrones of judgment," which means that somebody's case gets heard. Luke describes the same habit in Jesus at Nazareth: "as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day." Going was simply His custom. And at the end of the psalm David says, "For my brethren and companions' sakes, I will now say, Peace be within thee. Because of the house of the LORD our God I will seek thy good." He wants the place to do well because of the people in it.

So here are two plain questions to carry into the week. When did somebody last say "let us go" to you about anything to do with God? And whose name would you put in that sentence if you were the one saying it? Somebody's hand may be resting on a car door right now, waiting for a voice like yours. When you say "let us go," you pass on the same gladness David felt, and the house of the LORD still has room for you both.

Yours on the same road,

a fellow learner

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 352 is Prayer Behind a Shut Door (Matthew 6:6).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two