Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 36 · February 5
Create in Me
“Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.”
It is the morning after. A man sits on the edge of his bed with his phone in his hand. He has written an apology three times, and the third draft is better written than the first two. That is the part that frightens him.
Most of us know that place. We have cleaned up a mess and been quietly pleased with how well we did it. Underneath, the dread is rarely about being found out. It is the fear that we are the kind of person who does this, and that we are simply getting better at apologising.
David is asking for far more than a tidy-up. "Create in me a clean heart, O God."
The Hebrew word for create is bara. When the Bible uses it for creating, God is always the one who does it. It is the word in the first line of Genesis: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." David has looked honestly at himself and decided that nothing less than the word for God's own making will do. And he knows he cannot be the one to do it.
The second half of the verse is quieter, though no smaller: "renew a right spirit within me." To renew is to repair, to make fresh again what has worn down. So in one breath David asks for two things: a new creation, and the daily upkeep that keeps it going.
There is real fear in the next line, and we should not skip past it: "Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me." David had seen that happen to a king. Scripture says "the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul," and it was David who was brought in to play the harp for Saul when he was troubled.
Father, we have written better apologies than we have lived. Please do not settle for our drafts. Make in us what is not there, because we have proved we cannot make it ourselves. We would rather be made new by You than be well spoken of. Do not take Your Spirit from us. "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit," and that is all we have brought. Your own word tells us what You will do with it: "a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 36 is Blotted Out (Isaiah 44:22).