On the Bed

Three thousand years ago a man lay sick in bed, too weak to get up, and people kept coming to visit him.

Psalm 41 is written from that bed, and further down it tells you plainly who came through the room. "Mine enemies speak evil of me, When shall he die, and his name perish? And if he come to see me, he speaketh vanity: his heart gathereth iniquity to itself; when he goeth abroad, he telleth it." One visitor sits by the bed saying kind things while he collects gossip to repeat in the street. Then comes the saddest line in the psalm: "Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me." Jesus quoted that line at the Last Supper, about Judas.

Now go back to the opening: "Blessed is he that considereth the poor: the LORD will deliver him in time of trouble." The poor here are the weak and the low, and the man who wrote it was himself the weak one in that room. He was learning firsthand what a visit is really worth. "Considereth" is a thinking word. It means paying attention to someone's situation and looking at it until you understand it. That takes longer than handing over money, and it is the very thing his false visitors never did.

Proverbs says the same thing in the language of lending: "He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD; and that which he hath given will he pay him again."

So take the promise as it stands, from a man who tested it flat on his back. "The LORD will preserve him, and keep him alive." "The LORD will strengthen him upon the bed of languishing." The repayment God promises arrives at the very place it will be needed, the sickbed itself. When you sit with someone who is weak and truly pay attention, you are doing what God does for you, and He will remember it on the day you are the one in bed.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 71 is A Man Plans His Way (Proverbs 16:9).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two