“Give me an undivided
heart, that I may fear your name” (Psalm 86:11).
The translators are
divided on how to translate this phrase. For instance, some version says,
"Unite my heart to fear your name." Others say , "Make my heart focused only on honoring your name.” Then we have
this paraphrase “Help me make worshiping your name the most important
thing in my life." Eugene Peterson (MSG) gives us this colorful rendering:
“Put me together, one
heart and mind;
then, undivided, I’ll worship in joyful
fear.”
I like that because it
sounds like the way I pray: “Put me together, Lord, because right now my
life is scattered in a thousand directions.” Most days my heart doesn’t seem
“undivided,” and it certainly feels like it needs some kind of
“uniting."So I like this phrase both ways:
“Unite my heart to fear
your name.”
"Give me an undivided
heart, that I may fear your name.”
The first speaks of my
need.
The second speaks of my
desire.
Because my heart is so
often divided, I need the Lord to unite it somehow so that I might worship him
with nothing held back. That is the situation many of us face right now. Our
hearts are fragmented because we are pulled in so many directions at once.
The world around us is no
help. Last Sunday I listened to a pastor preached on “Trash, Trinkets and Treasures,” in
which he commented that sometimes we are enticed by things that turn out to be
trash, and sometimes we are distracted by things that are not bad in
themselves, but when pursued as the goal of life end up being trinkets, little
gaudy baubles that amount to nothing much when you look at them closely.
How hard it is to focus
on the treasures of life!
How easy to mistake the
trinkets for treasures!
What are
the marks of a divided heart?
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