My bad! I ruined a surprise baby shower. But can YOU keep Good News quiet?
“Has the LORD redeemed you? Then speak out! Tell others he has redeemed you from your enemies. For he has gathered the exiles from many lands, from east and west, from north and south.” Psalm 107:2-3
I will always remember my cousin’s expression. Bright-eyed, with just a slight opening in her mouth from the almost gasp intake, her reaction was ever so slight. It was the perfect combo between
“I didn’t get hear what you said,” mixed with “How do I respond with grace and charm?”
In all fairness to me at the time, what I didn’t know was that this was a surprise baby shower.
Before you guess the number of family baby showers I have not been invited to since that fateful day, let me flip it to you. How do YOU keep things quiet, especially when it is really good news?
This is how this verse David writes of here in Psalm 107 should be taken. It is just so good no one should stop you. No one should silence you. The joy of the LORD you find when we’ve been locked and are now released is shout from the top of the roof excitement. The thrill of being lost and now found, of being burdened and now lightened? Yea. No one keeps quiet on that.
And no one should.
That’s David’s point. The psalm opens with an instruction to the people to give thanks to God because God, in goodness and steadfast love (hesed), has redeemed them from the hand of the oppressor and gathered them in “from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south.” Truly, they’ve returned redeemed from all points of the compass.
These words would have been particularly poignant to the people of Jerusalem in the postexilic period. After fifty years of captivity in Babylon, they had indeed been “gathered in” by God to their ancestral home. Party time! Who can keep quiet on this? Why keep quiet on this?
I get that we get a little (or a lot) weirded out with the street preacher yelling what seems to us like nonsensical stuff, and maybe some of that passion can be thought through or channeled better, but when the LORD has redeemed you, can you really stay quiet?
The answer is no, you cannot stay silent. You cannot stay still.
When you are redeemed, you begin to do the craziest things in the name of the boldest love you’ve ever known—God’s love. You begin to seek out and then say the wildest things you’ve ever said because you know God’s love.
If you are not speaking out, maybe you need to look at a hard truth—that you have not yet been redeemed. Even the redeemed live with sin; none of us are sin-free; but if you still hit that same hard wall, if you still hate, or if you still let your broken past guide your present—and you want a change—meet God. Give Him your sins, your hot mess, your train wreck. God can do what you cannot, and that is save you.
The Redeemed make this clear: they don’t want a Savior each day; they need a Savior each day.
PRAYER: Redeem me each day, Lord. I need this. Oh, and let me speak out about this redemption. Amen.
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