585_Finding our contentment in Him (Psalm 131) Psalm 131 O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. 2 But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. 3 O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. A few years ago, a journalist interviewed an eighty–seven–year–old woman who had survived war, famine, and the loss of her family. She lived in a tiny room above a bakery, and owned very little. Yet her eyes sparkled with a joy that seemed almost unreasonable. The journalist finally asked, “How is it that you seem more at peace than people who have everything?” She smiled and said, “It’s very simple. Every morning I remind myself that I am not God. And every evening I thank Him that He is.” That comment may sound almost humorous at first, but it is profoundly true. So much of our anxiety, our striving, our dissatisfaction, comes from forgetting that we are creatures and not the Creator. We want answers to everything. We want control. We want life to fit into our understanding. But when we encounter God, one of the first things He calls us to is simple humility. Humility does not mean thinking less of ourselves in a negative way; it means recognizing who we are in relation to Him—finite, limited, beloved, and dependent. Finding contentment in Him begins right there. Psalm 131 is one of the shortest psalms in the Bible, just three verses, yet it opens a deep well of wisdom. David begins, “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high.” Before he talks about peace and contentment, he talks about posture—an inner attitude before God. He admits that he does not occupy himself “with things too great and too marvelous” for him. That is a startling statement, especially in our age of information where we believe we should know everything, master everything, and have an answer for everything. But David says: I’ve learned to stop reaching for what only God can understand. The Bible continually reminds us that God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. Pride was at the root of Lucifer’s downfall. Isaiah 14 describes his ambition in these haunting words: “I will ascend… I will set my throne on high… I will make myself like the Most High.” Pride is not just boasting; pride is the refusal to accept our creaturely place. It is the restless desire to be in control, to be central, to manage outcomes, to hold the steering wheel of life with white knuckles. Humility, by contrast, recognizes something essential: God is God, and we are not. Deuteronomy 29:29 says, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever.” In other words, there are things God wants us to know—real things, true things, life-giving things—about
