The Miry Bog

Whenever I read the 40th Psalm, I always remember the witness of a professor and Dean at Asbury College.  In those days we were required to attend chapel three mornings a week and there were attendance checkers in the balcony to make sure all the assigned seats were filled.  When this particular professor shared a personal witness and said, "The Lord lifted me out of the miry bog and planted my feet upon a rock,"  I did not know at the time he was quoting the 2nd verse of this Psalm.  It would be much later that I would come across this verse and remember that he was the one from whom I first heard it. 

 

Even though he was a Dean of a college and I was but a mere student, we had something in common.  We were both delivered by the power of Christ in our lives.  We both walked in the miry bog for a time in our lives and thought it to be how people were supposed to live.  And no matter how far we rise from our beginnings, no matter how much power others give to us, no matter how much of the world's goods we possess, we are never more than just a step away from the miry bog.  The only ones who fail to understand how close faithful life is lived to the miry bog are those who are still in it, or who have become prideful, self-sufficient, and too full of themselves.

 

Sometimes it has seemed that the rock upon which I been enabled to stand is such a small rock.  Sometimes it has seemed as slippery as a flat rock in a creek bed.  But, what I have come to learn over years of slipping in sin and being picked up again by grace is that is it not really such a small rock.  Actually, it is not a rock, but the Rock.  As the song goes, "On Christ the solid Rock I stand."  We only can fall when we look more at our agility and skill at walking than the Rock underneath our feet.