Open Your Mouth Wide
Sometimes while reading Scripture it seems as though it leaps off the page at you. That’s what happened for me this morning as I was reading Psalm 81. This is a familiar psalm for me, but this morning the heart and character of God shone through this psalm with the brightness of the sun.
1 Sing aloud to God our strength;
shout for joy to the God of Jacob!
2 Raise a song; sound the tambourine,
the sweet lyre with the harp.
3 Blow the trumpet at the new moon,
at the full moon, on our feast day.
4 For it is a statute for Israel,
a rule of the God of Jacob.
5 He made it a decree in Joseph
when he went out over the land of Egypt.
I hear a language I had not known:
6 “I relieved your shoulder of the burden;
your hands were freed from the basket.
7 In distress you called, and I delivered you;
I answered you in the secret place of thunder;
I tested you at the waters of Meribah. Selah
8 Hear, O my people, while I admonish you!
O Israel, if you would but listen to me!
9 There shall be no strange god among you;
you shall not bow down to a foreign god.
10 I am the Lord your God,
who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.
Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.
11 “But my people did not listen to my voice;
Israel would not submit to me.
12 So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts,
to follow their own counsels.
13 Oh, that my people would listen to me,
that Israel would walk in my ways!
14 I would soon subdue their enemies
and turn my hand against their foes.
15 Those who hate the Lord would cringe toward him,
and their fate would last forever.
16 But he would feed you with the finest of the wheat,
and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.”
As you read through that psalm - what leapt off the page for you? We see that it begins with a call to give God great praise. God has delivered his people from slavery, from bondage. The allusion is to the exodus, and for believers today there is a greater picture - our redemption from slavery to sin. But what it shows is God responds to our pleas, to our cries. And then when we see verses 8 & 9, God’s heart admonishes and warns his people of danger - specifically of the danger of foreign gods, of idols that we bow down to and to whom we give our allegiance.
And then the folly of that turning to false gods is shown so clearly in verse 10. The image is of baby birds opening their mouths wide as can be for their mother to feed them with everything they need. God is saying to his people - “Simply open up…come to me…and I will fill you with all you need.” Can you hear the words of Jesus in Matthew 11:28-30? What about Psalm 23:5 or John 15:11 or Ephesians 3:14-19?
Yet the Lord will let us suffer in our poor choices to help us to see our own folly. Yet he longs for us to choose the path of blessing, the path of abundance. He is the God who longs to bless us (see v. 16).
Oh may we hear the heart of our God! May we hear the delight he has in his children and how he delights (yes…delights) to care for us and to provide us with abundant blessings. His grace is magnificent. And those blessings are most clearly and gloriously shown to us in Christ Jesus our Lord. Let us open our mouths wide and be filled with the goodness of our God!!
Two songs this morning. The first is Good and Gracious King by CityAlight. Beautiful words. The second is from The Gray Havens - Storehouse. (Here’s a little information about the song)