We are in a season of life in which leaving the house is discouraged, socializing is discouraged, and, for some, work is discouraged. Happily, there are a bevy of technological opportunities wide open to us. Social media and Internet browsing and a myriad of digital options await us. With ordinary life on pause, the extraordinary life of digital intake is thrust upon us. I can almost hear It’s a Small World After All playing in the background as we lazily float through a digital technicolor dream-come-true.
With so much of our ordinary use of time discouraged, and some of our favorite uses of time suddenly encouraged, our hearts can feel divided.
In Psalm 86.11, which is a prayer, David says, “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; unite my heart to fear your name.”
When David prays to God that his heart would be united, what do you think he means? Perhaps we should ask, to what or to whom does David wish his heart to be united? Do you think that David is praying that his heart would be spiritually united to God? That sounds thoroughly appropriate, and even makes for a very holy-sounding prayer request, asking God to unite with Him in the context of gaining greater sense of fear or reverence.
This would be to miss what it is that David is actually asking God to do. In Psalm 86, David is most certainly praying that his heart would be united … to his heart. His heart is currently split apart. It is divided into two (or more) pieces and he is asking God to repair this division. David is unable to walk rightly before God, to walk in His truth, and the reason for this is that his heart is divided. His heart is, as Calvin says, “scattered about in fragments (Calvin 388).”
We might just as easily translate David’s prayer request as asking God to make his heart one. There is a “disquietude” within his heart such that it is “distracted and tossed ... as it fluctuates amidst its own affections,” even “full of tumult, drawn asunder.” When the heart is like this, walking in God’s truth is virtually impossible because walking in a straight line is impossible.
We are in an extraordinary time in which the disconnectedness of our own heart is enhanced. It isn’t as if all of our ordinary tasks, the things we cannot do right now, are good, while all of the alternatives are bad. However, we have a lot of time on our hands now that we didn’t have a few weeks ago. Some of this new unspent time can become for us fuel to split our hearts, to divide our affections. We do not want to use the changed circumstances as an excuse to further scatter our heart so that minutes on Facebook can become hours, or that we begin consuming Netflix one full season at a time. We are prone to be tossed to and fro (Ephesians 4.14), to waffle in uncertainty (James 1.6), to want what we don’t want (Romans 7.15). In this regard, the coronavirus may have placed us in not just a physically perilous time, but a spiritually perilous time as well.
David’s prayer in circumstances like this is that God would glue the scattered affections of his heart together in one piece so that he may walk in God’s truth and give thanks with his “whole heart” (Psalm 86.12). David knows this to be no easy task; nothing short of the very strength of God is able to do this (Psalm 86.16).
I think we are in a very appropriate season of life for me to recommend to you a unique little book by Dave Griffith-Jones called, Escaping Escapism. Dave Griffith-Jones is a young pastor at Saint Columba’s Church (on FB) in Hull, England. While he wrote this book in 2018, I think it is especially appropriate now. If you need additional encouragement, you can get a sense of the author’s heart in this interview with the author done by Union School of Theology in Wales. He readily admits that his besetting sin is escapism from the ordinary responsibilities. This is sometimes the result of fear, sometimes laziness, and sometimes wicked affections. He began a search through Scripture to find out if this propensity of escapism is addressed by God. This brought him to consider David’s own prayer of Psalm 86.
Let’s not float through this season of life with divided affections, using the new spare time as excuses to handicap our walk in truth before God. Rather, let’s ask Him to unite divided affections into a heart united to glorify Him and sing with Thomas Ken in “Awake, My Soul, and With the Sun,”
"Direct, control, suggest, this day,
All I design, or do, or say,
That all my powers, with all their might,
In Thy sole glory may unite."
