Sense

“You made me; you created me.
 Now give me the sense to follow your commands.”
Psalm 119:73 NLT

This is an important verse from the Psalmist. He is saying that to fully maximise the potential of God’s creation, we need to engage something he called “sense”. But if God created us, why didn’t He put within us the sense-quality to do things His way? Then we wouldn’t have to pray our psalmist’s prayer – we would be sensible intuitively. Imagine a world where every human being knows who God is, knows all about His laws, and has the built-in sense to follow them, not even needing to think that by doing so they are aligning their lives to God’s ways. 

So why didn’t God put within His created beings an organ, companion to the liver and kidneys, called “sense”? An organ that will play up painfully should we violate its designed purposes. An organ that secretes a wonderful enzyme that automatically aligns us to God’s ways, countering the ways of “non-sense”. Is there a bug in the design and build of human beings? Of course not. Our loving Heavenly Father created us with something called “free will”. We have the opportunity to make choices and nothing pleases our Heavenly Dad more than for His children to praise and worship Him and choose to follow His ways. He created within us a God-shaped hole, so that His creation would know Him and fill it with His presence. Now that’s sense. So He didn’t need to create our imaginary “sense” organ. 

Of course there is a dark side, for people without sense. People who have rejected God and don’t give a hoot about following His commands. They fill their God-shaped hole with counterfeit “gods”, of material things, of the trappings of debauchery. And they stagger through life, increasingly lurching down the spiral that leads to a God-less eternity. So let’s get hold of this verse. Repeat it. Meditate upon it. And pray this simple prayer – “Please, God, give me the sense to do things Your way rather than doing things my way. Amen.”