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Oct 05, 2024 18:00pm

Set Your Aim!

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“Incline my heart to Your testimonies and not to dishonest gain.” Psalm 119:36

I have been honored to be a part of all three of our children’s education through homeschooling, either partly or all through school. As our older children grew and their windows slowly closed for “playtime” as often, I found I had more free time with our youngest son outside of teaching. We spent countless hours playing with figures, creating imaginary worlds and pushing the creative parts of my brain to once again find itself in our play, building towers with blocks to set figures atop and shoot down with our Nerf guns, tossing a ball and counting until we dropped it, trying to beat our highest scores, racing toy cars down numerous hallways and around designs in rugs, and so many other fun things grown-ups don’t normally get to do. 🙂

One of our favorite things to do together was to create “tracks” using pieces of his old train track, books, and whatever we could find to create an acceptable and well-performing path and race our cars down the inclines to see who could speed to the end first. Often, my car would leave the track on its way, interrupted by the catches in our created paths.

I was doing a Bible study, and the speaker gave a model prayer to use to prepare our hearts before facing any difficult situation or even when readying our hearts to pray over a problem or decision. As part of the model, the speaker encouraged us to pray Psalm 119:36. In my mind, this verse initially brought back thoughts of our race tracks and the incline they gave our cars as they raced to the bottom. I wanted to know what those words really intended, so I pulled out my dusty Strong’s Concordance and set to work.

Side note: I am not a seminary-trained concordance user, just a geek about words who likes to dabble in such things…so take this interpretation as one of an untrained and curious seeker. I suggest you always read everything with a prayerful heart, asking the Holy Spirit to reveal the truth and give you discernment.

Back to my study…’ Incline’ comes from the Hebrew word ‘Nata’. It can mean to bow down, turn, cause to yield. ‘Testimonies’ comes from the Hebrew word, ‘eduwth’, which (as far as I can tell) comes from the words ‘ayd’ and ‘uwd’, which has several possible meanings similar to “to encompass or earnestly lift up.” The term at the end (dishonest gain) was a little more difficult for me to nail down, mostly because I saw so many variations of the term in different translations. It seems it comes from the Hebrew word ‘besa’ or ‘betsa’. This term usually refers to “plunder, to finish, to stop, to covet, given to flesh, or greedy.”

I came out of my word dive with a prayer that goes something like:

Dear God, Yield my heart to whatever would earnestly lift You up, not just to end the hard things I am bringing before You or an ending that gives me what I covet.

Just like our little cars would fly down our tracks toward wherever they were aimed, God wants our prayers and our hearts to be aimed at His will, whatever brings the most good for His people and glory to Him, not just what we consider the more favorable answer to our prayers.