Il a Penché Son Oreille — The Ear Already Inclined

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Psalm Has Come a Third Time

The prayer Le has brought is Psalm 116 turned back into a prayer. A God who bends down to listen is verse 2, almost word for word.

And this is the third time that psalm has arrived in five weeks.

August 10 — James Smith preached from verse 4, unchosen.
August 24 — Le opened the psalm herself, at verse 1.
September 11 — it returns in someone else's words, in a devotional she picked up this morning.

Nobody arranged any of the three.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — What the Inclining Actually Looks Like

A God who bends down to listen. Il a penché son oreille vers moi.

The Hebrew verb means to stretch out, to bend, to tilt. And it is worth picturing literally, because the picture is the meaning.

You incline your ear when the person speaking is lower than you. A grandmother stooping to a child. Someone kneeling beside a bed to hear a sick man who cannot raise his voice. Nobody bends down to an equal.

So the posture admits the distance and closes it in the same movement. The prayer's own phrase is exactly right: never distant — not because the gap is small, but because He came down through it.

And David uses the same verb in Psalm 40, with the situation spelled out. He inclined to me, and heard my cry. He brought me up out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay. A man in a pit cannot be heard by anyone standing upright at the edge.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Request Has Already Been Answered

Now the one thing worth noticing about this prayer, and it is a comfort rather than a correction.

The prayer asks: I ask that you incline your ear to my prayer today.

The psalm it comes from says the inclining already happened. Because He has inclined His ear to me, therefore I will call upon Him as long as I live.

Read the logic of that sentence, because it runs the opposite way from how most people pray.

We tend to assume the order is: I call, and then He listens. The psalm says: He listened, and that is why I call. The inclining is the reason for the prayer, not the result of it.

Which means nothing this morning has to persuade Him to lean in. He is already leaning. The asking is not a request for attention — it is what a person does once they have discovered they have it.

This journal noted the same thing on the tenth of August, in the first line of the psalm. Not I love the Lord, therefore He hears me, but the reverse. The hearing came first, and the love is the answer to it.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Two Kinds of Noise

Quiet the noise around me and within me.

The prayer names two, and the second is the harder one. The noise around a person can be walked away from — a door closes, an engine stops, a road ends. The noise within travels.

Which is why this petition is honest. A quiet place does not produce a quiet heart, and everybody who has gone somewhere peaceful and found their own mind still running has proved it.

And the answer to it was read here on the fourteenth of August. The peace that garrisons the heart — phroureō, a soldier's word. Not a peace that depends on silence outside, but a wall posted around the inside.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Unsure of the Words

The prayer asks: when I am unsure of the words to say, look at the deep cries of my heart.

Romans 8 answers that petition, and the answer is larger than the request.

The prayer asks God to look past the missing words. Paul says the Spirit supplies them. L'Esprit lui-même intercède par des soupirs inexprimables. Groanings that cannot be put into words — and the Spirit is the one doing the groaning.

So the inarticulate prayer is not a lesser prayer that God graciously tolerates. It is the Spirit praying, and it reaches its destination exactly.

And note who is listening: He who searches the hearts. Celui qui sonde les cœurs.

That is the same verb Le met in Portuguese on the fifteenth of August, in Psalm 139. Sondar — to probe, to dig into, to examine the depths. The one being asked to look at the deep cries of a heart is already described as the one who digs into hearts for a living.

Which closes the loop entirely. The Spirit supplies the words from inside; the Father searches the heart and finds them there. The prayer never had to be articulate to arrive.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Phrase Is Isaiah's

The prayer asks for quiet confidence. Whoever wrote it may not have known, but that is Isaiah's phrase, almost exactly.

In quietness and confidence shall be your strength. C'est dans le calme et la confiance que sera votre force.

And the context is bracing. Isaiah is speaking to a nation in a crisis, who wanted to go down to Egypt for horses and chariots. The word came: your strength is not in the cavalry. It is in quietness and trust.

And the verse ends with the saddest four words in the chapter: but you would not.

Which is worth knowing, because it means quiet confidence is not a temperament some people are born with. It is something offered, and refusable. It was on the table for a whole nation and they preferred the horses.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Trust Your Timing

The prayer's last petition is strengthen my faith to trust your timing and your answers.

Le wrote that sentence herself five days ago, in her own words and about her own life. O Senhor decide o tempo. The timing belongs to the Holy Spirit.

She was talking about two books she had set down and would not pick up until the season was right. Today the same conviction arrives as a request in somebody else's prayer.

Which is the ordinary shape of how these things settle. A person says it once as a decision, and then keeps asking for the strength to keep meaning it. Convictions are not held by being stated. They are held by being renewed.

And it lands in a week of house-hunting, land, and builders' timelines. Trusting God's timing is an easy sentence in a settled month and a real one in this one.