Bless the Lord, O My Soul

The gap between waking and praying is about twenty-five minutes for him and it is the hardest twenty-five minutes of his day.

He gets up. He is not lazy; he is up before most people. He puts the kettle on and stands in the kitchen in the dark and there is a chair in the other room where he has prayed for eleven years, and every single morning he has a small negotiation with himself about whether he is going to sit in it.

He usually does. That is what makes it strange. It is not that he does not pray. It is that he has to be talked into it every single day by a version of himself that is barely awake and not particularly persuasive.

The internal conversation is roughly this. You should. I know. You will feel better. That is not the point. It has been three days and you know what happens when it gets to a week. I know.

And then he sits down, and it is fine, and it is often better than fine.

But he is fifty-one years old and he has been doing this for eleven years and he has noticed that the effort has never once got easier, and he has quietly concluded that this is what it is like to be a man with a lukewarm heart. He would not say that out loud. It sits in him like a diagnosis he has given himself and never had checked.

The psalm speaks to the wrong person first

Here is something nobody points out about the psalm, and once you have seen it you cannot unsee it.

Bless the LORD, O my soul. O LORD my God, thou art very great (Psalm 104:1).

Read the first four words again and look at who is being addressed.

Not God. The psalmist's own soul. He turns around and speaks to himself, out loud, by name, and tells his own interior to get up and bless God. Only after that does he turn and speak to God at all.

He does exactly the same thing in Psalm 103. Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.

That is a man who woke up flat and knew it, and did not wait to feel different, and did not conclude he had a lukewarm heart. He spoke to his own soul first.

You have been given the authority to speak to your own interior and tell it what to do. The word models it twice in two psalms and does it without apology, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that spoken instruction more than self-talk, because Scripture says the word of God is living and active and divides even between soul and spirit (Hebrews 4:12).

What you have been calling lukewarm

Now I want to take a diagnosis off you, because you have been wearing it for eleven years and nobody ever gave it to you but you.

You have concluded that the effort proves something about your heart. That a man who genuinely loved God would not have to be talked into a chair.

But look at what you have actually done. Eleven years. Most mornings. Through seasons where nothing was happening and seasons where things were. Nobody watching, nobody checking, no reward except the thing itself. That is not the profile of a lukewarm man. That is the profile of a faithful one who happens to wake up flat, which is a description of temperament rather than of love.

You are not lukewarm, and the resistance in the morning has never once been a verdict on your heart. The word says a bruised reed He will not break and smoking flax He will not quench (Isaiah 42:3), which is God's own assessment of the person who is barely going, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as helping our weakness rather than grading it.

The soul does not lead. It follows.

Here is the mechanic, and it is a practical one.

Your soul, in the Bible's way of talking, is your interior life: the mind, the feelings, the appetites, the thing that wakes up flat. It is not the highest part of you and it was never designed to lead. It follows whatever is spoken to it with authority, which is why it follows the news, and the weather, and the first thought that arrives at six in the morning.

What the psalmist does is get in first. He speaks to his soul before anything else does, and he tells it a true thing, and the soul, which follows, follows.

That is not a mood trick. It is the created order of a human being being used correctly.

You have a voice and your soul has ears, and the morning does not have to speak first. Scripture says death and life are in the power of the tongue (Proverbs 18:21), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a sentence spoken in a dark kitchen into something a body actually obeys.

And I will be straight with you, because you would spot it otherwise. Doing this does not mean the flatness goes. Some mornings you will speak to your soul and your soul will take twenty minutes to catch up, and that is not failure. What is settled is that you are not waiting to feel like praying before you begin, and a man who leads his own morning is in a different position from a man who negotiates with it.