Whose Flag?

I am so excited about this new book by Christopher Ash! So far it has been a wonderful way to start the mornings as he takes the reader through a selection of the Psalms.

May we shout for joy over your victory and lift up our banners in the name of our God. 

May the Lord grant all your requests.

Psalm 20.5

Ash:

We, the king’s loyal people, rejoice not when our individual desires are satisfied but when our king is victorious! This is what causes us to “lift up our banners” (or, we might say, wave our flags). So this is a very different psalm from the individualistic, “me first” appropriation of the promises.... My default—and it will probably be yours too—is to rejoice, to wave my cheerful flag, when I do well, when I am victorious—when I do well in an exam or am praised by other people or get a good job or make a happy marriage, and so on. This psalm reshapes my desires so that I begin genuinely to care more about the victories of King Jesus than about my own success or failure. That is a wonderful but radical change!

The biggest existential challenge for us is to learn from these psalms to root our deepest desires in the victory of our King and to find our deepest joys when our King wins. By nature our strongest longings are for our own success, safety, or comfort, and so our joy is most felt when things have gone well for us (and it’s extinguished when those things are threatened or lost). But what truly matters most is the people of King Jesus: the worldwide inter-generational church of Jesus, his body, in whose persecutions he is persecuted (Acts 9:4) and in whose exaltation he is exalted. When going for a job interview, I am to pray, “Father, give Jesus what he wants today”. When taking an exam, I should ask, “Father, give Jesus the result he wants for me today”. When belonging to a local church, I ought to pray, “Father, may the yearnings of King Jesus’ heart be fulfilled in what happens in this church, even if it includes me being humbled and having a tough time”. Those will be radical prayers to pray. 

These psalms begin—just begin—to reshape our affections and desires, so that we long most deeply for the victory of Jesus, seen in the vindication of his people and ultimately in his return in glory, and so that we experience in our suffering a foretaste of the joy of our king’s final victory.