Day 22: Roll Your Way onto the Lord

If you want to find the right way in each situation and circumstance of life, you need God’s guidance. In this respect, we looked at God’s wonderful promise in Psalm 37:4:

"Delight yourself in the LORD and He will give you the desires of your heart." (NASB)

Now let's look at the promise that follows, Psalm 37:5:

"Commit your way to the LORD, trust also in Him, and He will do it." (NASB)

God will do it! However, in order to claim this promise, the first thing we need to do is an act: "Commit your way to the LORD." Committing is a single act that has to be performed just once.

Interestingly enough, the original Hebrew says literally, "roll your way on the LORD". Why do you think the psalmist says, "roll your way on the LORD"? Well, I have my particular answer to that question. It's based on experience.

At some point in my life, I was the principal of a college in East Africa for training African teachers. The principal of the college was everybody's servant. He had to do everything. If a tap leaked, he had to mend it. If there was a food shortage, he had to come up with food. One of the things I often had to do was go down into the local city and collect the food for our students, and one of their favourite items of diet was rice. So I would collect these big sacks of rice, each of which weighed 112 pounds, and bring them in my little station wagon to the door of the storehouse where the food was kept.

One of the things that I found it necessary to impress upon Africans who were being educated was that it's not undignified for an educated person to work with his hands, because they began to get the attitude that once they had been to school and college, then it was below their dignity to work with their hands. So I used to sometimes set them an example by helping them to unload these sacks of rice from the back of the station wagon. And I discovered that if a sack of rice was standing on the back of the station wagon, it wasn't difficult to get it out on my back and carry it into the storehouse. But what was difficult was to get it off my back again, because it was easy to injure your back if you made the wrong movement. That's why I learned about rolling my burden on the Lord. I discovered that instead of doing it rather slowly, I had to give a little quick jerk and roll that sack off my back in one movement, so that it stood up on its end on the floor beside me, and I became quite skilful at doing that.

Well then, I saw why the psalmist says, "roll your way upon the LORD", because the choosing of our way through life is like that 112-pound sack. It's too heavy for us to handle by ourselves; it's too big a decision and responsibility. So, the psalmist says, "Don't try to carry that sack. Just roll it off your back and leave it at the Lord's feet, and He'll take care of it." So that's the first phase, "Commit your way to the LORD" or "Roll your way onto the LORD".