Last week, I started a new, 4-part blog series walking through the Scripture readings from my wedding. You can also read Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4.
After our first Scripture reading, we prayed together as a congregation Psalm 67:
May God be merciful to us and bless us,
show us the light of his countenance and come to us.
Let your ways be known upon earth,
your saving health among all nations.
Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you.
Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,
for you judge the peoples with equity
and guide all the nations upon earth.
Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you.
The earth has brought forth her increase;
may God, our own God, give us his
blessing.
May God give us his blessing,
and may all the ends of the earth stand in
awe of him.
When we prayed this Psalm at our wedding, the meaning felt obvious to me. We were requesting God to look with favor on our marriage and, as we turn to Him, to grant us success as we work to build a life together.
A couple of weeks after our wedding, we met with a couple who mentored me during my teenage years. They had not met Anna before. They spent time listening to her story and our relationship, the questions we were asking, and the plans we were deliberating for our lives. Then they posed a question to us. They said, “When we were first married, one of the things that helped us make decisions for our lives was to ask ourselves, what does success look like to us? It showed us what we valued so we could make decisions that aligned with our vision of success. What does success look like to you?"
I still do not know how to answer that question for myself, let alone how we can answer that question together. When we asked for God’s blessing at our wedding, what were we really asking? The entire Bible lays rest to the naive view that He wants to make us happy, healthy, and wealthy. If that were the case, He certainly does not seem to favor most heroes of the Bible. Instead, He seems more interested in bringing people into the fullness of His life, despite their circumstances, and transforming even the worst of circumstances into opportunities for others to encounter His love. If I am to answer the question of what success looks like for us, it has to go deeper than easy material metrics such as career achievements and financial goals.
The sketch of an answer is there in Psalm 67, as plain as the opening request for God’s blessing. It is for God to be present to us and for the entire world to turn to God in praise. The Psalmist speaks of all nations knowing God and of people praising Him with joy in the context of asking for blessing. What does success look like for us? The starting point for answering that question is a life that is open to the presence of God and opens others around us to turn to God in praise. We still have to make it more concrete than that. We will have to ask how our individual dreams, skills, and personalities combine, so that together, we can reflect who God is to those around us so that they can encounter His love.
Each individual, married couple, and family unit has its own answer to the question, “What does success look like?" The concrete answer will be as varied as the human race. But Psalm 67 gives us a direction for our answers. Success is a life open to God's presence and for the world around us to turn to God in praise.
His blessing is found in the person and work of Jesus, whose death was for all nations. Even at His death, the proclamation that He was King was proclaimed to all nations in the sign on His cross, written in Aramaic, Greek, and Latin so all could understand it. God’s justice and peace come to the world through Jesus’ death for sin and through His resurrection. By faith, we have already received that blessing. The question is, how do we live as people who have that blessing and share that blessing with others?
So how exactly does this play out in my life and my marriage with Anna?
We are still asking that question.
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