Today’s psalm inspired two main questions: What are our pictures of God? What is the nature of prayer?

Mark Twain quipped that God made man in God’s image and that man was quick to return the favor - by “making” God in man’s image. And C.S. Lewis wrote that we must be ever open to new pictures of God, so that the ones with which we’re most comfortable don’t become our idols. Psalm 65 presents God as “visiting” the earth (in a chariot or wagon!), watering and enriching the soil, and providing a bountiful harvest. Nature responds to God’s goodness (Psalm 65:12-13): “The pastures of the wilderness drip, the hills gird themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain, they shout and sing together for joy.”

In the opening verses of Psalm 65, David notes that all of us have sinned and that all of us must approach God in order to be healed of our sin. And we must be diligent in paying our vows to God. In David’s time, a common prayer practice (one that mirrored the economic norms of the culture) was to barter with God: You, God, answer my prayer, and I’ll make a sacrifice in the temple.

What are OUR pictures or models of prayer? Is prayer a bargaining process? Does “covenant” necessarily imply an if-then (if you do this, then I’ll do that) relationship? Could we describe prayer as a conversation - or as an expression (like that of the meadows, hills, and valleys in the verses above)? Are WE part of God’s “expression”?

Paul called the Corinthians his “letter of recommendation” and “a letter from Christ . . . written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on the tablets of human hearts” (2 Corinthians 3:2-3). Perhaps, then, prayer is our listening to God, so that we may convey what God would want us to convey, so that we may express to others what God would want others to know - not in an academic sense, but in such a manner that others would “hear” as our lives “speak” of God’s abundant generosity and love.