Psalm 31:24 Be strong and take heart,
    all you who hope in the Lord.

It is significant that David so often encourages others to trust God. There are three major reasons to write things like this Psalm. The first is simple emotional catharsis, personal satisfaction in expressing feelings and experiences. Some poetry that gets published seems to be just this, ending up as a kind of emotional diarrhea. The second, for a person of faith, is to give thanks and praise to God. The third is to encourage the reader, or the hearer, just as this verse does. It is significant that David wasn’t satisfied simply to know God himself, he wanted others to know and trust Him too. Even in prose writing, if there is no emotion behind it, it quickly becomes stale and uninteresting. We don’t often read a technical manual or a legal paper simply for enjoyment! The motive of giving thanks and praise to God is certainly a limited subset, but even those with that intention have varying degrees of success at it. However, the intent to encourage applies very broadly. It can come across as pride, “Be like me,” but if there is humility, it becomes, “If I can do this, you can too.” That’s when it becomes uplifting. David composed his Psalms for all three of these reasons. In reading them we need to recognize, and perhaps identify with, his emotions, and join with Him in praising the God who saved him, but we should not fail to receive encouragement, that the God who was gracious to David will be gracious to us as well.

This is very timely for me, since I am in the process of writing my autobiography. I need to be emotionally involved, so that my readers will likewise become involved in what I’ve written, but my major motive is the second one, of praising God for His grace to me. I don’t want it to be an account of all that I have done, but rather of what God has done involving me, often in spite of me. That said, I do want what I write to be an encouragement to others to trust God themselves, to seek Him with their whole heart and discover His all-sufficient magnificence. As someone with Teacher gifting I sometimes tend to present facts, cut and dried, expecting those facts to change people, but that seldom works. I need to bare my heart so that others too may discover that God loves them as they are, but He doesn’t leave them as they are. I have changed in even more ways than I know over my so far 76 years, but I am still who God created me to be, and I want to encourage others that God wants to and will do the same for them, if they will yield themselves to Him.

Father, thank You for this clear reminder. My schedule looks rather free for the next couple of weeks. Help me get back into writing what You have told me to write, so that all of Your purposes for the words You pour through me may be fulfilled, drawing many into genuine discipleship, for their great blessing and Your glory. Thank You Hallelujah!