Who Is Your Muse?

Maybe a better first question is — what is a muse?

A muse can be a person, a place, or a thing. Whatever it is, when you think deeply about it and sit with it long enough, it stirs something inside you. It moves you. It inspires you to act.

Think of a painter and his subject. He studies that person so carefully, so completely, that he can reproduce an exact likeness on the canvas. That subject — that muse — has become part of him.

David had a muse.

In Psalm 39:3, the prophet David wrote: "While I mused, the fire burned within me." He meditated. He turned things over in his heart and his mind. He sat with everything he felt God was speaking and doing in his life — and it set him on fire.

David had tapped into the reality of the living God. Not just a concept of God, not just a distant belief — but Jehovah God, the Creator of the universe, present and at work in his life right now. He didn't merely have faith that was the case. He knew it.

And the Word was his fuel.

Psalm 1:2 tells us that David meditated on God's law day and night. He wrote many of those very words by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit — and then he lived by them. God must have been as real to him as someone standing right in front of him.

There is a place where we can live, dwell, and exist in the presence of God where the scriptures don't just sit in our heads. They live in us. We have meditated on them, turned them over so many times in our heart, soul, and mind, that they become more real than our present circumstances. More real than the need we're facing right now.

That's where I want to be.

How about you?