Open your Mouth Wide and I will Fill it

June 4, 2023 Download: Audio

Psalm 81

“Close your eyes and open your mouth.” Have you ever heard that phrase? So many times growing up my mother would call me into the kitchen and tell me to do this. Almost always it would lead to some tasty treat. As Christmas approached I could count on it being something sweet as my mother made lots of homemade cookies and candies at that time. Divinity and peanut brittle were annual reminders of the joy that was around the corner on Christmas day.

Of course, there were also those rare occasions when something quite unexpected hit the palate. One Christmas my mother was cooking something dark and thick on the stove. I had seen it passing through. So when she called us in to close our eyes and open our mouths, I knew what to expect. Before the spoon got to my mouth I could taste her mouth-watering homemade chocolate sauce. All that was missing was some vanilla ice cream. But when the sauce hit my tongue I pulled back so fast that some of the sauce fell to the floor. As you guessed, it wasn’t chocolate sauce. It was barbecue sauce—home-made barbecue sauce. It was marvelous. That is, when you’re not expecting it to be chocolate sauce.

It’s the unexpected encounters like this that make us hesitant when we here the invitation, “close your eyes and open your mouth.”

When it comes to your relationship with God we have an invitation like this. He is more than eager for you to taste life. We find it in this psalm in verse 10,

I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.

If only we could remember this. “Open your mouth wide and I will fill it.” That is the voice we want to hear. More than that, we need to hear it. It’s a pleading voice, not a demanding voice. It’s a voice filled with compassion, with love, and with power. It is a grand promise from the Lord for his people, and it is validated by the miraculous rescue from the land of Egypt.