Psalm 81:10 (NIV)
I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth and I will fill it.
Dr. Danny Lotz married into a rather well-known family. After winning a national championship in basketball at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1957, he went on to dental school and then joined the Air Force. Three months before his discharge he met his wife, Anne Graham. He was already familiar with her father – Dr. Billy Graham – and Danny married Anne on September 2, 1966. Dr. Lotz had a rather odd passage of scripture hanging on the wall in his examination room at the dental practice, where he somehow managed to maneuver his large basketball hands into people’s mouths to help them with their dental needs. The sign simply read:
“Open wide your mouth and I will fill it.”
Can you imagine? The guy was a giant of a man with an imposing physical presence. His first-time clients must have been a bit nervous. Danny became a dear friend of mine years later, and he went to be with the Lord in 2015…but God used today’s passage to open the door for the gospel in that dental office time and time again. It seems that Danny had learned to open his own mouth wide…and God certainly had filled it.
This psalm takes a walk down memory lane for God’s chosen people, Israel, and was read in public during various festivals and feast days. This particular passage (v. 10) was a reminder of God’s deliverance from the oppression of their Egyptian slavery and referenced how He had provided for their needs time and time again…and abundantly. Spurgeon’s commentary remarks that, “Because he had brought them out of Egypt he could do great things for them. He had proved his power and his good will; it remained only for his people to believe in him and ask large things of him. If their expectations were enlarged to the utmost degree, they could not exceed the bounty of the Lord. Little birds in the nest open their mouths widely enough, and perhaps the parent birds fail to fill them, but it will never be so with our God. His treasures of grace are inexhaustible.”
This passage shows us that whenever we open up our lives to God, He can and will fill them. We do this when we have a sense of need…when we petition God for large things…when we pray and worship in a way that acknowledges his immensity…and when we pray based on Jesus’ merits, rather than our own. Baby birds don’t put in a request for certain types of food before each feeding. They simply open up their mouths and expect to be fed. Unlike us, a baby bird does not have the ability to question the worthiness of the provision – it simply receives and is satisfied.
Spurgeon quipped that, “Our cup is small, and we blame the fountain.” How easy it is to put conditions on God’s provision and then complain when He gives us food that we don’t like but is for our greater good. We are small-minded people that can’t see over the next hill and act as if our timetables should be relevant to God. His ways are not our ways (Is. 5:8-9) and we should be grateful for that, to say the least. If you know Christ as Savior, then you have already been delivered up out of a fate far worse than Egyptian slavery. The God that would go to a bloody cross from sinners like you and I (Rom. 5:8) can be trusted to provide for our daily needs. We need to just open wide our mouths in prayer and praise and wait for the Lord to fill them with things far greater than what we would choose for ourselves.
