My heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord both now and forevermore. (Psalm 131)   Psalm 131 connects with the psalm that comes before it, psalm 130, which is a cry from the depths of suffering that eventually resolves to wait in hope for the Lord—"more than watchmen wait for the morning."  Psalm 131 carries that hard-won resolve to wait in hope for the Lord on into the rest of life.  This picture of humility is childlike—but it's not the kind of humble trust that comes from a child.  It's a mature, adult form of humility before God, and it often only comes after long years of experience that lead one to return to that place of childlike submission to God.  It's a 2nd humility: a 2nd, much more experienced and determined form of childlike trust. As Eugene Peterson tells it, there are two sides to that childlike trust that the Psalmist highlights.  One is a check against uncontrolled pride and ambition, the other is a check against infantile dependency.     It is a check against uncontrolled pride and ambition because, we were not created to have it all.  We were created to live within limits.  Adam and Eve set their eyes on higher things of course, reaching for that which was not theirs to have.  They over-reached: trying to become like God, instead of submitting to God.  We do the same: trying to gain for ourselves the agency, the knowledge, the control, the resources, or the prestige of God, instead of submitting to God.  Or, trying to save ourselves and give ourselves our own identity, rather than accepting and submitting ourselves to our God-given identity as sons and daughters of God, loved and redeemed by His work in Jesus Christ and not our own.    In a few short words, the Psalmist tears down our Forbidden Fruit aspirations.  "My heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me."  Why?  Because that's your job.  Not mine. But, contested Adam Smith and other capitalists like him down through the centuries—without pride and the arrogance and ambition that it drives, won't we all just be lazy mooches?  Given to unhealthy dependency and sloth? Well, no.  Not in the Psalmist's perspective, and not in the perspective of the Christian tradition down through the ages either.  Without the prideful overreach for forbidden fruit—far from being sloths—Adam and Eve would've gotten on just fine with good and plentiful work to do, food enough, and living in the true paradise, with God—heaven on earth.  They would have been naked—stripped down quite literally to their truest human selves, and feeling no shame whatsoever in the presence of each other, or a Holy God.  There is a place between the sin of pride and the sin of sloth.  And it is healthy, Christian humility.  The place of childlike trust.  Instead of reaching to take on God's work ourselves, the Psalmist says: I have calmed and quieted myself.  I'm like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child, I am content.    That's the idea of the Psalm.  Israel is to put their hope in the Lord because He is the one who provides all that is needful: salvation, identity, provision.  All of these are given as good gifts of the Lord.  Actually it is only he that can give these gifts—even our best attempts fall short, because we are not God.  Only He is.  So the psalm's invitation: put your hope in the Lord.  

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