Psalm 44:8-9,17
8  In God we have boasted continually,
and we will give thanks to your name forever.
Selah
9 But you have rejected us and disgraced us
and have not gone out with our armies.
17  All this has come upon us,
though we have not forgotten you,
and we have not been false to your covenant.
 
If you have ever thought about what attracts you to anyone, it can be boiled down to them boasting about you.  Them making much of you, magnifying you in a way that says with action, “you are loved, you are important, or you are appreciated”.  Yet what keeps you attracted when the things you once boasted about, become “blurred” with things you don’t like?
Most, if not all marital relationships begin with attraction of some kind.  That attraction expressed makes anyone feel good about themselves.  But most married couples know that a covenant cannot grow and be secured by “mere attraction”.  It most grow from the things we once boasted about, to what covenant is about, faithfulness.
This is important, because none of us can promise to remain attractive to another person.  We may try, but life has a way of causing us to lose physical attributes, as well as mental attributes, that may have attracted them in the beginning, but no longer “hold weight”.  So it must go deeper than accentuating the things about us, that were once worthy of boasting and finding our confidence in…
David in this Psalm expresses how great God has been to them, and it has caused them to boast in His grace and mercy.  But God eventually “stepped back” from them, and allowed them to be defeated and disgraced, or no longer “the boast” before other nations.  Here David reveals how much the relationship with God is not about us being boasted about, but about our faithfulness to His covenant in victory and humiliation…
Are you struggling to find faith in God because you feel the Lord has left you to be “disgraced”?  Or you no longer feel like you have anything “naturally” to be confident in?  God disrupts or “steps back” from us to teach us faithfulness in covenant, even when the relationship seems unattractive or “boast worthy.”  David proves that he understands that a relationship with God (or anyone else), is about making much of Him through all seasons of life, by remaining faithful to His covenant. Always looking to make us more like Jesus Christ.
In His Love, Ld