Psalm 31: The Song of Crisis
The Psalms meet a variety of needs beyond just the experiences of the authors. When we hear someone tell their story, there are elements that don’t match our experiences but still resonate with us on a deeper level. In the Psalms, we find fellow human beings who, like us, are in the midst of crisis […]
Psalm 30: The Song of Dancing
The Psalms teach us to be storytellers. They invite us to tell our individual stories to the corporate people of God so that they may learn from our mistakes, rejoice in our victories, and ultimately praise the goodness and mercy of God in all of our lives.
Psalm 29: The Song of the Storm
The Psalms present nature – even natural disasters – as part of God’s creation and under God’s rule. The natural world serves the Creator and his purposes, and the heavens declare his power, his sovereignty, and his majesty.
Psalm 28: The Song of the Strong Sanctuary
The Psalms are pledges of allegiance to God. They are declarations of our desire to be aligned with God and no one else. When the world says, “I reject God,” the psalms give us language to plant our flag in the ground and say, “I am his, and he is mine. I belong to the […]
Psalm 27: The Song of the Secure Sanctuary
The Psalms find no contradiction between confidence and crisis. We sometimes believe we can only have one or the other, either entirely trusting or entirely doubting. But in the Psalms, we find hints of lament even in praise and seeds of faith even in darkest days.
Psalm 26: The Song of the Steady Sanctuary
The Psalms assume that we are praying to the God who already knows our prayers. He sees everything truly as it is, and because our vision is often flawed and distorted, we run to God for reality. He makes the final verdict. He is our standard of truth.
Psalm 25: The Song of Alphabetical Trust
The Psalms are teachers. They broaden our minds as we, the students, sit at our desks and study these carefully crafted prayers. The Psalms educate us with all the support, structure, and challenge that a good classroom demands. They invite us to learn how to talk with God.
Psalm 24: The Song of the King of Glory
The Psalms are poems of ancient Israel, and they involve themes and categories that we in our modern time might not understand, concepts like the temple and purification. But this rich context of the past, Old Testament people of God is an invitation to know more about the God of the Bible who never changes.
Psalm 23: The Song of the Shepherd and Host
The Psalms are well-known and beloved by many people, and certain psalms have a resonance in our souls because we have heard them often and perhaps even memorized parts of them. And yet familiar psalms can become wondrously strange to us when we study them anew and come out the other side with a deeper […]
Psalm 22: The Song of the Forsaken
The Psalms are inherently communal, which is sometimes surprising given that some psalmists describe their intense loneliness. The Psalms give words to our isolation, but we must not forget that these are also corporate songs for the community of God’s people. It’s one thing to sing a lament alone; it’s another thing to sing a […]