Words for Worship

Re:Verse passage – Psalm 66:1-20 (day four)

The Psalms teach us how to worship and how to pray. They free us to pray in ways we aren’t used to, and they give language to emotions that are hard to put into words. When we pray the words of the Psalms, we’re using prayers of old to express ourselves to God, and we find they are just as relevant and poignant now as they were then.

In Psalm 66, we find a prayer that follows the journey of the Israelites, centering on the event of the Exodus. In the Exodus, we see that an all-powerful God is willing to hear the cries of his people and intervene on their behalf. The Psalmist recognizes that God allowed them to experience hardship, but it was a hardship that refined them as God’s people. They reflect on that refinement with joy because it ultimately led them to a place of abundance.

Though we didn’t experience the Exodus firsthand, these words still lead us to worship. When have you experienced God intervening on your behalf? When have you experienced a challenging time of God refining you, allowing you to go through hard things? How did that refinement make you more Christlike? How has God led you into abundance? As we reflect on these things, we’ll find that we come to the same conclusion as the Psalmist: we should make God’s praise glorious.