Tag: psalmist

Inventory

Re: Verse reading–1 Samuel 16:1-7; Psalm 139 (day three)

“Do I not hate those who hate you, Lord?” The hardest type of leadership is self-leadership, experts conclude.  You don’t say.  “If only you, God, would slay the wicked!”  That comes easy enough.  Then, a sobering turn: If God is everywhere, he is surely privy to one’s innermost thoughts.  What if those innermost thoughts harbor malice, greed, dishonesty?  Has the psalmist just condemned himself?  He realizes the high probability that his own heart shares the same traits as the hearts of the people he has asked the Lord to annihilate.  Self-leadership demands a fierce moral inventory: God, search me, test me, see me, lead me.  We will never preach God’s forgiveness without the poison of arrogance until we have humbled ourselves enough to become the forgiven.

Ecstatic Joy

Fifteenth Day of Advent

Psalm 89:1-4 (Message)

1-4 Your love, God, is my song, and I’ll sing it!
I’m forever telling everyone how faithful you are.
I’ll never quit telling the story of your love—
how you built the cosmos
and guaranteed everything in it.
Your love has always been our lives’ foundation,
your fidelity has been the roof over our world.
You once said, “I joined forces with my chosen leader,
I pledged my word to my servant, David, saying,
‘Everyone descending from you is guaranteed life;
I’ll make your rule as solid and lasting as rock.’”

“I have made a covenant with my chosen one…” Psalm 89:3

“Jesus Christ is the object of everything, and the center to which everything tends. Whoever knows him knows the reason for everything.” –Blaise Pascal

“I’ll rise and fall with you, ’cause you can’t fail me now.” –Joe Henry

There are and will come again times in our lives when we’re stricken with a suffering that we can’t surmount. These trials don’t exist in vacuums: they always pull back the curtain to reveal our ever-present and profound dissatisfaction with the world and ourselves. The psalmists are certainly no strangers to this, and they groan under their imperfections while waiting for God to fulfill His climactic promise to their people. Yet, in the midst of their agonized waiting, they also can ecstatically rejoice in the love of God. As Psalm 89 shows us, this is because they cling to the words of God’s promise, Whom He will reveal as Jesus, His divine Word made flesh. Christ, through His own sorrows, transfigures the psalmist’s earthly pain into heavenly joy, and He does exactly the same for us. By inviting us into his life, Christ also invites us into His suffering so that He can freely lead us into His happiness. Right now He is waiting to transform our tears into glories. Let us wait in faith and love with Him, so that we might fully know Him.

Garner Richardson

Re: Verse reading – John 3:1-21

Prone

Re: Verse reading–Psalm 119:9-16; Acts 17:10-12; 2 Timothy 3:14-17 (Day Three)
“Do not let me stray from your commands.”  Songs don’t get much darker than this old hymn’s take on the fallen human condition: “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.”  That song gets it, and the psalmist knew it to be true long before that: The spirit might be willing, but the flesh is weaker than we thought.  Sometimes, we’d rather sin than breathe.  Our weakened selves need the words of scripture to brace us, to allow us to stand and take faltering steps Christward.  Read, read.

Majestic

Re:Verse reading–Psalm 8 (day four)
Have you ever stood out in the country, or better yet, on top of a mountain and looked up into the vast night sky?  The stars…the Milky Way…the constellations…the universe… stretched before you from east to west, north to south?  I have.  The pictures are etched into my memory.  I can not only remember most every experience, I can remember the overwhelming feeling of grandeur.  It is Psalm 8 that immediately comes to mind when I have such an experience.  The majesty of the creation is but a small portion of the majesty of the Creator.  As we contemplate the glory of our Creator, the response of the Psalmist wells up inside us…’when I consider all of this, God, what is man that you are mindful of him?’  The focus of our worship must always be on the person of God.  The Psalmist started and ended this psalm in recognition of that…”O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

Worth

Re:Verse reading–Psalm 8 (day three)
“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place…”  Consider, then:  13.3 billion light-years away, a tiny galaxy (the rather clunkily-named MACS0647-JD) shines its light.  That light travels six trillion miles in one year, and even at that speed, it needs 13.3 billion years to reach earth.  The psalmist didn’t measure space like we do, but he knew: God’s heavens are immense enough that the human race would seem trivial by comparison.  And yet, God is mindful of us.  Jesus knew that our well-being depends on our knowledge of that mindfulness in this vast universe: “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?  Yet not one of them is forgotten by God…Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” (Luke 12:6-7)