What do you hope for? When you let your mind drift on the seas of your longings, where does it go?
Here’s an even more important question: What do you hope in? When you consider the things you most want, how do you imagine achieving them? Hard work? Wise maneuvering? Winning the lottery?
Read More hope, dependence, worshipEvil is real. A few minutes of CNN provide ample evidence that there are people on this planet who take pleasure in destruction.
While no one is without sin (1 John 1:8), Psalm 36 describes a special breed of sinner. The “wicked” surrender themselves to sin, dismissing any claim God has on their lives. For them, evil morphs from temptation to obsession – “sin is all they think about,” day and especially night.
Read More evil, trust, goodnessIt’s one thing to endure hardship for a season. It’s quite another thing to suffer interminably, to languish at the miserable intersection of chronic pain and diminished hope.
Psalm 39 is a lament for the Sufferer who has endured too much for too long. It’s a prayer for the Pray-er who suspects her cries to the heavens are really just shouts into the void. It’s a liturgy for the Bewildered; a hymn for the Seemingly-Forsaken.
Read More suffering, prayer, perseverance, bewildermentWhere many psalms express human praise and petition, Psalm 50 articulates God’s perspective. He arrives in a storm cloud to assess the “State of the Union” with his covenant people. Not all is well.
Many of the Israelites are relying on the rituals of sacrifice, less as an expression of real relationship than as a system of attempted bribes.
Read More sacrifice, thankfulness, feastIn his book The Shattered Lantern, Ronald Rolheiser observes that many people suffer from a kind of functional agnosticism. Even those who profess to believe in God may struggle to detect, perceive and experience his presence.
Rolheiser examines cultural conditions that are decreasing our capacity to “imagine or feel God’s existence.”
Read More wisdom, morality, foolishnessHave you ever given everything to fighting a battle, only to be ambushed by an unexpected attack from a different source?
Scholars link Psalm 60 to a series of military campaigns described in 2 Samuel 8. But where the Samuel passage has a victorious tone, Psalm 60 seems to have been written at a particularly desperate moment.
Read More victory, defeat, confusion, trustIf you had to diagram history, what would you draw? Endless circles – history repeating itself? Or a line snaking downward as the human gift for technology intertwines with the human appetite for destruction?
The map drawn in Psalm 75 follows a different trajectory than any we might sketch based on current events.
Read More judgment, promise, timingIt’s natural to hum God Save the King when Psalm 20 is read. The prayer – written by King David for King David – was offered up so often at the outset of battles that it became a national anthem. It expresses the petitions of Israel’s soldiers and citizens, who ask God to grant victory to their king.
Psalm 20 places certain demands on present-day readers. It asks us to examine, first, how we respond to crises.
Read More prayer, worshipThis passage opens a four-psalm symphony of jubilant thanksgiving. Praise has been waiting in slumber (v 1, NIV), and it’s up to God’s people to awaken it and stir it into song. Psalm 65 offers a poetic list of reasons why praise is due.
First, the psalmist reminds the people that they vowed to offer God their thanksgiving if he would deliver them (v 1).
Read More worship, praise, thanksgivingAs a worship leader, I instinctually change the “I” and “me” pronouns in praise lyrics to “us” and “we.” After all, corporate worship is a group activity. At the same time, our personal (and often private) experience is frequently where our praise can and must begin. How do we include both the personal and the collective in our worship?
Psalm 66 is a breathtaking hymn of praise written in response to answered prayer.
Read More praise, corporate worship