Psalm 16  As I read this psalm there were three verses where David’s words were also my words of praise.  I prayed/praised them right back to the LORD.  Why don’t you go ahead and do the same.  “You are my Lord; apart from You I have no good thing.  Lord You have assigned me my portion and my cup; You have made my…

Remember a few weeks ago when we were studying Leviticus; we learned the principle: “Not all scripture is written to us but all scripture is written for us.”  Psalm 45, for me, is a great example of this.  The psalm is a Hebrew wedding song, written at a specific time for a specific purpose.  As I read it this morning I remembered the above principle and wrote these…

Psalm 73 We pick right up with the same theme as yesterday: “the wicked are prospering.”  It didn’t make sense!  But then we come to verses 16 & 17 “When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me till I entered the sanctuary of God…”  When I read/pray these verses I replace “sanctuary of God” with “Your presence.” (For the Old Testament…

There seems to be a theme which runs through two of today’s psalms, Psalm 12 & 102.  I would summarize it like this, “Sometimes life doesn’t seem fair.  The ‘godly suffer’ and are in great distress and it seems like those who oppose God and His people prosper.”  It’s a timeless theme, one which we see happening in our days in international…

For those of us who have been blessed with Christian parents and grandparents who brought us up in the church and nurtured our hearts to be open to Jesus at an early age Psalm 71:5-6 and 17a are our grateful testimony, “You have been my hope, O sovereign LORD, my Confidence since my youth.  From birth I have relied on You.  You brought me forth from my…

Psalm 40:3, “He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.”  I’m in the book of Judges as part of my daily reading time.  This morning I read the story of Deborah, one of Israel’s great female leaders.  Deborah, along with another leader name Barak led Israel to a great military victory over an enemy.  After the victory Deborah and…

I read the words of Psalm 9:9, 12b, The LORD is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble.  He does not ignore the cry of the afflicted.”  As I read these verses I thought of those suffering in Gaza and Ukraine.  My prayer, (will you pray it with me?) “LORD Jesus, be their Refuge, their Stronghold in these times of trouble.  Hear their cries.”  Let us…

Psalm 8  As I’ve been reading through the psalms recently I have been struck (or perhaps “nudged by the Holy Spirit”) at how frequently God calls on nature to praise Him, or how nature was made to praise Him.  (Later in your reading you’ll read about it in Psalm 98:7-9). Today, in Psalm 8: 1, 3 “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is Your Name in…

You made it!  One week down.  I hope it has been as refreshing for you as it has been for me.  Today one of our five psalms is one of my favorites, Psalm 37, so I’ll spend almost all of our time with this psalm. Psalm 37 Verses 4 & 5 are verses I memorized years ago and have clung to through the years: verse…

Psalm 6 I call this Psalm “The Prayer of a Man in Despair.”   We read of his despair in verses 2 & 3, 6 & 7.  Soon after reading this psalm I got a text message from a friend who has been suffering for a prolonged period of time.  Yesterday was a procedure which we were hoping would bring some relief.  Instead, it…