I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Psalms 117-118.

    I really like today’s Psalms, but was struggling with how to express what it said to me. Then I thought some more about what the psalmist said in Psalms 117. He calls on all people to praise the Lord because God is faithful, and His faithfulness will endure beyond the end of time. The psalmist continues that theme into 118. Here he explains his reasons for praising the Lord. What the Lord did for the psalmist He will do for us, if He has not already. God will be our strength and protection. If you find yourself surrounded by enemies, call upon God and you will have no reason to fear those enemies any longer. If we allow our actions to be determined by fear of the Lord, we will have no reason to fear any person or group of people because God will take our side. If we trust in God, and therefore follow His instructions, we will be more secure than if we put our trust in any other person or thing. If we put our trust in God, He will give us victory over every enemy and trouble we face in life. Then we, like the psalmist, will be able to tell what the Lord has done.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Psalms 108-116.

    Since most of the psalms are about praising God, it should come as no surprise that praising God is the primary subject of today’s passage. When we have confidence in God it permits us, it more than permits us, it inspires us to praise God with all of our heart. It may inspire us to wake up at dawn to praise Him…oh wait, the psalmist says that he will wake the dawn. Think about what he is saying. Ordinarily, we think of, possibly, waking with the dawn to get something done which we strongly desire to do. However, the psalmist does not say that he wakes with the dawn to praise God. He says that he is so inspired to praise God that he gets up before the dawn and wakes the dawn up.

    The psalmist tells us of one of the great mysteries of this world which God has created. Fear of the Lord inspires us to act according to God’s will. Acting according to God’s will brings us great joy. That great joy causes us to praise God with our whole being. Praising God allows us to experience God’s love for us. When we experience God’s love we cease to fear Him. I have one final point from today’s psalms which I want to make. The psalmist tells us that the glory for all that happens around us belongs to God. We desire to be glorified and yet when we learn to credit God, and to get others to credit God, for any good which might incidentally result from our actions the joy we experience is greater than that which we might receive from public adulation. And it is genuinely true that God deserves credit for any good which I do. It was He who set up my life experiences so that I do whatever limited good which I do. If you are blessed by anything I say, or write, or do, give credit to God and praise Him, because it is the many wonderful gifts which He has given me which caused me to take whatever action you may think praiseworthy (my screw ups however, are my own).

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Psalms 105-107.

    Psalms 105 recounts how God cared for the children of Israel and shaped them as a people. When they were few in the land of Canaan, which God had promised to them as an inheritance, He protected them from the more numerous people around them. When the sons of Jacob began to assimilate with the locals and thus lose their identity as the people of God, God ordained a famine in Canaan. But first He sent Joseph ahead of them into Egypt as a slave. Through Joseph’s faithfulness in adversity God prepared a place to forge the descendants of Jacob into the Children of Israel (these two names for the same person which reflect how his relationship with God changed over time also reflect how his descendants relationship with God changed over time). In due time, God acted, by calling Moses, to bring this new people out of Egypt and forged them into a nation as they traveled through the wilderness. All of this was done in order to create a people who would follow God’s will and model it for the world.

    Psalms 106 recounts how the Children of Israel failed to live up to the plans which God had for them. Time and again, despite the many miracles which God performed for them, they failed to trust Him and turned away to other gods. And time and again, God called them back to Himself by a combination of punishment and mercy. The psalmist does not recount these things to condemn the Jewish people. Instead he does so to remind us of God’s mercy, to remind us that when we have sinned, God will be merciful to us when we turn from our sins and back to Him. If we are currently being faithful to God, let us praise Him for the wonderful things He has done for us. If we are currently in rebellion by being sinful, let us call on God to bring us back to Him; let us repent of our sins and return to Him.

    Finally, for today, Psalms 107 calls on us to tell our story. How did God redeem you? How did He rescue you from your life of sin? Every time I read this psalm it touches me deeply. Some people were wandering and lost, without shelter and dying from hunger. When they cried out to God, He led them to a place of food and rest. The psalmist goes to to describe various ways in which people found themselves at the end of their rope and called out to God. In each and every case, God came to them and showed them the path out of their troubles. Do not be afraid to tell people YOUR story. Reading this psalm reminds me that it is time to tell my story again, not in today’s blog, but as a separate entry later this week (possibly later today).

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Psalms 98-104.

    Psalms 98 starts off setting the theme for today’s scripture reading:

Sing a new song to the Lord,
for he has done wonderful deeds.

The theme which ties together all of today’s psalms, and I know this is going to come as a surprise (or perhaps not if you have read the Book of Psalms before), is praising God. Before I go into the rest of these psalms I want to write about my thoughts regarding this opening line. I dislike current contemporary Christian music. Yet here we are told to sing a new song. My problem with current contemporary Christian music is not with those who produce it, but with the way the Church uses it (or, at least most of the Church). The problem I have is that we are constantly bombarded with new songs to replace the existing ones. This means that the good ones do not have time to seep down in our souls and become expressions of deep, lasting praise for God. I first became aware of the problem at funerals. The songs sung at the funerals for my parents’ generation (my mother is still alive, but my father and all of his siblings have died) were much the same as those sung at the funerals for my grandparents’ generation. Those songs are deep expressions of the faith which filled the lives of those whose life was being celebrated at these funerals. I realized that most current contemporary worship songs lacked the same depth of meaning, and those that did have it were not sung often enough for those singing them to have the same level of investment in their meaning.

    OK, rant over. I do not think the psalmist was just calling for new songs. He was calling on us to find new ways to worship and praise God. We must never allow our praise and worship for God to become stale. Interestingly, in Psalms 101 the psalmist tells us the steps necessary to accomplish this.

1. Live a life of integrity, even in private, where only our own family (and maybe not even them) can see

Our integrity should be real, not just to project an image.

2. Refuse to look at anything vile and vulgar, not for educational value let alone for entertainment, not for any reason at all.

That one is probably harder for many of us to do than it seems.

3. Have nothing to do with those who deal dishonestly.

I do not think this means never associating with such people. I think it means not entering into partnership or alliance with them.

4. Reject perverse ideas.

This is one which I think requires more emphasis than most of us place on it, and more thought about what constitutes a “perverse idea”.

5. Stay away from every evil.

Not just most evil, every evil.

6. Do not tolerate those who slander others.

This is about listening to negative gossip which leads you, and others, to think of people in a negative light. The NIV says it is about those who slander others in secret.

7. Do not endure conceit.

To me this means rooting out my own conceit and building up those who others put down in their own conceit.

8. Associate with faithful people

Now the psalmist gets to the active things we must do to successfully serve and praise God. If we spend our time with faithful people, we will not have time to hang out with wicked ones. And, the influence of faithful people will make us more faithful.

9. Hire people who are above reproach.

This is not just good for our spiritual lives, but it will make whatever business we are in more successful as well.

Every year, I think I should do a blog entry on just Psalms 101, and every year I forget until I find it taking over the post on the rest of the passages included in my reading.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Psalms 78-81.

    The first psalm in today’s passage, Psalms 78, tells us the importance of teaching our stories, and the stories of our ancestors, to the next generation. We need to teach the young about the mighty deeds which God has performed in our lives and tell them the stories we were told by those who came before us. Each generation must set their hope in God anew and if they are going to do that they need to hear and understand what God has done in the past. There is a very human tendency to think and act as if history began with our own birth. The only remedy for that is for the elders to teach the young the stories of what went before. We must do more than just teach the next generation God’s commands and our understanding of them, we must teach them why it is important to follow those commands. I will go even further than that. While it is important to teach theology and godly doctrine, it is not possible to truly understand what it means to follow God without learning the stories about what God has done in the past. As a child, my parents and my congregation spent time teaching us the stories from “The Martyr’s Mirror”. In the last few years I have realized that those stories gave me an understanding of what it means to be a Christian which no one who was not so immersed in those stories will ever have.

    Once he made his point about the importance of telling our stories, the psalmist goes on to focus on the stories about how the Israelites had, time and again, failed to obey God and suffered the consequences. He first tells of how the Israelites did not trust God to supply their needs. While they were in the wilderness they craved meat and rather than ask God to provide it, they conspired to return to Egypt to get it. Despite the great miracles which God had already done on their behalf they believed Him unable to give them this thing. God both showed them that He was indeed able to supply their needs and the consequences of not trusting Him. The story reminds us of the danger of not trusting God to supply us with what is best for us. We must learn to ask God for what we want, but to know that perhaps He has not already given it to us because it is better for us not to have it. We must learn to persistently ask God for what we desire, but remain accepting of God’s judgment about what is best for us. If we have been asking God for something that He has not given us, we should re-evaluate our desire to see if perhaps we will not be happier without it. Perhaps the reason we do not have it is because God is teaching us patience and persistence, but perhaps it is because He knows our true needs and desires better than we do.