In Psalm 9, the tone has changed but the circumstances really have not.  David opens with the lines:  I will give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart; I will tell of all your wonderful deeds.  I will be glad and exult in you; I will sing praise to your name, O Most High.  But even though, David expresses a heart that is eager to praise the Lord, it is clear from the rest of the psalm that all in his life is not well:

Be gracious to me, O LORD. See what I suffer from those who hate me…

There is no shortage of danger in Psalm 9 but the lens through which David looks at everything is a lens of gratitude, hope, and faith.  He does not simply will himself to this place of expectant fidelity but recounts the past when God had rescued him.  David in the midst of anxious present can look to both the past and the future with clear eyes.  He sees that God has indeed rescued him in times of trouble and he is thus confident that he will do it again.

He declares in the assembly:  The LORD is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. 10 And those who know your name put their trust in you, for you, O LORD, have not forsaken those who seek you.

This is the confidence that comes from a long obedience in the same direction.  David can speak as one who has put their trust in the Lord, sought him, and he has found himself not forsaken.  We see this cycle in Scripture, often its when the most dire, hopeless of circumstances strike that the people turn again to the Lord.  The pendulum swings from a sleepy complacency which usually results in idolatry and judgment to a desperate plea for God’s intervention.  But Psalm 9 shows us a different rhythm.

What would it look like to seek God so fervently that your circumstances would almost become ancillary?  Or another way we could ask the question, what would it look like to be so alive to God in our daily lives that even in the face of certain death, we would still find faith and hope in his life?  I want to be alive to God in the daily moments of the ordinary days because I know that the trouble finds us all.  David, here in the bleakest of circumstances, can express such unwavering trust in the Lord because he has expressed that same trust on the bright, sunny days.  I don’t know where you find yourself today but perhaps God is inviting you to just acknowledge that he exists, to have your day interrupted and shaped by the beauty of his presence.  When we seek him in the sunlight, we can stand confidently against the black of night, knowing the dawn is coming.  He is faithful.

Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger (v.2)

Psalm 8 is all about power.  The word translated “bulwark” simply means strength or might.  But notice where the Lord’s strength is on display, not in deeds of mighty kings, or by the wealth of the rich, but in the cries of infants.  These cries testify to the power of the Lord so greatly that the enemy is silenced.  The psalmist goes on, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; 4 what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”  David is in awe of the Lord’s mighty strength, the world “charged with the glory of God” in the stars that light the night.  He asks the question that so many agnostics have understandably asked for centuries:  “If there’s a god that made the entire universe with all its vastness, why would he concern himself with humanity?”  Again, David displays this imbalance of power:  the Creator God, maker of Heaven and Earth, and women and men, each one who’s days on the earth are “but a breath” (Ps. 103).

This whole psalm is subverting our own expectations of power dynamics.  God’s praise in the mouths of babies is strong enough to vanquish armies, the maker of the whole cosmos has numbered both the stars in the sky and the hairs on the heads of his children.  And its here that David appeals to the origin stories of his people.  You see, the people of Israel are not only daring enough to assert that there is one God who made heaven and earth, but also that this God has shared his rule and reign with humanity.  The psalmist declares:

Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. 6 You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet,  all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas (vv. 6-8).  

David asserts the royalty of women and men made in God’s image and then lists the creatures whom they reign over in the opposite order we find in Genesis 1:24-26 (land animals>birds>fish).  To be made in the image of God is to share in the rule of God.  We should look at the world in awestruck wonder and in the same way marvel at the tasks that God invites us to know him in.  Whereas many of the previous psalms have been about rest, this psalm is about work.  This is not a celebration of power for power’s sake but a recognition that we are called to wield our power in a way that brings life to the world.  The work of God informs our own work and makes it a way that we can know him. The work that we engage in every day is done recognizing that everything has been put under our feet.  Our work is a way that we can know God and thus it is holy ground.  We both remove our shoes in awe and wonder at the works of the Lord and put on our boots marveling that we get to participate with him in the redemption of all things.

For meditation:
What would it look like for your everyday work to declare:  O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Psalm 7 is a psalm of judgment. David extols the righteous judgment of the Lord, even inviting the Lord’s judgment upon his own life.  David doesn’t fear the judgment of the Lord because he knows that the Lord’s justice is not retributive but restorative.  For many today, we fear any talk of God as a judge because of the images of an angry, arbitrary God that it conjures up.  But what would it look like for us to recover a proper understanding of the judgment of God?  I want to focus on a couple of this psalm’s important perspectives.

First, the Lord is a judge who is able to actually bring about justice through his wisdom, power, and holiness (v. 11).  The people of Israel actually wanted God to judge the world because they were often oppressed, at the mercy of violent imperial forces.  They were certain, because of God’s promises to their ancestors, that when God enacted his judgment, their righteousness would be vindicated and their oppressors would be condemned.

Second, David gives us an important paradigm as he begins his request for judgment with himself.  He invites the Lord:

3 O LORD my God, if I have done this, if there is wrong in my hands, 4 if I have repaid my ally with harm or plundered my foe without cause, 5 then let the enemy pursue and overtake me, trample my life to the ground, and lay my soul in the dust.

Judgment should always begin with us.  This is the heart of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 7.  He tells his disciples:

Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. 2 For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. 3 Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.

The Scriptures do not try to deter us from the notion of judgment altogether.  They simply declare over and over again that judgment belongs to God alone and thus when we judge others, especially their motivations, we are in a sense playing God.  The psalms invite a deep and searching self-examination.  They place us face to face with God and in his presence our souls are laid bare.  The psalms constantly invoke the Lord to judge and they invite us to do the same.  Jesus’ warnings against judgment do not remove the promise that the Lord will judge the earth from the equation, rather they beckon us to recognize our proper place is not in the judgment seat but rather in the place of the one being judged and finding God just and merciful.

For meditation:

-Pray to the Lord asking him to judge your heart and motivations.  Confess.  Know that you are forgiven.  Ask that the Spirit of God would reshape your heart towards his justice and holiness.

We are five psalms into the psalter and we have seen some of the currents that move the prayers of the people of God along.  Flowing underneath the surface are the preeminence of God, his rule and reign, rest as worship and rebellion, the temptation to subvert God’s authority by assuming his throne, and then there is the difficult matter of enemies.  For Christians, Jesus instructed us to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us.  But the psalter is laden with vitriol and curses (known as imprecations) all heaped upon the heads of our enemies.  Here in Psalm 5, David prays:  Make them bear their guilt, O God; let them fall by their own counsels; because of their many transgressions cast them out, for they have rebelled against you.

In 1 Timothy 2:4, Paul writes that the Lord wants all to be saved and to come to a knowledge of him.  David, on the other hand, seems ready to condemn all of his enemies to the grave.  The psalms then raise the question: how are we to pray these sorts of prayers and be faithful to Jesus?  The answers, as seems fittings, are as complicated as the question.  I want to focus on two angles to this difficult discussion.  First, this is a psalm of David, famous in the Old Testament for being “the one after God’s own heart.”  A quick survey of David’s life will yield many disturbing results that you would not encourage anyone to emulate.  David is a violent man who builds his reputation around his ability to kill.  David commits adultery which leads him into a tangled conspiracy resulting in David doing what he does best, killing.  So how can this at best morally ambiguous and at worst morally reprehensible man be seen as “the one after God’s own heart?”  Perhaps its his feelings towards enemies that gives us a hint.  David holds nothing back from God.  He does not hold in reserve his most exuberant praise as he dances like a fool before the ark of God in front of all Israel.  Conversely, David does not try to keep the dark corners of his heart from the light of God.  He brings it all out into the open of God’s all-seeing light.  He bears his soul completely before God in compete trust and vulnerability.  Is it not at least possible that this is the characteristic that the Spirit is beckoning us to pattern our own prayers after?  Perhaps this is what it means to be a woman or a man after God’s own heart?

Second, the psalmist writes in v. 9:   For there is no truth in their mouths; their hearts are destruction; their throats are open graves; they flatter with their tongues.  The second angle that I want to address pertaining to enemies is around the person of Jesus.  Jesus is the one who Christians are to see as our pattern in the world:  his words, his love, his beauty.  So who are the enemies of Jesus?  Perhaps this will give us insight into our own prayers regarding our enemies.  Well certainly, during his incarnate life recorded in the gospels there are many schemers: scribes, Pharisees, Herod, Pilate all trying to be rid of Jesus.  But when the temple guard comes to apprehend Jesus and Peter draws his sword to engage the apparent enemies of Jesus, Jesus stills his hand saying, “Peter, those who live by the sword, die by the sword.”  He even heals the ear of Malchus, one of the soldiers who assists in arresting Jesus.  Paul will say it this way in Ephesians 6v12:  For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.   Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection reveals our enemies.  Our enemies are not people, not even those who inflict violence upon us.  Our enemies are the sin and death to which those people are enslaved.  Thus, we pray.  We pray that our true enemies, sin and death, would meet their final end as Jesus triumphs over them and we pray that the people in our lives who may be acting as enemies would be liberated from the grip of their captors.

For meditation:   But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house (v.7)

I am languishing; O LORD, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror. My soul also is struck with terror, while you, O LORD—how long?  (Ps. 6vv2-3).

The psalmist, presumably David, in Psalm 6 is not just having a bad day.  He is in the throes of death.  He goes on:  For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?    I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping.  My eyes waste away because of grief; they grow weak because of all my foes.  (vv. 5-7).  David is in a downward spiral, drowning in his tears every night, losing his vision either because his eyes are red, dry and all cried-out or they are calling it quits because they have just seen too much.  I have certainly felt this way recently.  On every side, we are constantly bombarded with unspeakable suffering in our world.  Whether we are enduring it ourselves or simply empathizing from afar, it’s a wonder our eyes don’t all just up and retire saying, “I’ve seen enough.”

But this psalm and thus the circumstances of the psalmist take an unexpected turn.  The psalmist has been crying out to the Lord, “How long?” (v. 3) and now he speaks with a confidence that seems to come from nowhere:  Depart from me, all you workers of evil, for the LORD has heard the sound of my weeping. The LORD has heard my supplication; the LORD accepts my prayer. All my enemies shall be ashamed and struck with terror; they shall turn back, and in a moment be put to shame.  (vv. 8-10).  Why the sudden bravado when as recently as v. 7 he was drowning in tears?  Simply, the psalmist knows that heaven hears him.  He is assuaged, strengthened, emboldened by this one simple expression of faith that God hears when he cries and is able to work mightily in his circumstances. We are not told if the psalmist receives this word from the Lord.  Presumably he does not and rather is operating from the confidence of his past dealings with God.  He knows that in previous trials, the Lord has heard him when he has cried out and has responded.  But most of all he knows that he does not serve a God who is far off but rather a loving, attentive Father—a God who hears.  Here this is the psalmist’s sole hope, that heaven hears him.  And it changes everything.

For meditation:
-What is causing you anguish, grief, anxiety, or anger?  What would it look like to bring that before the Lord and to trust that he hears you?
-When has God acted in your life in an unforeseen way?
-Notice how the psalms give voice to genuine pain in our lives.  They enable us both to name our suffering and to frame it within the hope that we have in God.

Verse for meditation:   The LORD has heard my supplication; the LORD accepts my prayer.

What’s the thing in your life that you are just certain, if it were to be different, would change everything?  What’s the circumstance, relationship, life event far off in the future that you are waiting on to make you happier, more fulfilled, or put you in the place where you are finally able to experience joy?  If your job were different, would you be different?  If your spouse, your friends, or your kids were different, would you be different?  David in Psalm 4, takes on two challenges with this sort of counterfactual investment in the future.  First, there is the temptation towards bitterness.  Look at vv. 4-5, “When you are disturbed (possibly or are angry), do not sin; ponder it on your beds, and be silent.”  Here we find David in distress, he is at the mercy of his circumstances.  He is the object of scorn and lies, and from every appearance he is completely in the right, the victim with a righteous complaint.  Yet there is nothing he can do about it and even in that place, the temptation to become embittered and to lash out, however justified it may seem, runs the risk of plunging him into sin.  David determines that his only response to his circumstances is to “offer right sacrifices, and put your trust in the Lord.”  This is far from trying to carve one’s own path in the world.  David here models the trust in the Lord that both heals the sin in our own hearts and judges justly and fights on our behalf.

The second temptation that we see in this psalm is the allure of using your circumstances as an excuse.  David says in v. 6 of those that are constantly waiting on something to change, “Oh that we might see some good!  Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord!”  If only God would do this, if only he would change this, life would be so much better.  When we find our life becoming so future-oriented that we fail to seize the present moment, we betray that we misunderstand God’s promises.  God’s promise of ultimate joy is not that the weather would always be fair, that people would always treat us well, and that things would go our way.   God’s promise is that in spite of our circumstances, he is always near.   The promise is presence.  David, a master mystic and thus a seasoned diver in the deep places of the Lord, knows this well.  He concludes:  You have put gladness in my heart more that when their grain and wine abound.  I will both lie down and sleep in peace; for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety” (vv. 7-8)—notice again, rest is a defiant act of faith and trust.

Verse for meditation from Eugene Peterson’s version of Psalm 4vv7-8:  

In reflecting on Psalm 2, we were reminded in the absurdity of trying to gain control of our worlds by sacrificing sleep.  In Psalm 3, we see this lived out.  The psalmist states:

5 I lie down and sleep; I wake again, for the LORD sustains me. 6 I am not afraid of ten thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around.

The psalmist, after taking note of all the enemies assembled against him, surrounding him, places himself in the most vulnerable human state. He goes to sleep.  If any situation would call for a stop-at-nothing workaholic approach, it would seem that being the target of the hatred and vitriol of thousands would be such a scenario.  And yet the psalmist doesn’t try to fight his way out, he doesn’t even lose sleep over the furor arrayed outside his door.  He lays down.  From Genesis 1, we can gather a few things that are true of all humanity.

1. We are not God.  Seems like a no-brainer but I am always amazed how often I forget that simple fact.
2. A seemingly subtle fact that the Jewish people still recognize in the way they observe major holidays:  the days do not start or end with us.  There is evening and morning, each day begins when we cease from our work to spend time with family, to eat, to sleep.  Every day is a gift.
3. Every woman and man is made in the image of God, an icon, singularly shaped by God to reflect the beauty of our Creator.
4. We are creatures designed with the task of ruling and stewarding the creation of God.  The image of God is not simply a characteristic of being human it is a vocation to live into.
5. In all of this we are blessed by God.  As the old cliche goes, we are “blessed to be a blessing.”  God has lavished his love and attention upon us in order that we might live rightly in relationship with him in worship.  I think it no small detail that in Genesis 1, the work is the worship.
6. It all culminates in sabbath.  The Creator rests and all of creation joins him.  This is the Shalom, the world at peace joyfully ceding all that we would do to sustain us over to Creator, entrusting ourselves to God.

Returning to Psalm 3, the question for us today is where are our battles raging?  Notice the psalmist never downplays the very real threat that his enemies present.  If anything, he emphasizes just how strong they are to demonstrate that the stakes are nothing short of life and death.  What sorts of stress are you enduring at this moment?   Perhaps your enemies are surrounding you: pressures at work, bosses or coworkers who want to see you fail, financial troubles, marital strife.  This psalm tells us that the strongest thing we can possibly do, in response to these overwhelming forces, is simply to entrust ourselves to God.  Sabbath is not passive.  Sabbath is a form of radical resistance.

Questions for meditation:
Where do you feel the pressure to ignore rest?
What does rest look like to you—just as Sabbath is not passive, resting is not simple inaction, it is time attending to God and trusting that he sustains us.

Verse for meditation today:  Psalm 3v3-But you, O LORD, are a shield around me, my glory, and the one who lifts up my head.

Read Psalm 2.

With bleary eyes, I looked at my phone…3:34 AM.  For most of us, we understand that coded collection of numbers and letters as a disruption in our normal routines.  Perhaps it’s an expected interruption like the first few months of a baby’s life.  Maybe it’s anticipation or anxiety that is making sleep elusive.  For me, it was all of the above.  My family and I recently started down the path towards some major changes (more on that soon) and also recently welcomed our beautiful son to the world.  But I knew in that particular moment that it was not our boy that was keeping me awake.

Worry (I use this term intentionally because I am not describing clinical anxiety here) about the future is like being held captive.  Your captor is a master of human psychology and breaking human resolve.  He makes sure that you are constantly on the edge of exhaustion rushing into your room turning all the lights on and blaring unbearably loud noises and then leaving you in your panicked state.  Fear about tomorrow invades the deep watches of the night leaving us trying to play God from our beds.

“The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and his anointed, saying, Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us'”(Psalm 2vv.3-4). The psalmist here describes kings who are attempting to establish their own sovereignty apart from the rule of God.  For them, the peaceful, just reign of God begins to feel like bonds and cords of slavery.   Psalm 2 is about nations conspiring against the rule of God.  But its also about the things that we plan and the things that we fear in God’s absence.

Often our response to the waking nightmares of worry is to plot our own course.  We use our imaginations to construct doomsday scenarios.  We believe the worst about tomorrow and thus the worst about God and begin to scheme every way we can to stockpile our own needs so we will no longer need to rely on the provision of God.

And yet in the midst of all our attempts to take the reins, to be yet captains of our own fate, heaven laughs.  Heaven laughs because there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God.  Heaven laughs at the absurdity of our attempts to manage the affairs of the world from our beds.  Heaven laughs like a parent laughs when a child tells them there are monsters under the bed.  Heaven laughs because the Lord of all the universe loves us, is concerned with us and rejoices with us.

Verse to meditate on throughout the day:  Happy are all those who take refuge in him.

In Luke ch. 11, we are welcomed into the scene that truly encapsulates the way that we are formed to be more like Jesus.  Jesus’ disciples are with Jesus as he is praying.  Listening to Christ pray is like listening to Bach play the piano or watching Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel.  The disciples pray along by listening and then they beg of Jesus:  Lord teach us to pray (v. 2).

1.  Prayer Is An Innate Skill.  Large swaths of the evangelical church in America have done their congregants a great disservice in failing to foster this paradigm-shifitng request— “Lord teach us to pray”— in their congregants.  For many Christians in America, it is simply assumed by churches that you will automatically know how to pray.   The disciples sitting near Jesus as he prayed to his Father were no novices in prayer.  They were first century Jews who prayed the psalms throughout their daily lives and recited psalms and corporate prayers in the synagogue.  But something about Jesus’ prayer was still so foreign and novel to them that they knew the prayers they had learned and the prayers of Jesus were of a different character.  Their response asking for help is truly the first prayer:  we want to pray, Lord teach us how to pray.  Prayer is the language of the Kingdom of God.  It is not foreign in grammar or vocabulary but in content.

2.  I have to come up with the words to pray.  The disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray.  He responds with his most famous prayer, the Lord’s prayer, and these words have been life-giving in prayer for the Church ever since.  But the reality is, Matthew 7 and Luke 11 are not the only places that the Spirit of God is teaching us how to pray.  The psalms immerse us in a school of prayer.  The psalms also run the entire range of the human condition from rapturous praise to hopeless abandonment and everywhere in between.  Consider the end of the lament longing for home in Psalm 137:  “O daughter Babylon, you devastator!  Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!  Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! (vv.8-9).”  Are the psalms condoning violence against innocent children?  How could something like this be in the Bible about a God of love?  But those questions miss the point.  This psalm is not promoting violence in God or in humanity but transparency between the divine and women and men.  The psalms give us words for even our most base and heinous impulses because the psalms are shaping us towards a life that is fully alive to God.

3.  If I have to work at prayer it becomes a “work.”  The reason most people struggle so consistently with prayer is because they fail to embrace the struggle.   Jesus’ response to the disciples’ request, “Lord teach us to pray,” is a prayer for daily bread, for daily forgiveness, for daily strength to overcome the evil one.  There is not a prayer that will suffice for all of time.  We must see each day afresh in the grace and provision of God.  Think of your most valuable relationships.  It is likely that there was an ease, an instant connection that felt a lot like grace, that paved the way for the relationship at the beginning.  But that relationship has only strengthened and deepened to the extent that you both have invested in the relationship.  There is not less grace present in the relationship because you have worked at it over the years.  If anything, you have found more grace because of the work.  Prayer is like this because the grounds for all our work in prayer is the grace of Jesus.  Remember where we started in Luke ch. 11?  The disciples long to pray in response to hearing Jesus pray.  All of our work in prayer is a response to our listening in on the love shared between Father, Spirit, and Son.  We ask, “Lord teach us to pray,” in order to be immersed in the eternal love of the Trinity.

The Psalms literally stop us in our tracks.  We have been walking our own way, the way of the world, the way of the wicked (v. 1).  We have treated the world like a spectator sport where our sofa becomes the seat of judgment (v. 2).  The psalms are an invitation to know God and to know ourselves, and thus an invitation to pray.  Here in Psalm 1, we receive this invitation not as a list of things to do but as a cease and desist order.  Stop walking, stop standing, stop sitting. Stop talking and listen.  The law of the Lord is heeded only as it is received as a sabbath of hearing.

Hear the words of the Lord, hear how his ways are so different than the acquisitive, reductive ways of the world.  Hear and find joy.

The verbs for the righteous are deceptively passive:  delight, meditate, be planted.  I mean how do you delight in something?  Do you think about it really hard?  But this is the paradox of prayer.  Prayer is not first a speaking, but a hearing.  God’s initial speech in Genesis 1, “Let there be light,” bathes the whole of creation in the illuminating grace of God. It’s in response to the world-creating words of the Lord that we speak, that we pray.  Like babies copying the sounds and syllables of their parents, we learn to speak in listening. In hearing ourselves addressed by God, we can turn from the ways of sinners. We can repent. In hearing the Law of the Lord we are initiated into the customs and cultures of a new world. In hearing the Law of the Lord we are planted in the well-watered sunlight of the love of God.

Psalm 1 invites us to listen, to hear and to pray. Prayer is the grounds of grace, the fertile soil of new life where our lives stand tall in the love of God in every season.  Psalm 1 initiates us into the rhythms of the psalter, into living, real living.  Our lives are only truly alive when we are alive to God and thus the psalm 1 invites us to rest in the grace of God.

Verse for meditation:   They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper (v.3).