I love Christmas music but there are only so many great, class Christmas hymns. So how do you help your congregation lean into the season of Advent while keeping in tune with the theological implications of the season. Below are four songs that I think are simply great songs but they also have deep resonances with the message of Advent. They are great songs for congregational singing and reflection and will certainly help your church behold the wonder and longing of the Advent season.

1. All The Poor and Powerless

This song, originally written by Leslie Jordan and David Leonard (All Sons and Daughters), embodies the season of Advent. Mary, upon receiving and responding to the call of God, that she would bear the Messiah, sings out:

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty^[1]Luke 1vv52-53

The song is at both times worshipful proclamation and invitation inviting “all the poor and powerless, all the lost and lonely” to “know the Lord is holy.”  The chorus drawing from Philippians 2vv6-11 declares in hope for the present and certainty for the future that “all will cry out hallelujah.” The bridge is resounding and triumphant, “Shout it, go on and scream it from the mountains, go on and tell it to the masses that he is God.” When I first heard the song it reminded me of the old Christmas standby, “Go Tell It On The Mountain,” and it carries the message of that song in a form, less classic yet more lyrically and musically impactful.

This has been a source of contention amongst my colleagues but I prefer The Digital Age’s version to the original by All Sons and Daughters.  Bwack (Digital Age’s Drummer) is one of my all-time favorites and the bridge was meant to be belted out at the top of your lungs.

 

2. You’ll Come

Here’s a worship leader trick. Search through the songwriting credentials for any Hillsong song and when you find the name Brooke Ligertwood, go ahead and put that song in your church’s rotation.^[2]Brooke Ligertwood performs her solo tunes under the name Brooke Fraser. Her writing is saturated with what Eugene Peterson calls “scriptural imagination.” Rather than stringing random bible concepts together, her lyrics are steeped in scripture while still evoking the broader context from which they come.  Not to mention, if she is singing the song she has a voice that both demands attention and retains its delicacy. Ok, enough about Brooke, needless to say I am a fan. This song places certainty on the hope of Advent.  He will come. The promise is certain, it is all grace. During Advent, we live into that grace in patient expectation, the kind of hope that isn’t frantically seeking to secure our own future but entrusts ourselves wholly to God’s care. The bridge of this song announces the realities of the kingdom come that Jesus proclaims in his first public words in Luke4vv16-19 as he reads from the scroll of Isaiah. Brooke sings out “Chains be broken, lives be healed, eyes be opened Christ is revealed.”

3. The Glory Of It All

“At the start, he was there, he was there…” David Crowder sings echoing the prologue to John’s gospel, “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God, and the word was God.” This song is not a melodically catchy as some of the others on this list but it conveys the yearning of Advent. The second verse begins, “All is lost, find him there.”  In the season of Advent we are transported back to the story of ancient Israel, a people who had received the promises of God and yet, through a long history of events, seemed doomed to never receive them. The people are waiting for a fresh word from God, a fresh hope that God has not forgotten them. And into that longing, the Messiah is born. The catch of it all is that the answer to the centuries of aching for home is missed.  The people wanted God to move and they missed the reality that God himself came to them.  Crowder captures this well, “The glory of it all is he came here.” Crowder captures the glory of God with us in the bridge, “After night comes a light, dawn is here, it’s a new day, everything will change, things will never be the same.”

4. King Of Heaven

The first time I heard this song performed I was completely in awe, immersed in the beauty of God. I had taken a group of students to see Hillsong United lead worship supporting their album, Zion,^[3]Great album by the way. I don’t understand people that still turn their noses up at Hillsong. Joel Houston and co. are writing songs for the church that are imaginative and daring. at the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ. We were literally on the back row of the arena and this was the last song of the evening. The night was a rousing celebration of God’s presence and yet it ended with Matt Crocker signing accompanied by only a piano (and the omnipresent Hillsong pad). Crocker’s tone is pure tenor, beautiful and clear. The chorus sings simply “Immanuel, God with us.” The song builds at the bridge and Crocker belted out, “King of Heaven on the Earth be found.” It was a stunning conclusion to a powerful evening and I have loved the song ever since. The words are Advent through and through:

Read Psalm 16

Hopefully you have had one of those days.  One of those days where the sun shines perfectly bright and warm, where the coffee is exquisite, or the company is the kind that you wish you could stay at that meal or that vacation forever. The psalms, are not all complaints for help or outraged pleas for justice. The psalms are a prism displaying the full radiance of what it means to be human before God. Throughout the early part of the psalter, many of the Psalms have been focused upon the life of the ungodly and the wicked. The psalmist has looked outward at the state of the world and determined that those who live their lives taking advantage of others seem to have a pretty good life, they are economically secure and thus free from the accompanying, all-consuming anxiety of not knowing where their next meal is coming from. They live fat and happy in the face of God’s law and the Psalmist implores God to do something to balance the scales. Here in Ps. 16 we see the opposite. David says of those that live according to God’s law— “As for the holy ones in the land, they are the noble”^[1]Ps. 16v3—whereas those who follow other gods are those who “multiply their sorrows, they drink offerings of blood.”^[2]Ps. 16v4

The psalmist here is not worried about everyone else, he is simply expressing his trust in the Lord and gratitude for his provision. David proclaims both his faith in God and the extent of his Lord’s reign in v. 2:

You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.

David, in worshiping the Lord, has seen that he is the gracious giver of every good thing and the benefits are real-life security—”the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a goodly heritage^[3]Ps. 16v6. David is having one of those days, a day of sabbath, a day of peace where he sees his life as it truly is in the hands of the Lord, who is God over all. He says, “My heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure. For you do not give me up to Sheol, or let your faithful one see the Pit.”^[4]Ps. 16vv9-10 Ps. 16 is an expression of the beauty of a life lived trusting in the Lord.  David’s life is ordered by rhythms of prayer and praise- I bless the Lord who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me. I kept the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.^[5]Ps. 16v8

Life lived in the presence of the Lord, as the psalms so openly attest, is not always easy.  But in embracing the Lord in every season, in developing rhythms to soak in the presence of Jesus and to be addressed and shaped by him really does produce a harvest of joy.^[6]J. L. Mays, Commentary on The Psalms”The psalm teaches that trust is not merely a warm feeling of a passing impulse in a time of trouble; it is a structure of acts and experiences that open one’s consciousness to the Lord as the supreme reality of life.”

For Meditation:
Ps. 16v11: You show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

[Click Here For Part One]

6. Build Sabbath Into Your Ministry

The student ministry calendar is prohibitive, especially if you have a family. Often, there are several nights out each week in addition to whenever your group meets. Everybody involved—students, parents, leaders, you, and your family—benefit from regularly scheduled rest in the calendar. Take a week off from your normal gathering, encourage your students to spend that time having a meal with their families. Spend that time with your own family. Slow down at the end of the summer when things naturally taper off. None of this is rocket science but there is a reason that so many pastors start out in youth ministry and then move to a different role within a few years: keeping up with the schedule is difficult. But it’s not impossible—if you build rest into your ministry calendar.

7. Dig In Deep

[This one is from my beautiful, wise, and brave wife Courtney]-You can’t do this one without committing to #6 above. But once you have established a ministry calendar you can live with, make it a habit of signing a mental contract of sorts, binding yourself to staying in your ministry setting for a certain amount of time. For Courtney and I, we would reevaluate every couple of years taking into account the state of our family, asking whether we were still truly serving the needs of our students, and the state of the church that we were a part of. All of these served as factors for us to be able to say that we would be here until a certain date and then would commit to reevaluating at that point. Once we had prayerfully considered our involvement, we could be all in with our students in a way that provided for slow, steady growth. Longevity in ministry gives you credibility in people’s lives that you don’t have to fight for. You get it just by showing up and being consistent. There is no substitute for trust in ministry and there is no shortcut through the time it takes to build that kind of trust. When possible, stay.

8. Parents Need Encouragement Too

Often our interactions with parents are limited to communicating details or listening to the problems they are having with their child at home. Those things are important. But just as you should encourage your students regularly and verbally, you should also tell parents the things that you see in their kids. It’s not fair, but parents often get the worst of our students and we often get the best of them. When you see those glimpses of what God is doing in their life or the young woman or young man that a particular student is becoming, tell their parents. Your words will often fall upon the ears of people who feel like they have no idea what they are doing and certainly no confirmation that they are getting through to their kids in any way. One I found helpful in this regard is, Like Dew Your Youth by Eugene Peterson. You can purchase it by clicking the link below.

9. One Is The Only Number That Matters

[Also from Courtney] I was recently out of college, spending four year studying the Scriptures, loaded with information and exuberance to share with this new group of students I was going to be leading. I prepared my talk for the entire week leading up to our Sunday night gathering. I had so much to say (so I thought), all I needed was a group to share it with. I had so many visions of kids hearing what I had to say, surrounding their lives  to Jesus, laughing at all my jokes, and thinking, “Wow, I never knew Jesus was this good.” Sunday night came, my first official gathering as youth pastor, and six kids showed up. Turns out, it’s kind of awkward to preach a long sermon to six kids. I was flustered by the difference between my expectations and reality and so I completely scrapped what I had planned, dejected by the small crowd. I thought to myself, “I will give them the good stuff when more of them show up.” But here’s the thing, it kept happening. Week by week, six kids here, maybe eight kids there and I would just kind of get sucked into the malaise allowing the environment to influence me rather than vice versa. About six months in, we did an event where only one (ONE!) kid showed up. I had five adult leaders there and one kid. I was completely convinced that I should quit but in that moment I felt the Lord speak to me as clearly as I ever have, “Ian, that one matters to me so it better matter to you.” Instead of canceling the event and sending everyone home, we all hung out and laughed together and I, for the first time in my ministry, understood the story Jesus tells of the shepherd leaving the ninety-nine to find the one lost sheep. That was one of the early turning points for me, not allowing the size of the group to determine how I interacted with them or my vision for their lives. It wasn’t until I began to give all of myself joyfully to whoever happened show up that anyone actually started showing up. Whether you have a group of two-hundred or a group of two, one is the key number. Go after the one.

10. I Will Be In Your Life As Long As You’ll Have Me

Youth ministry is, by design, a seasonal ministry. But the relationships you build don’t have to be. Your interactions with your students will change, you may be separated by long distances, but I would encourage you to continue to make yourself available to your students long after they are under your care. I say to our students, “I will be in your life as long as you’ll have me.” I am not over-promising anything or taking responsibility for their spiritual growth throughout the remainder of their life. I am simply acknowledging the value of the relationship that I have built with them, honoring their impact on me and mine on them. Seasons will change, relationships will lose the immediacy of proximity but for many students, they follow Jesus because they saw something beautiful, something true in the lives of the adults that invested in them during their teenage years. This is certainly true for me. One of the greatest joys I have experienced has been growing in my friendships with adults who used to be my leaders and seeing students that we used to shepherd grow into true friends.

 

 

The end of this year marks the end of my time in vocational youth ministry. I could not be more grateful for the amazing people that we have gotten to serve and those we were blessed to work alongside. I am forever shaped by my experiences—both painful and joyful—working with students. In this post, I am waxing nostalgic about some of the lessons I have learned. While these may be specific to my observations and experiences in youth ministry, they are not sequestered to that particular field or church work in general. Truth is truth, because it transcends borders. Grace and peace.

1. Prayer Is The Work.

You got into student ministry because you (hopefully) enjoy being in the presence of students. One problem, those people to whom you are ministering are in school seven hours a day, nine months out of the year. So what do you do when everything is all planned and everyone is in school? I can’t tell you how many youth pastors I have spoken to simply don’t feel like they know how to fill out the hours of their day. A lot of youth pastors feel guilty because they spend their time distracted on social media or completing busy work tasks because at least an open computer makes them appear productive. We often spend our time coming up with more efficient ways to reach people and miss the fact that God has given us the most efficient way to reach people: his own presence. When we pray, we spend time with Jesus, we become more like him, and thus become better pastors.

2. Stories Win.

Can you feel the anxiety? Have you been in ministry for a couple of years and already used your best stories? Youth pastors often feel the pressure to tell stories that are equal parts hilarious and relevant. We have all been at that retreat or conference where the speaker that will only ever interact with our students once gets up and tells a story that kills and also paints a poignant picture of Jesus. But here’s the thing, I’m not talking about those stories. I’m talking about the stories that have been passed onto all of us in the Scriptures. It’s amazing how many youth ministries see their task as doctrinal download. Don’t tell your students what grace is, show them. Jesus embodies and enacts grace, the things he does and says are the essence of grace. Bring your students back to those stories. Help them to locate their lives within the story of Jesus. The Bible is amazing, mysterious, perplexing, and breath-taking. Don’t turn your gatherings into lectures, help your students encounter Jesus.

3. Students Are Not The Future, They Are The Present.

Like in those zombie movies where the heroes are able to finally shut the door on the hordes of brain-eating monsters, many churches group all their teenagers in one place, shut the door, and run away. But what if teenagers were invited to actually do ministry, not in the future, but right now? What if they led worship, served communion, greeted people at the doors? When we involve students in the life of the church during their formative years they don’t run into the dissonance of trying to integrate into “adult” church when they are older.

4. You Won’t Connect With Every Student. Don’t Try.

This is not about the value you place on every student you have the privilege to pastor. This is about what it means to be a finite human being. No matter the size of your group, you simply don’t share interests, similar experiences, or even a basic understanding with every student in your midst. And God never asked you to try. What God has asked of you is to create an environment where young people are cared for and nurtured to grow in their faith. You’re going to need help. Find and empower people to minister to your students. If you are the focal point of every aspect of your ministry, you are bottlenecking the growth of those you serve.

5. Words Create Worlds.

Every day your students walk in worlds where they are competing for attention, for meaning, and affirmation. Don’t make them fight for it within the confines of your ministry. Make it a regular practice to verbally encourage individuals. Pray for them so you can point them towards the things that God is doing in their lives. Beyond this, have regular rhythms throughout the year where you publicly affirm, encourage, and speak life into your students. Be thoughtful, be effusive, be prophetic. Your words, well-thought out and proclaimed in front of the group become seeds that are certain to produce a harvest.

 

Look for part two tomorrow.

The psalms are the prayerful tapestry of everything that it means to be human; thus, it comes as no surprise that they weave a tangled web of contradictions. For instance, Psalm 14v3:  all have gone astray, they are all alike perverse… and then in Psalm 15v2, in answer to the question who can dwell on the holy hill of the Lord: those who walk blamelessly?  Were we not just told in Ps. 14 that this is an impossible standard? Is God unreasonable and cruel, calling us to unreasonable heights where are bound to run out of oxygen? Many Christians, post-Augustine would say, simply “yes.”

But the psalms demand to be encountered on their own terms.  Psalm 15 does not live in the hopeless fatalism of original sin, rather it calls us to a visceral, tangible holiness.  In Genesis 1 and 2, the Lord calls to life the heavens and the earth, the seas and the land and fills them all with things that he says are unequivocally good. At the height of this creation we see the key to it all, the woman and man made in the image of God himself.  What was God doing when he created the world?  He was creating a space where he might reveal his love, a space where heaven and earth would be inseparably interlocked.  In short, he was creating a temple. The purpose of all of life, laid out from the beginning of the Scriptures is that humans might dwell face to face with their Creator in grace, worship, and work.  Thus the question that Ps. 15 asks is effectively, “Who can live out the true purpose of life?”

The psalmist answers his own lofty question: those who walk in holiness, truthfully,  integrity, love, and justice.  We live in a world where many talk the talk of righteous indignation. People stand on their self-appointed sides lobbing outrage and vitriol and call it justice. But Ps. 15 simply will not allow this sort of judgmental speculating. Ps. 15 asks the question of each one of us as individuals, what does it mean to dwell with God? To walk.  To dwell with God is to walk with God. We don’t get to build a bastion of holy security and seclusion, safe from the outside world. God’s holy hill is not a fortress to be protected but a house in which we arise each day in shalom.  And just as the earth constructed a temple in Genesis 1 and 2, the whole earth, which means every aspect of our lives, every moment, and every task is an invitation to behold God’s presence.

The Lord doesn’t stay in his holy tent.  The Lord is not found in sanctuaries made with human hands, rather the whole earth is a temple and we, when we carry him into every corner of our lives, his priests.  To dwell with the Lord is to walk with him through real, lived life.

For meditation:
-Walk through the list of those who dwell with the Lord, ask the Lord for the strength of his presence to live more like the one described.
-Develop a prayer hook throughout the day.  Maybe it’s when you look at your phone, or get in your car, or get a meeting notification. Whatever it may be, let your hook throughout the day remind you to pray this simple prayer of acknowledgment:  Lord, you are here.

David begins in Ps. 14, “Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.”  But David did not live in our modern world of secular humanism.  In David’s world everybody was religious, people and nations were defined by their gods.  So who are these ancient atheists who seemingly deny the reality that everyone else lives in?   His critique is not levied against those outside the people of God but those who claim the name and heritage of the Lord for their own.  These people say all the right things and show up for all of the religious ceremonies but  in truth, they live as if God does not exist.

The Hebrew word used for fools here is nabal a word denoting “someone who operates off of a faulty assumption about the way things work.”^[1]On Nabal the man, 1 Samuel 25v25:  Nabal is his name, and folly is with him…  David here does not describe the actual atheist but the functional atheist.   David is inviting us to interrogate our own assumptions about the congruence of life and he indicts us all:  we have all gone astray (v.3), living segmented lives that deny the all-seeing, all-ruling reality of God.

So what are we to do with such an all-encompassing condemnation?  First, submit to it.  When John the Baptist emerges in the wilderness proclaiming the coming Kingdom, preparing the way of Jesus, his call is to one and all:  repent.  Hebrews 10:31 tell us that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God but the rest of Hebrews 10 tells us this is only true for those who refuse the grace of Jesus.  This is functional atheism, whether by denying our own sin or Jesus’ love revealing the fullness of God.  Hebrews 10:22 beckons us to boldly approach the Lord with a pure heart and a clean conscience.  The Scriptures do not live in denial of the reality of sin, they invite us to acknowledge our own sin, and to place our hope and faith in the one who has overcome it by the power of his blood.^[2]Hebrews 10v19  Confession is our first response to grace.  Often the first honest word we utter to God is, “Christ Jesus have mercy upon me a sinner.”

Second, we must seek to live integrated lives.  Functional atheism arises from our ability to compartmentalize between sacred and secular.  Jesus’ death has torn the veil of the temple, separating the Holy of Holies from the rest of existence.  Just as the curtain has been ripped in two, so the curtains have been removed from our eyes.  Jesus is Lord of all of life.  This psalm is an invitation to investigate where we have segmented our lives and to subordinate it all to beautiful reign of King Jesus.

For meditation:
– Meditate on the psalm’s insistence in v. 3:  hey have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.
-Throughout your day, repeat the Christ Prayer, “Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy upon me a sinner.”  Allow this to be a centering practice as you focus on the log on your own eye instead of the specks in the eyes of your neighbors.

If you were trying to reach a certain place in the world, you would chart a course (or more likely you would do what the voice on your phone tells you to do).  Much in the same way, the destinations of our lives determine the course of our lives.  Just as our journeys are shaped by our destination, our lives are shaped by our hopes.  David asks the Lord, “How long?”

For many of us when we consider our hopes and dreams, we think of the positive ends we want for our own lives, our careers, and our family.  But David’s hopes in Ps. 13 rise up from the pit of despair.   He doesn’t have time for goals and vision, he just needs God to show up, right now.  He needs God, not something that resembles him.^[1]C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

This psalm invites us in two directions.  First, we are to be people who pray this prayer on behalf of those who are in a situation similar to David’s.  David’s life is under the threat of imminent death.  He cries out in fear and in frustration, “How long until you fix this? Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death.”^[2]vv.1-3   Paul describes the very fabric of creation echoing the anguish of David’s prayers.^[3]Romans 8vv21-25  All around us, there are those praying, “How long until I see you?”  “How long until I am healed?” “How long until there is joy?” When we pray this psalm on behalf of our neighbors, we bear one another’s burdens and partner with God in their redemption and healing.

The second direction is more introspective.  What are you hoping for right now?  What’s the thing that seems to elude you, standing off in the distance just out of reach?  What direction is your life pointed towards?  Do you long with the aches of how long?  Do you long to see the Lord face to face?  Are your hopes heaven-shaped?  In the psalms, we are invited towards a reorientation of our whole lives.  Ps. 13 is shaping our hopes around the things of God, putting our own self-centered dreams through the fire of God’s desires and heart for the world.  What emerges from the furnace is a life of purified gold that seeks the Lord first and receives every gift from his hand with gratitude and worship.

For meditation:
-Where is God trying to reshape and reorient your longings?
-Who in your life do you need to cry out with in solidarity, “How long?”
-This prayer is a good spiritual discipline to apply when, as we so often are, you encounter overwhelming suffering and devastation.  When you are faced with the catastrophes of our world, train your immediate response to be a simple prayer:  how long?  This initiates us into the suffering of our world and orients our hopes towards the one who has overcome it.

Psalm 12 draws a sharp contrast between the words of the wicked and the words of the Lord.  The psalmist enters his plea into the courtroom in vv.1-3:

Help, O Lord, for there is no longer anyone who is godly: the faithful have disappeared from humankind.  They utter lies to each other with flattering lips and a double they heart they speak.

It’s interesting how the words of the ungodly are entered as articles of evidence against them.  Were we not always taught that “sticks and stones would break our bones but word would never hurt us?”  Notice also, these words are not spoken from within the circle of the ungodly to the oppressed masses, rather these are the words shared in conversation between the ungodly.  So why would a bunch of lies and empty flattery shared between people claiming to be friends be of any concern to the world at large?  I think the key is in v. 8b:

Vileness is exalted among humankind.

The words shared between the wicked are not the cause of the state of the world, rather they are the clearest evidence of the collective bent of the human heart.  Instead of focusing on the things that really matter, things like truth, beauty, justice, and love, people everywhere are focused on themselves, spending their time and their words on inanity and gossip.  The psalmist, like us, lives in a reality TV world where the conversations shared in polite society are the most damning evidence that the world has lost its mind.  Think about our own world.  Think about how much time we all spend on promoting a facade, think about how much mindless scrolling occupies the minutes, and seconds of our lives, think about a world where binge-watching is seen as almost a good.  We spend our days looking at screens which claim to be windows to the world at large, but what we find is that are merely mirrors reflecting back our hollow souls.^[1]The first episode in the Netflix series, Black Mirror, is a haunting depiction of our world.  In such a state, how could we have anything good to say?  It’s easier just to talk about ourselves.

In v. 5 it is the Lord who speaks:

Because the poor are despoiled, because the needy groan, I will now rise up, says the Lord.  I will place them in the safety for which they long.

The Lord speaks and he does not even address the words of the wicked.  Their words don’t even warrant consideration.  Rather he turns his words immediately to the poor.  The one’s who suffer physically in a world without any sense of meaning are always the marginalized.  But their suffering will not be ignored, it is their plight which rouses the Lord to action.  While the ungodly long for entertainment and to be lifted up, it is the longings of the poor, longings for safety and security which will be met by the Lord.  Jesus says it this way:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.  Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.^[2]Matthew 5vv3-12

 

For reflection:

-Spend time in silence away from any screens.  Read the psalm three times through and ask the Lord, “What are you trying to say to me?”
-How can you seek the beauty of the Lord in the entertainment that you enjoy?  How can you seek new revelations revealed in artistic works such as TV shows, movies, and music?  How can you glorify God in rest?
-What practices can you adopt to opt out of the cycle of empty talk and empty entertainment?

Verse for meditation:
Ps. 12v6:  The promises of the LORD are promises that are pure, silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times.

“If the foundations are destroyed what can the righteous do?” (v. 3).

David’s world is tearing at the seams.  The fabric of polite society, the ethos that upholds a peaceful and civil society has eroded. People are cruel and bombastic, without regard for human decency. Everywhere he looks there is more violence.  Snipers load their weapons and shoot indiscriminately into crowds of the innocent (v. 2).  David’s world sounds like hell.  What’s worse, David’s world sounds a lot like our own world a lot of the time.  And the temptation for David is no different than so many of us undoubtedly feel:  with all the darkness in the world should we just run and hide (v. 1)

Its unclear to me whether our own world is more saturated with fear, violence, and evil than ages prior but what I do know is that those of us in the western world who have smart phones in our pockets or computers in our house are more inundated with these images than ever before.  So how are we to respond when our eyes are constantly confronted with suffering and wickedness?  Surely we would rather just ignore it altogether.  Often we try to numb ourselves to the pain of our world by inundating ourselves with entertainment or mindless scrolling.  This is a form of flight.  But look again at what David says in v. 1:

1 In the LORD I take refuge; how can you say to me, “Flee like a bird to the mountains;

David is asking, “How can I run and hide when the Lord is my refuge?”  David is saying that his only recourse in this world of wickedness is to take refuge in the Lord.  He goes on to describe the certainty that the Lord will make it right, he will enact justice.  He chooses to stand and fight but not with his hands, but to entrust himself to God.  He implores God to act with urgency.  He prays.  Prayer is the battleground, the theater of the battle between good and evil and the Lord is inviting us into the fight.

For meditation:
What are your responses to injustice?
What would it look like to pray for God to act in these spaces?
How does this psalm instruct us to engage the news in our world?

“All their thoughts are, ‘There is no God.'”  This is the psalmist’s diagnosis of the most successful people in his world—a powerful group collectively called “the wicked”.  Hidden within this observation is a question:  “God, are you watching this?”  The psalmist continues, “Their ways prosper at all times; your judgments are on high, out of their sight; as for their foes…”  In other words, the psalmist is suggesting that something is getting lost in translation between the heavenly judgments of God and the facts on the ground.  It seems that the one’s who are getting ahead in our world those who are willing to climb on the backs of others.  The rich get richer at the expense of the poor and they think to themselves, “God has forgotten, he has hidden his face, he will never see it” (v. 11).

It is always tempting to take things at face value.  In our world, no different than the psalmists, it just seems like the good girls and guys can’t win.  But the psalmist counters the observations of his eyes with his expectant hope that God does in fact see the things that take place on the earth.  He sees and he cares deeply (v. 14).   And beyond that, he is able to judge rightly and bring about true justice.  The psalmist implores him to do so:

Break the arm of the wicked and evildoers; seek out their wickedness until you find none.

David asks the Lord to act and to disable those who oppressing their neighbors.  But at the close of this psalm, this is his only request.  Surrounding this imploring of God to act is theology.  Look at what he says in v. 14:

But you do see! Indeed you note trouble and grief, that you may take it into your hands; the helpless commit themselves to you; you have been the helper of the orphan.

And again in vv. 16-18:

The LORD is king forever and ever; the nations shall perish from his land.   Psa. 10:17    O LORD, you will hear the desire of the meek; you will strengthen their heart, you will incline your ear 18 to do justice for the orphan and the oppressed, so that those from earth may strike terror no more.

Even though everything David sees would tell him, echoing Longfellow, “that hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men,” his faith tells him otherwise.  In order to combat injustice, we not only need righteous indignation we need deep theological reflection and prayer.  The psalms invite us to the intersection of this sort of rich theology and bold, unflinching prayer.  Jesus, in announcing the “Kingdom has come near” declares that through his power and life, that the justice of God is no longer a pipe dream but that the judgments of heaven have come to earth at last.