Last year our college ministry spent the summer in the Psalms, and our staff directional team took turns writing devotionals for each Psalm that we covered. While I am traveling and working on some long term projects this summer, I thought I’d share some of the devotionals I wrote. Today’s is on Psalm 122, which you can read here.

Imagine you are one of the children of Israel, in the generations after exile.

You were born of a people covenanted to Yahweh God, married to the Most High. Your ancestors followed Yahweh out of Egypt, through the wilderness and into the land of promise – Israel. You grew up listening to stories of the golden years – when Israel was united under King David and worship centered around the temple in Jerusalem. Jerusalem, named the city or fountain of shalom (peace, wholeness,  flourishing.) But along with those golden stories, you also grew up with stories of darkness, consequences, judgment. Your ancestors, your people, were unfaithful to Yahweh. They joined themselves to other gods, sought protection through military might and treaties with foreign nations rather than in Yahweh your God. And so – as was promised in the ancient texts, and warned of by prophet after prophet, the mighty men of old – your people were removed from the land. Carried off by the very foreign powers they had looked to for safety and security. Jerusalem, the city of peace, was lost. The temple in ruins, the people were removed from the land of promise. You inherited generational guilt and consequences of sin, through no fault of your own – you were born into exile.

Imagine you are one of the children of Israel born in exile. You were raised on these stories, but you were also raised on promise – the promise of Yahweh’s lovingkindness, the promise of the prophets – that after the judgment would come restoration and return, and some day, a Messiah. A Christ. A King to return Israel to what she should have been. A return of Shalom to Jerusalem, the city of Shalom. And now you are seeing kept promises begin to rise like dawn. Jerusalem is being restored. The temple is being rebuilt. Your people are allowed to make the yearly pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship. The Psalms are your songbook, and as you make the long trek home, you sing the Psalms of Ascent. Step by step you are getting closer. Closer to seeing Yahweh’s promises fulfilled, closer to the hope of the Messiah, closer to Jerusalem.

You sing: Read more

Last year our college ministry spent the summer in the Psalms, and our staff directional team took turns writing devotionals for each Psalm that we covered. While I am traveling and working on some long term projects this summer, I thought I’d share some of the devotionals I wrote. 

I love Christians, but sometimes we say dumb things.

Years ago, in a hard season, people kept telling my friend Rae “God never gives us more than we can handle.” She finally said, “I think God has severely overestimated my abilities!”

It made me laugh, but can we all agree that God has never promised not to give us more than we can handle?

Personally I find most of life more than I can handle. And more often than not, the pathway to deeper dependence on God and faith has been not my ability to handle things, but my inability.

Maybe we say things like “God never gives us more than we can handle” because we’re uncomfortable with suffering. We think we need to fix it, to make it better, to get over it.

Psalm 88 presents a vastly different response to prolonged suffering. This is the saddest of all the laments, called by many “the dark corner of the Psalms.” Read more

Last year our college ministry spent the summer in the Psalms, and our staff directional team took turns writing devotionals for each Psalm that we covered. While I am on vacation this summer, I thought I’d share some of the devotionals I wrote. 

Food tastes best when you’re hungry.

Rest is sweet to the exhausted.

A shower is never more enjoyable than when you’re covered in sweat and dirt.

Safety is taken for granted by those who are used to it. But for those in danger and hardship, security is a gift. A blessed relief.

With these truths in mind, read Psalm 66.

Come and see the works of God, Who is awesome in His deeds toward the sons of men.  He turned the sea into dry land; They passed through the river on foot; There let us rejoice in Him! He rules by His might forever; His eyes keep watch on the nations; Let not the rebellious exalt themselves. Selah.

Bless our God, O peoples, and sound His praise abroad, who keeps us in life and does not allow our feet to slip.

For You have tried us, O God; You have refined us as silver is refined. You brought us into the net; You laid an oppressive burden upon our loins. You made men ride over our heads; We went through fire and through water, Yet You brought us out into a place of abundance. (Psalm 66:5 – 12)

Psalm 66 tells a tale of deliverance, of danger and privation, followed by being led into abundance, “Finally he brought us to this well-watered place.” (v. 12, The Mssg)

No wonder the response is praise:

I shall come into Your house with burnt offerings; I shall pay You my vows, which my lips uttered and my mouth spoke when I was in distress. I shall offer to You burnt offerings of fat beasts, With the smoke of rams; I shall make an offering of bulls with male goats. Selah.

Come and hear, all who fear God, And I will tell of what He has done for my soul. (Psalm 66:13 – 16)

The psalmist experiences God as one who hears, who delivers, who restores and leads and comforts.

For those in danger and hardship, security is a gift and a blessed relief. Read more

Last year our college ministry spent the summer in the Psalms, and our staff directional team took turns writing devotionals for each Psalm that we covered. While I am on vacation this summer, I thought I’d share some of the devotionals I wrote. This one is on Psalm 6,  which you can read here.

O Lord, do not rebuke me in Your anger,
Nor chasten me in Your wrath.
Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am pining away;
Heal me, O Lord, for my bones are dismayed.

Psalm 6  is the first of the Confessional (penitent) Psalms in the book of Songs. Studying penitent Psalms means thinking and talking about sin.

The Hebrew people – at least as they are represented by the psalmists – seem to have had a much more open relationship with sin than we do. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like talking about sin. My history with conversations about sin is colored by groups of people calling other people sinners. As a Bible teacher, it’s awfully hard to talk about sin without condemning and judging – and only God is judge. This makes it so much easier to avoid the topic. But perhaps that tendency blinds us from embracing a healthy awareness of our own sin?

I want to learn from the Psalmists’ openness and understanding of human sinfulness and a holy God. Read more

Last year our college ministry spent the summer in the Psalms, and our staff directional team took turns writing devotionals for each Psalm that we covered. While I am traveling and working on some long term projects this summer, I thought I’d share some of the devotionals I wrote. This one is on the second half of Psalm 44,  which you can read here.

On Tuesday we talked about finding the honesty – together as a community – to say things to God like, “it feels like you have rejected and forsaken us.”

As I watch the news – violence near and far, division of all types, anger, hate fear – I do sometimes feel like we are in God-forsaken times. And when I see that violence, division, anger, hate and fear in people who claim the name of Jesus, I just don’t know what to say. WHY does God stand by and let this happen?

Join me in asking Psalm 44 to be our tutor. I am looking here for what we can learn about what to do as a community when it feels like oppression is running rampant. Read more

Last year our college ministry spent the summer in the Psalms, and our staff directional team took turns writing devotionals for each Psalm that we covered. While I am on vacation this summer, I thought I’d share some of the devotionals I wrote. This one is on the fist half of Psalm44,  which you can read here.

Psalm 44 is categorized as a corporate lament – it is an expression of grief or anger, written to be expressed by a community, an assembly, a people. I feel very free to express my grief and questions to God on my own, but I see an honesty in the Lament Psalms (this one in particular) that makes me uncomfortable. Expressing this sort of honesty in public spaces, as a part of worship, feels unimaginable.

The Psalmist knows God’s history of goodness.

O God, we have heard with our ears, Our fathers have told us the work that You did in their days, In the days of old. You with Your own hand drove out the nations…For by their own sword they did not possess the land, and their own arm did not save them, but Your right hand and Your arm and the light of Your presence, for You favored them. (v.1-3)

This is the story of my people, the Psalmist cries. Those who came into blessing and victory not by might or by power, but by God’s spirit. And we – the Psalmist asserts – we will be a people who follow in those footsteps.

You are my King, O God; Command victories for Jacob. Through You we will push back our adversaries; Through Your name we will trample down those who rise up against us. For I will not trust in my bow, Nor will my sword save me. (v. 4-6)

The people of God expected victory. They expected the same outcome as their forefathers. But this is not a victory song.

Yet You have rejected us and brought us to dishonor, And do not go out with our armies. You cause us to turn back from the adversary; And those who hate us have taken spoil for themselves.

You give us as sheep to be eaten And have scattered us among the nations. You sell Your people cheaply, And have not profited by their sale. You make us a reproach to our neighbors, A scoffing and a derision to those around us. You make us a byword among the nations, A laughingstock among the peoples.

All day long my dishonor is before me and my humiliation has overwhelmed me… (v. 9-15)

We went went out in the name of our God and we have been brought low. We are God’s people and now we are a laughingstock, a reproach to the world. Why? Look at the first word in each those verses. You. You. You. You. You.

That is some real talk.

The Psalmist is accusing God of unfaithfulness, of being the source of their downfall. Is it OK to say that to a God you believe is GOOD?

I believe in God’s goodness. I hold tightly to God’s goodness. Reading Psalm 44, I want the Psalmist to turn the corner, to say that in the end of the story his people got the same outcome as their forefathers, “But your right hand and your arm and the light of Your presence saved them, for You favored them!” I want to shed some eternal perspective on this psalm.

But this is not a victory song. At this point in the Psalmist’s journey, overcoming was not his story (yet.) So he accuses and complains and laments.

And God apparently did not strike the Psalmist dead. As far as we know from Scripture, there’s no correction, no consequence for accusing God of abandoning His people. In fact, this Psalm and many like it were encased in Hebrew canon and then passed into Christian Holy Word.

As I read Psalm 44, I wonder how God felt, hearing his people sing this song.

How would He feel now if I were to be honest about my response to bad news and the current state of the world? If I publicly expressed that it feels like He has abandoned us and is allowing His people to be a laughingstock and reproach among the nations?

How did God feel, and how would He feel now?

Mad? Disappointed? Wishing we had the eternal perspective to trust Him?

Maybe.

Or maybe God understands.

In His great heart of empathy and compassion, maybe God knows how far away He feels to us sometimes, as the result of the fallen world and the Genesis 3 knowledge of good and evil. Maybe His eternal heart has room for all of our pain and honesty and accusations.

Maybe this is the reason faith is required for relationship with God – not to earn eternity or grace from Him (as if we could earn anything). Maybe He knows that the realities of this fallen world make it awfully hard to trust a God who feels very far away sometimes.

Jesus on the cross echoes another lament Psalm, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Maybe, when we’re honest, God cries with us and whispers, wait.

If you’re interested in reading any of the other Psalms devotionals from last summer (I was very impressed with my coworkers’ writing skills, I really enjoyed every one of these!), you can look around over here.

Last year our college ministry spent the summer in the Psalms, and our staff directional team took turns writing devotionals for each Psalm that we covered. While I am on vacation this summer, I thought I’d share some of the devotionals I wrote. This one is on the second half of Psalm 18,  which you can read here.

After becoming a Christian halfway through college, I was introduced to the concept of getting out of my comfort zone. Fear has always been a big issue for me, and as a young believer I latched onto the idea of trusting God enough to try things that scare me.

As I approached my last summer in college, I had one PE requirement to fulfill. Since I have been deathly afraid of heights my whole life, I decided to take a class called Venture Dynamics – a “Challenge Ropes Course” class that’s still offered at my university, and is described as “designed to increase a student’s sense of personal worth and esteem, promote personal and group interaction, and develop an increased awareness of one’s physical self.” I had no idea how far out of my comfort zone this class would take me. Read more