Day 50 - Psalm 150

Praise the LORD.
     Praise God in his sanctuary;
     praise him in his might heavens.
Praise him for his acts of power;
     praise him for his surpassing greatness.
Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet,
     praise him with the harp and lyre,
praise him with tambourine and dancing,
     praise him with the strings and flute,
praise him with the clash of cymbals,
     praise him with resounding cymbals.
Let everything that has breath praise the LORD.
     Praise the LORD.


Do you ever have days where you don't feel like praising God? I'll admit that I do. Life is hard sometimes and when it is hard, it seems the words of praise don't keep to our lips quite so readily.

And yet the book of Psalms ends with a psalm of praise. And furthermore, the psalmist doesn't say that we should praise God when all is going well...or when we like our circumstances...or when we are blessed. He simply says to praise God. I think it is reasonable to assume that he means to praise God in all circumstances (an idea backed up by other scripture as well).

That's a challenge, isn't it? How do we praise God when we are daily pressed on every front by life? I don't know that I have the wherewithal to praise him through everything...but I know some people who challenge me to do that every day.

Eleven years ago when Terre Conner was diagnosed with breast cancer, a friend of Terre and Dennis told Dennis, "We will praise God anyway." That speaks to a trust and confidence that no matter what life throws at us, it has been sifted through God's heart and hand before it ever touched us...and that has been the one constant through the last 11 years in Dennis and Terre's lives. Through years of treatment, surgeries, relapses, and remissions, Dennis and Terre praised God. And invited us to join them in their praise. Terre even wrote a song based on Psalm 9, sung in the video below by the Brooks Avenue praise teams.

Terre went home to her reward on Thursday night. Praise God for the healing she has now received. Praise God for the lives she touched. Praise God for his faithfulness to her. Praise God that we will see Terre again one day.

Let everything that has breath praise the LORD.

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I would be remiss in not thanking the blog team for the Summer in the Psalms blog. Nolan Davis, Bob Diamond, Andrea Eller, Sandy Welfare, and Norman and Melissa Wilson did a marvelous job with their assignments and this blog wouldn't have happened without them. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts, your hearts, and your lives with us through the last 50 days. 

May God be glorified in all we do!

- submitted by Holly Barrett

Day 49 - Psalm 147

Psalm 147:3 says, "he heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds." We feel with our hearts. We love with our hearts. When our hearts are broken, we feel as if we have no purpose. The heart is our center.

The heart is the target of everything spiritual: every battle, struggle...and every joy. Every choice and every behavior I am involved in says something about my heart. It says what is important to my heart. My body always goes where my heart leads it. Yet, we do't talk about our hearts much. When I'm having a problem, I want a way to fix it and make myself better. I want my heart to feel whole.

Psalm 147 points us back to the way to heal our broken hearts. It is to place our focus solely on Christ and his love for us. Is that what gets you out of bed in the morning? The love of Christ? We all want to understand our purpose for living, and that purpose is really quite simple: it is to love with the love of Christ as he compels us to regard no one and nothing from a worldly point of view.

Everything is spiritual.

              Everything is about love.

                             Everything is about God.

- submitted by Sandy Welfare

Day 48 - Psalm 144

The Force With Us

Amazing that David was in such a high position and at the same time totally saw his place as powerless, weak, hopeless, failing, but for God! And he was happily confident in his pathetic state!

We should all be so aware of our place! But so often we think that success comes from ability - our own. And we end up, like the old song says, "reaching up to touch the ground, to find we're living life upside down."

David confidently knew that he rose up because God lifted him up. We read of the battles David fought, led, won - and David says, "He subdues my people under me." Little surprise that he was also the boy that said that God delivered him from the mouth of the lion and the bear, and that God would deliver him from the Philistine. (See encounter with Goliath.)

Certainly we know David wasn't perfect. (See encounter with Bathsheba.) But this is yet another great lesson we should learn from David. Our successes are not ours alone. They really are not ours at all! We belong to God, so our successes belong to God, are from God, and are because of God.

He knew that if God protected the kingdom, then the collective sons would grow tall and strong, the collective daughters would be solid and beautiful. The storehouses would be full and the flocks plentiful. When God is in control, we are prepared for battle and our enemies are defeated. The Force is with(in) us! The Lord trains our hands for battle and our fingers for warfare.

May the leaders of our congregation draw strength from the same well as did David. May we remember, as we lead in our families, our workplaces, and our schools, that our strength and our success are only in the LORD.

Then there will be "no breach in the walls, no going into captivity, and no cry of lament in our public squares." Contemplate that in not just the physical realm, but also the spiritual. No breach in the walls. What threatens you?

No captivity. What holds you?

No cry of lament. What grieves you?

Draw strength from the One that defined strength.

"Happy are the people with such blessings.
Happy are the people whose God is the LORD."

- submitted by Andrea Eller

Day 47 - Psalm 141

No rain, no rain, no rain. There's a MercyMe song title "Jesus Bring the Rain." It talks about our trials compared to those of Jesus and sums up by saying I'll accept whatever brings you glory..."Jesus bring the rain"

In the 141st Psalm, David asks God for help. David says keep me out of trouble, keep me from saying stupid things, and I'll gladly accept the rebuke of the righteous. You don't hear that often. The first two bits, sure...keep me safe, help me do some of that L1, L2 stuff...yeah, yeah. That's not new. But David doesn't overlook the part about accepting rebuke...acknowledging that there are folks better at things than him...faster, smarter, stronger, better musicians, you name it.

For David, this wasn't about pride or about serving self in any sense. David was earnestly seeking God's provision, guidance, security, and correction. And no, it's not just you. I can count on one hand (or less) the number of times I've asked God for correction and rebuke. We don't want that. But praise, God, He knows what we need and, because He loves us and is uniquely interested in our development, He brings rebuke. He answers not only the prayers we are lifting up by our voices, but also the prayers somewhere deep down we concede but never give voice to.

We need God. We need His grace and provision. We need Him as the absolute, immovable, unchanging reference point for our lives. We need God because He's wired us all to seek fulfillment...the kind you can't get from anything this life has to offer. We need God. We need His omniscient hand over and in our lives because as His children - and like children - we often think we know what we need. Praise God He really knows and cares enough to say no.

David prayed to God for protection, for guidance, and for refinement, because He knew that God cares and God can. Pay attention to the tense. David knew (past tense), but God cares and can (present tense).

As soon as you stop reading this, ask God to continue working on you. Ask Him for protection, for guidance, and for rebuke (yup, ask, cause He's going to provide what you need). You are "undone"...unraveled and not yet complete.

But that's a blog for another day.

- submitted by Norman & Melissa Wilson

Day 46 - Psalm 137

Israel: The Nation that Won't Stay Conquered

Psalm 137 © 2000 Graphic by Irv Davis

Psalm 137, probably written by the Old Testament prophet, Jeremiah, expresses the yearnings of the Jewish people in exile, following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BC; that the Jews would never celebrate again until they were back in their homeland.

The early lines of the poem are very well known, as they describe the sadness of the Israelites, asked to "sing the Lord's song in a foreign land." This they refused to do, leaving their harps hanging in trees. The poem then turns into self-exhortation to remember Jerusalem.

Today, Jews fast and read out loud the scroll of Lamentations on Tisha B'Av, a holiday that commemorates their exile from Zion.  

The verses at the end, wishing for the children of Babylon to be bashed, is an indication of how much the author wanted revenge for the destruction of the Temple and for being torn from the land that God had given the Jews.

Click here to see a PBS Special: Kingdom of David: By the Rivers of Babylon: 

- submitted by Bob Diamond

Day 45 - Psam 134

The sound of the radio came as a shock to my system. I was fully aware that it was on and could call me or any of the rest of the staff to action at anytime, but I was giving it little thought as I was too engrossed in my game of cards. A voice on the other end said the phrase I didn't want to hear, "Tango for one! Tango for one! I repeat, Tango For One!" "Tango for one" was the code phrase for a missing camper, and as a male staff member trained in water rescue, it was now up to me to hit the trail running in search of a little one that was missing.

I made a full-on spring down the gravel road towards the edge of the lake where my search area started. The time was now 12:27 AM and I had almost a mile to run up a mountain on rough trails looking for a little girl. I had just about five minutes to make my search. If the camper was in distress in the water, that was all the time it would take for them to drown. My bright blue Maglite barely kept me from falling over the rocks and roots as I sprinted around the lake with everything that I had. I was already tired from a full day of watching kids and playing games but the adrenaline in my veins gave me new strength to keep pushing. The trail got steeper and the woods more dense. I knew I was now more than half a mile from my nearest help. If this little girl was in danger it was all up to me. With no luck and three minutes gone, fear began to kick in. Just after the halfway point of my run around the lake, I ran headlong into an inflatable pool toy of a whale. It was tied to a tree and hung in the middle of the path. On its fin was a note that said, "Thank you for saving me! I could have been a real emergency." I got on the radio and informed the other staff members of my find. The director came over the airwave and thanked everyone for their efforts and stated that this was a successful drill in finding a missing camper. I was completely drained, but I knew that if this had been a real emergency, the staff was ready. That I was ready. When the camp ended we had not had to use our safety system again. The campers were safe and protected in ways that they never even knew.

Such is the way that God is. He offers blessings and protections in ways that we will never truly  understand or know. While some of God's blessings are obvious to us in life, most aren't. Even when we are looking for it, the true nature of a blessing can be hard to spot. Fortunately we serve a God who blesses us everyday in every way.

I recently attended a self-defense course given by the Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Office for Emergency and Rescue workers. Even as a young EMT I had already been exposed to gang violence in the streets and combative patients in the ambulance. I knew it was important to listen and listen good. The officer made two things clear from the start. One, that he was a Christian and two, that by being in a Rescue team we had been called by God to be "shepherds." Now don't let my use of the word shepherd here imply that I am now qualified to be a bishop or an elder (depending on your translation). What I am talking about here, and what the officer meant that day, was that there are really only two types of people in life: sheep and shepherds. Most people are sheep. They follow other sheep. They stay with the group and assume that in general the group is good. They spend little time worrying about personal or group safety because there is "safety in numbers." Sheep can be easily fooled and easily harmed by those who have an intention to do so.

This is where the shepherd comes in. Shepherds are the people who stand ready to put themselves in harm's way to protect not just one sheep but the flock. Shepherds are, as Orson Wells put it, "We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." We will never know the full risks and threats that our men and women in the Armed Forces face for us every day. We can never fully understand the dangers that our brave police officers and firefighters face to keep our city safe and standing. We almost never think of the heroes on the other end of 911 until you wake up in the middle of the night with chest pain and difficulty breathing. It takes courage to run into unknown dangers in dark backways and busy highways.

As Americans we are blessed to live in a country where being a shepherd is a common trait among many of our friends and neighbors who "serve the Lord in the night." God keeps us safe by his providence and  his favorite tools to use often come from Providence Road. As you go about your daily walk, remember to thank those who serve the Lord and serve us in the night. Few people want to be in the line of danger and even fewer want to do so at night. So please give thanks to our soldiers, police, firemen, and medics who serve God by serving us.


Note: This is my last addition to the Summer in the Psalms blog. It has been an honor to write and share my heart with you, along with my thoughts about some of God's word. I hope that each of you will continue in prayer and study so as to better understand our God and His will for all of us. May He bless you in your walk with Him, and all you meet along the way.

- submitted by Nolan Davis

Day 44 - Psalm 131

Psalm 131 is one of the shortest Psalms and yet, one of the most poignant.  This is a person who is quiet on the inside.  There doesn’t seem to be a lot of ‘racket’ going on in his head.  He is composed and not living on the edge.  He is not churning inside, always looking for something better.  Anxiety isn’t sending him into a free fall.

This type of composure and peacefulness is learned. We are not born like this. We are born into a world that has gone haywire. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is operating according to God's original design. This type of peace is learned in relationships.

       He's quiet.

                     He's at peace with himself and with God.

                                He is not climbing ladders to nowhere: to success, ambition,
                                wealth, or achievement.

Are you quiet on the inside?

Read this Psalm slowly and listen to every sentence. Memorize it for those times when the racket in your head won't go away. Be still with your God. Know you are his.

- submitted by Sandy Welfare