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