Psalm 25, 29, 33, 36, 39

What a great groupings of Psalms to remind us that we are in a conversation with God, not a series of encounters. God is not a concert we attend to be entertained, thrilled, adrenalinized...He longs for us to be in a passion filled, life defining, moment by moment governing, loving, covenantal relationship with Him, our Father! These Psalms remind us as such.

Psalm 25 is bringing to Him our needs, our cry, our desperation, our reality and then come on...Psalm 29 gives reveals how our conversations with God flow, He answers! But He doesn't answer in ways that are difficult to discern if it is in fact His voice, He is unmistakeable! His voice "shatters the cedars...flashes flames of fire...shakes the wilderness."

We must not over-elevate Elijah's post Carmel encounter with the voice of God. We must remember that the WHOLE of Scripture is our truth, not in part. The great truth of Elijah in the cave is that He speaks to us in a manner that is unmistakeable, which sometimes for us, as it was with Elijah, is a still small voice and yet other times as it was for David...universe splitting volume!

Then as we progress through these Psalms, we come to 33, a great praise and celebration in response to our hearing His voice. We celebrate, we declare, we proclaim, we worship!

But as conversations go, they have moments where they rise and fall in feelings, in volume...and even flow in subject matter. These Psalms remind us that while we may find His voice in response to one prayer and in turn rejoice in our having heard...we have other matters outstanding. Like a masterfully written novel, our God conversation is filled with concurrent plot lines, characters, both friendly and foe...our lives are complex...we move back into other needs, others situations for which we are equally desperate for His reply.

The final Psalm is a great capstone to this look at a God conversation as it reminds us that even though we should engage these conversations as if we are God's only child, engage these conversations as if our needs are His only concern! His love is so grand that we are made to feel as such, but we must never forget that this life is but a mere moment of our eternity and whatever may feel unresolved, unanswered is never because we have lost His attention or that He has reached His capacity to respond concurrently to so much of humanity or that...but only and always because in perfection and sovereignty, our waiting is a result of sovereign intentionality. Our impatience is oftentimes because we fail to see how our finite story is so wonderfully woven into the infinite purposes of our Father! But remember, na epiphany of the brevity of life and the smallness of our humanity is never to belittle us but rather give us a greater revelation of His love, we being so small yet still His love for us so very great.

How's your God conversation going?

Pastor Fred

2 Samuel 7 / 1 Chronicles 17

These are parallel texts to one another and I want to work out of 2 Samuel 7, specifically verses 11b - 17. This is wonderful example of where God is speaking to both the actual events of history in the immediate future as well as prophetically of what is to come centuries later. Here, God is speaking of both Solomon and Jesus. The relevance to Solomon is self explanatory if you are familiar with the coming history of Israel. Let me overlay though the relevance to Jesus...this is beginning with 11b through 17, adding my commentary to reveal its prophetic relevance...

"The Lord declares to you: The Lord Himself will make a house for you (The Church). When your time comes and you rest with your fathers, I will raise up after you your descendants, who will come from your body (Matthew 1:6-7,16), and I will establish His kingdom (Luke 1:32-33). He will build a house for My name, and I will establish the throne of His kingdom forever (Matthew 16:18). I will be a father to Him, and he will be a Son to Me (Matthew 3:17 & Mark 9:7). When He does wrong, I will discipline Him with a human rod and with blows from others (not that Jesus ever does wrong but rather that He dies for the wrongs that we have committed, His substitutionary death...Colossians 1:19-20). But my faithful love will never leave Him as I removed it from Saul; I removed him from your way (we are powerless to remove the obstacles that separate us from God, mainly our Saul like heart, a heart that is inherently self-serving and although we deserve a graceless response from God like Saul received, we receive His grace because of Jesus, Isaiah 53 & Romans 3:23, 6:23 & Ephesians 2:8). Your house and kingdom will endure before Me forever, and your throne will be established forever (Acts 2:29-35).

If we believe that all of Scripture is God breathed, what does it mean to you if God, knowing He had limited space, chose to repeat something? I say because there is something in there that is important to Him! When we come across such texts, don't say, "I've read this before..." We must on the contrary say, "Lord, clearly this is important to you, may it be as important to me, help me see what it is that you long for me to know!"

The Holy Spirit is our teacher, our ever present revelatory power (John 16:5-16 & 1 Corinthians 2:9-16) and He wants such revelation to be imparted to us! God's heart is one to reveal, not to hide, find Him and His truth always!!

Pastor Fred

Psalm 96/101/32

As I have blogged before, we trying to stop using the term "contemporary worship" to describe the music and singing the opens our corporate gatherings with praise and adoration to God. Truly, it is ancient! I think David scoffs in Heaven every time he hears someone use the term "contemporary worship." He says, "Hey, take 3,000 year ago look and see what we were doing!" Their worship was expressive, loud, joyful, celebrative, instrumental, corporate, dance filled, shouting, enthusiastic...3,000 years ago! The only argument we can make is that we have electricity, so maybe we can justify the use of a term like "technologically modern" but I don't think that term will catch on any time soon! Our worship is Psalmic, Davidic, ancient...

Pastor Fred

Psalm 89 / 105

In verses 28-37, we first need to understand the term "horn." This refers to one's lineage, their coming genealogy, the family tree that will flow from them. A common perception of God's favor in the Old Testament was that one's family would be both numerous and prosperous. But we also need to remember that often God's promises are prophetic, speaking to the future and spiritual, meaning that the fulfillment of the promise is within a heavenly kingdom and not a natural one. And here, while there is certainly a temporal application to God's promise regarding David's political kingdom, the greater application is a spiritual one, the Kingdom of Heaven. Much of God's promise regarding the "horn" of David is referencing Jesus. Read Matthew 1:1-17 and find how Jesus if from David's line, his "horn."

Our inability to recognize the eternal perspective of much of God's promises can lead to disappointment. This is where verses 38-52 come in to play. David is lamenting the reality of his circumstances in light of his perceived promise from God. He is unable to reconcile is present life with the promises of God. But much of his disappointment is due to his lack of grasping the prophetic nature of God's promise. What if David had known what God was planning with his "horn." What temporal circumstances could have begun to displace his joy, his excitement? Nothing! As with Abraham, the promises of God to him seemed so much more grand than the temporal fulfillment Abraham witnessed...because their ultimate grandeur was to be fulfilled spiritually, not practically.

Psalm 105 is one of my favorite texts that speak to providence, God's had at work in history, advancing His divine will. Read this Psalm and see how many "He..." statements you can identify. For example, verse 41 reads, "He opened..." He is at work in your life equally intentional!

We too struggle with disappointment, but we need to view the reality of our moment in light of eternity. Too often we find our circumstances irreconcilable to what we perceive to be His promise to us...remember His promise is far beyond our generation, He is always working to fulfill the future and sometimes the tenor of our day feels incongruent with our expectation of Him, just as David expressed in Psalm 89.

In those moments, recall Isaiah 26:4, "Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord, the Lord is the Rock eternal."

Pastor Fred

Psalm 47/48

So how exactly can we not fully yield our lives to Him?

Pastor Fred

Psalms 15/22-24

First a thought about Psalm 22. Just in case you feel the temptation to minimize the prophetic significance of this Psalm by saying Jesus was just quoting what He knew had already been written, may we not forget the Romans who crucified Him certainly were not following a Hebraic script. In verses 16 and 18 we see David speaking prophetically the manner by which Jesus would be sacrificed and also the soldiers casting lots for His garments...if you are looking for a great study, check out the Thompson Chain Study Bible identification of all the Old Testament prophetic moments in speaking of Christ.

Here are some thoughts as you study these four Psalms...

(15) He sets our goal...will you let Him?

(22) He takes our place...will you let Him?

(23) He guides our path...will you let Him?

(24) He rules our lives...will you let Him?

Pastor Fred

Psalm 1-2/101

I grew up in a rural community and building fences were not done by landscapers, it was a family affair. Long before HGTV romanticized home projects, in Varina, it was known as Saturday! My father would make sure the lawn mower passed by our bedroom windows if we were still enjoying slumber...the every reliable briggs and stratton alarm clock!

But putting up a fence was not just for any Saturday. You wanted a Saturday when the week prior had ample rain. Soft ground, water saturated, soil loosening, dirt unbinding rain for days prior. I see rental equipment advertised as they lay in parking lots, catching the attention of people driving by; I always look longingly at the augers, the oversized cork screws with a motor. Then check my hands, certain there must be a lingering blister there from decades before...we had a post hole digger.

What does Psalm 1 and 2 speak to me? They say, saturate yourself in God's presence. He wants to sink some posts deep into our hearts, posts that He will in turn use to build boundaries, truth fences, not to rob us of meaning and pleasure, on the contrary, but to release us more freely into the depths of eternal life.

In the Apologetics Study Bible, Psalm 101 is entitled "A Vow of Integrity." Make this vow, fences up!

Pastor Fred