Your gentleness made me great: reflections on Psalm 18
‘Your gentleness made me great.’ Sometimes a line in God’s word really strikes you. This one did me. But number eighteen in the divine songbook is not a nice, lovey-dovey psalm. David was on the run from many enemies. He wasn’t exactly enjoying a quiet, easy life. Psalm 18 is a psalm of war, not peace.
Seeing the Psalms as the songs that Jesus wrote
The Psalms are the songs that Jesus wrote. You might think that an incongruous notion–after all, don’t the Psalm superscriptions name other authors? And yet I have the cheek to suggest that Jesus wrote the Psalms?! What about David, ‘the sweet psalmist of Israel’?
Seeing the Psalms as the songs that Jesus sung
Songs connect with us emotionally in ways that no other form of expression can. Songs reverberate around our heads more than plain words do. In this post, I want to argue that if we want to be more like Jesus and live more like Him, then we need to sing the Psalms just like He did.
Seeing the Psalms as the songs that speak about Jesus
It’s staggering to think that as we read, sing and pray the Psalms, we use the same words Jesus Himself would’ve used during His time on earth.
What seven years in a Presbyterian church has taught me
I’m a Baptist, the son of a Baptist. So it may surprise you to learn that for the past seven years I’ve been a member of a Presbyterian church. Now that Presbyterianism has been somewhat demystified for me, here are some things that I’ve learnt.
Bochim: rediscovering a theology of lament
Today it seems that followers of Jesus have largely forgotten what it means to lament. But there is much to lament, in our own hearts and lives, in our churches and in our land. Life is hard; so many people are suffering because of the curse on us due to sin. We need to rediscover a biblical theology of lament.
Reading Psalm 119 one verse a day
I followed an old Puritan challenge of reading one verse from Psalm 119 each day. The psalm is all about the psalmist’s love of God’s word so it lends itself quite naturally to this practice. Here’s what I learnt along the way…
Don’t start with your problem(s), start with God
For believers, the ultimate end-point of everything is certain: an eternity with God in paradise. But that’s definitely not always how we start when confronted with a trial or problem in the day-to-day. To endure through dark times, we must take our eyes off of ourselves and our problem(s) and fix them instead on Christ Jesus.