The Psalms are a favorite for praying, singing and meditation. You probably have several favorite verses from the Psalms. How well do you read the entire book--all 150 psalms, all ~2500 verses? We want to explore how to go further and deeper in the psalms in this season.
If you are getting started in a relationship with God, trying to have a quiet time or seeking guidance at this point in your life, you're in the right place.
Spend your first fifteen minutes of the day listening to God and responding in a personal way. This podcast will show you how and teach you in an easy to follow process.
In fifteen minutes (or less) you will listen to God's word for you, reflect on it and learn to pray to God as well as carry that word with you through the rest of your day. What a perfect way to get started!
In this first episode we discuss three points that face us in the Psalms or humps to get over: History, Hebrew poetry and Harsh language. There is a lot of history in the Old Testament and in the writing of the Psalms. David is no doubt behind many of the psalms but not all of them. The historical background for any individual psalm is often not clear to us. We can pray it anyway. Poetry in any language is challenging, and Hebrew poetry has its own features that are different from English, especially parallelism and the figures of speech. The Church from early days, though, enjoyed and prayed the Psalms even in translation (in Greek and other languages--Latin, Coptic, Syriac, etc.) and we can too. The harsh language of the psalms targets enemies, foes, the wicked--even God! Jesus quoted from the Psalms when he was being tried to the extreme, both at his temptation (Matthew 4) and at his death (Matthew 27). God can hear us at our worst and he wants to bring us to a better place.
We close this episode praying Psalm 13, a short prayer of five verses that echoes the question "How long?" In Hebrew, ad nah is the phrases repeated four times in the first few verses, and God shows us here it's okay for us to question, to wonder, to pray "How long will this last?"
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Season Three has started and I encourage you to get a copy of the book God Help Me Grow: Learning to Pray through the Psalms on Amazon (or ebook)
Download the helpsheet that details and demonstrates the four step process we use on First Fifteen using Psalm 1.
Additional resources at the Word of Prayer website https://word-of-prayer.com