Songs for All Seasons: Connecting the Dots (Ps. 13:1-6)
This weekend, we’ll continue through our once (or sometimes twice) a month walk through the Psalms. We know this will take years, but we’re wanting to model as we gather as a church what we want to encourage us all toward in our individual lives - regularly coming back time and time again to this amazing song and prayer book the Lord has given us. Be sure to join our livestream Sunday as Michael Tooley looks at Psalm 4 with us.
Here is Aarik Danielsen’s sermon preached back on January 19th. It is a fantastic introduction to the book. You can listen to it here. The full manuscript is below.
Songs for All Seasons
What if Karis created one giant mixtape or playlist—each of us contributing a song that defines us. Not the song you play at the gym. Not the song you want people to think is your favorite song. Not even the song you got married to.
I’m talking about the song that, when it comes on, causes you to instinctively close your eyes for a few seconds. The song that puts language to something you can’t express on your own. The song that makes you feel seen and heard, like it was written just for you.
I have a few songs like that. When I feel especially in love with my wife, it’s “Simple Song” by The Shins. “Love’s such a delicate thing that we do / With nothing to prove, which I never knew.” When I feel inadequate as a father and anxious about my son’s future, it’s “Afraid of Everyone” by The National: “With my kid on my shoulders I try / Not to hurt anybody I like ... I’m afraid of everyone.”
But the song that defines me most days comes from the late, great Rich Mullins.This verse carries me along like a current:
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy I cannot find in my own
And he keeps his fire burning to melt this heart of stone
Keeps me aching with a yearning
Keeps me glad to have been caught
In the wreckless, raging fury they call the love of God.
We’re starting a new rhythm. In addition to our regular sermon series, we’ll preach from the Psalms once a month. There are so many reasons to do this. You find Psalms in the middle of the Bible, and at least one scholar has called it the heart of the book. They bridge the Old and New Testaments so perfectly. Psalms is perhaps the most beautiful, lyrical book in the whole Bible—and we can never get too much beauty.
What impresses me most about Psalms is how chock-full it is of songs that define us. Even better than the ones we’d select. It’s an impressive mixtape of human emotion, expressing everything—awful and great—we experience.
More than this, Psalms is the songbook of Jesus. As we’ll start to see today, and understand more fully as we go, every Psalm—just like every other sentence in Scripture—finds fulfillment in him. These songs sound loudest and clearest when they are sung to Jesus, through Jesus and by Jesus.
In Psalms, the true definition of who we are collides with the true definition of who God is. Tremper Longman writes, “As we read the Psalms, we are entering into the sanctuary, the place where God meets men and women in a special way. We will see that the conversation between God and his people is direct, intense, intimate and, above all, honest.”
This morning, I’ll give just a brief overview of what the Psalms are about and show that, if we tune to their frequency, we’ll move ever closer to the abundant life Jesus came to bring.
The Psalms connect the dots between every part of us. The American evangelical church is good at making disconnected disciples. We’re always checking some part of us at the door. We can’t imagine what to do with our bodies that’s not sinful, so we don’t talk about bodies.
Some Christians fear reducing the gospel to a list of propositions, or turning their faith into something cold and rote. They end up placing little emphasis on theology, instead focusing on a personal, subjective experience of God.
Other churches tend to fear their feelings. We’ve seen people follow their hearts down a road to ruin. We’ve seen churches abuse emotion, failing to be sober-minded. We fear honest lament is just the first step toward doubt and resentment and walking out the door. So we tend to make right thinking about God our most important thing.
The Psalms tell us we don’t have to choose between these fundamental parts of ourselves. The Psalms are grounded in a bodily experience of life, and written so that how we feel about God and what we think about him come together to make us fully alive.
The Psalms are not a list of commandments to follow or a historical record to acquaint ourselves with. They are not meant to be divorced from real, messy lives; Christopher Ash notes we can’t cherry-pick verses from them and slap them on motivational posters. They are poetry, and one of the keys to reading poetry is embracing its fullness—allowing every word to work on us as a whole statement.
Eugene Peterson says: “Poets use words to drag us into the depth of reality itself. They do it not by reporting on how life is, but by pushing-pulling us into the middle of it. Poetry grabs for the jugular. Far from being cosmetic language, it is intestinal.”
This is what we find in the Psalms. We struggle to know the difference between being honest and being truthful. Honesty looks like the person who goes to Facebook and posts about how they’re struggling, how disillusioned and lonely they feel. That person is expressing themselves honestly—that’s their reality; it’s how they actually feel.
For many Christians, being truthful means going beyond momentary reality to rehearse true things about God. Someone struggling in the same way chooses instead to talk about how good and sovereign God is. They mention how they trust God to work all things out for their good and his glory.
Typically in Christian circles, we pit honesty and truthfulness against each other. The Psalms calls them into fellowship; we can have both things at once. All of God meets all of us, right where we are.
We see this beautifully in many Psalms. The Psalmist begins by expressing real heartsickness, real betrayal, real trouble. In the Psalms of David, he often writes on the run from real people who want to kill him. We dreamily quote David’s words in Psalm 23 about lying down in green pastures. David didn’t get to write any of that without going through the valley of the shadow of death. This isn’t theoretical; it’s intestinal.
What’s going on inside and outside leads to fear, anger and anxiety. He even calls his relationship with God into question. But as these Psalms go on, he recounts the good things God has done for his people. He reflects on the intimate bond he shares with God. He is able to broker a peace treaty between two seemingly opposite things: anxiety in the present-tense and worship that casts a hopeful eye toward the future.
Psalm 13, for example, proves you can ask questions like “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” You can even cry out, “Consider and answer me, O Lord my God; light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death.” The Psalmist wrote emo songs before emo even existed.
You can say all this and also declare “But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me.”
Other times, the Psalmist writes that all his “bones are out of joint” and his heart is like melted wax (Ps. 22); that he is feeding on his tears (Ps. 42); that he cries himself to sleep (Ps. 6); that he is so distressed he forgets to eat (Ps. 102). Yet, time and again, he soothes himself with memories of God’s intervention. He reassures himself with knowledge of a redeemer who is also his friend. He promises to bear witness in the temple, to declare God’s goodness to the next generation. He speaks words of faith well before his heart catches up.
At other times, the Psalmist is almost delirious with joy, ecstatic to a degree most people would find foolish. He swears up and down that God’s love never changes, that it endures forever. The highest highs, the lowest lows, everything in between. It’s all right there.
The Psalms are good news to us. They tell us we’re not alone; we all feel what the Psalmist writes about. With words like these, we cry out to God or scream silently. The Psalms tell us that God knows, and isn’t disturbed or surprised by our feelings. Through the Psalmists, he literally wrote them into his permanent record.
The Psalms are good news for the anxious or depressed, for those living with the pain of fractured relationships or living through serious instability and insecurity. They are a refuge for infertile couples who watch friends get pregnant for the second, third or fourth time. They are consolation to the faithful employee who watches a corner-cutting co-worker get the promotion that should’ve been theirs. The Psalms don’t say we’re always right; they give us permission to feel every bit of our feelings under the sheltering wing of the God who loves us.
The Psalms also understand us when we are so enamored with God, so filled with praise, that we can’t help crying out. They remind us that it is right and good for us to be overcome with the glory of God, even if that isn’t our regular state.
The Psalms will not allow us to get by on confirmation bias. We cannot pluck out a few verses that justify our spiritual direction; they don’t let us engage in one-dimensional Christianity. They show us that the life devoted to God is always both/and—and then some.
The Psalms are both a balm and a bomb. They are a balm, a “fragrant ointment or preparation used to heal or soothe the skin.” They are music to soothe the savage beast, poetry to still a troubled soul, a comforting reminder that we are merely and gloriously human.
They are also a bomb, “an explosive device fused to detonate under specific conditions.” If we try to live out a neat, tidy Christianity, never fussing with the particular hardships and joys of being human, the Psalms will explode our notions. They will detonate right in the middle of the lives we’ve built and make rubble of our shallow experiences of God.
Artists, better than anyone else, understand this tension, this need to hold together honesty and truthfulness, pain and praise, lament and love songs. That’s why Bono could sing “I believe in the Kingdom Come / then all the colors will bleed into one ... but yes, I’m still running.” It’s why Rich Mullins could sing “Hold me Jesus, ‘cause I’m shaking like a leaf / You have been king of my glory, won’t you be my Prince of Peace?”
We don’t suddenly have to become like artists. But we must be willing to be drawn up into the artfulness of God. We must surrender to his poetry, to this strangely enthralling music. We must find ourselves in the center of the mess, right where he promises to dwell.
Psalms connects the dots between the anxious parts of us and the parts made to trust a good Father; they connect the dots between the parts of us that feel and the parts of us that believe. Tremper Longman says the Psalms don’t just describe the dots connecting; they reveal the conditions in which they can connect: covenant and presence.
We can be ourselves before the face of God because he keeps covenant with us. He promises to never leave or forsake us. His presence is proof. As we abide in him, and him with us, we recapture some of the naked vulnerability we lost in the garden.
I love what Laura Fabyrycky writes: In all their bracing reality, the Psalms offer companionship in suffering and an instructive mirror that shows us who we are and points the way out of ourselves and back into life. The Psalms don’t offer an escape from life; they offer a way to avoid escaping it—a way back from stone into flesh.
We are most ourselves when the dots connect. And when we are most ourselves, we become most reliant on him. The dots connect within us, then connect us back to Christ.
The Psalms get the songs of Jesus stuck in our heads. Getting an unfortunate song stuck in your head is a universal experience. It’s a regular experience for those of us with kids. Thanks to my 6-year-old, I often find myself mindlessly mouthing the words to “Old Town Road” or the “Caillou” theme song. I often try to counter-program, getting a really good song stuck in his head, so the loop between us will be less annoying.
At Karis, we believe every sentence of the Bible is about Jesus; they all find their meaning in him. Sometimes it’s easier to see—in prophecies about the Messiah, or discussions of the Old Testament sacrificial system. It can be more challenging when we find ourselves in the middle of temple blueprints or Paul’s purposeful digressions about food and drink.
There is a deep connection between Jesus and the Psalms. We see it most clearly as Jesus quotes the Psalms throughout his life. He grew up on these songs; he prayed them back to his Father; the Psalms were stuck in his head. Just a few examples:
On his way to the cross, Jesus declares “Now is my soul troubled,” echoing David’s declaration in Psalm 6.
On the cross, he cries out: “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani,” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is a direct reference to David’s words in Psalm 22.
As Jesus passes from life to death, he calls out: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” using the words of Psalm 31.
Jesus’ actions in John 2, as he turns over tables in the temple, embody Psalm 69. His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”
In his book, “Teaching Psalms,” Christopher Ash points out other occasions in which Jesus lived out the words of the Psalms. He taught his disciples in parables, which is directly alluded to in Psalm 78. The bitter wine he drinks on the cross is first described in Psalm 69.
Ash also shows how Paul often quotes the Psalms to show how they are realized in Christ. In Romans, he references Psalm 18: For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God's truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, “Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles, and sing to your name.”
He quotes Psalm 40 in Hebrews 10 to show how Christ is the ultimate sacrifice to God: Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’”
We cannot fully explain what Jesus did, or make sense of the New Testament until we see his life as Psalm-shaped.
This connection runs even deeper than we know. Ash’s book has really shaped my thinking. We run into moments in the Psalms and think, “How could I pray this truthfully? How could I ever live this out?” The answer Ash gives, and that I want to pass along to you, is that we can’t. Not fully. Not until we see Jesus as the truest singer of the Psalms.
Elsewhere in Scripture, we see Jesus is always praying what we can’t and singing God’s song over us. This comes so clearly into relief as we stub our toes on the Psalms. What do we do when we run into one of the “imprecatory Psalms,” in which the Psalmist damns his enemies? Is it possible to make that Psalm about us? Should we be praying it out loud? Should we be tweeting those words at our political foes?
Not exactly. But we can treat these passages as legitimate prayers when we read them as ultimately fulfilled in Jesus. They become, as Ash says, prayers in which he asks God the Father to keep his promises by judging the enemies of all that is right and good. At the cross, we see evidence that God will either save or destroy all his foes. So there is no trouble with Jesus asking God to finish what he has started.
This truth resolves some of the dissonance, and reminds us we can pray for God to do what he promises. But we must take care to pray in Jesus’ way, using Jesus’ words, with souls that are satisfied by however Jesus answers.
Often the Psalmist declares his innocence before God, even treating it as a condition that will move God to act on his behalf. Take Psalm 17: You have tried my heart, you have visited me by night, you have tested me, and you will find nothing; I have purposed that my mouth will not transgress. With regard to the works of man, by the word of your lips. I have avoided the ways of the violent. My steps have held fast to your paths; my feet have not slipped.
How about Psalm 18? For I have kept the ways of the Lord, and have not wickedly departed from my God. For all his rules were before me, and his statutes I did not put away from me. I was blameless before him, and I kept myself from my guilt. So the Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight.
Can we sing or pray this with integrity? Can we really participate in the Psalms? No—unless we recognize two things. First, because of the cross, everything that is true of Jesus is true of us. We might not be innocent in our actions, but we are now blameless in God’s eyes. This is one of the great paradoxes of the Christian life. The Psalms might not feel true, but if we credit these words to Jesus’ work on the cross, they are.
Second, we have to see Jesus as the ultimate singer of these songs. He is a truer king than David. A higher priest than any we find in Scripture. He is the real artist; he wrote these songs and sings them about himself. We can truly rejoice in these Psalms when we read them as words that aren’t just written to Jesus, but are written by and about him. He has come to fulfill the law, the prophecies, the poetry—all of it.
Think back to Psalm 13. Isolation from God; a sense the enemy has triumphed; a plea for God to intervene lest the speaker die in disgrace; a last-ditch expression of trust in God’s love; a moment of full rejoicing in his salvation. Who can sing these words like Jesus?
Knowing this, we’re free to get these songs stuck in our heads; we really can sing them with all our might. Citing Augustine, Christopher Ash says that, when it comes to the Psalms, Jesus is the choir director and we are the choir. He writes: But when Christ is our choir-leader, it is He who has done all things well; our calling is not to lead the Psalm and fulfill all the exhortations of the Psalm, but to join in the chorus in Christ.
We can sing the Psalms back to God, and find ourselves in these songs, because Jesus was and is their fulfillment. What Fred Sanders says is key: Christians are people who talk to God like they are Jesus Christ. We sing the songs of Jesus to Jesus because of Jesus; these are the best songs we could ever hope to have stuck in our heads.
If the Psalms are this important—connecting the dots, explaining us to ourselves, immersing us in the songs of Jesus—how should we approach them? Do we treat them like every other portion of Scripture? I want to suggest a few things:
Read with genre in mind. Interviewing younger musicians, so many create across genre; they don’t want to be pinned down by a single label. Most of us listen to more than one type of music and watch more than one type of movie. Still, our expectations of a piece of art, and our ability to understand it, is informed by its style and tradition.
Hip-hop is more than its building blocks, but we expect to hear nothing less than rap vocals and a certain type of beat. We might get more than we bargain for from a murder mystery or screwball comedy, but we expect them to explore specific tropes and contain certain character types. These elements help us understand the meaning of a phrase or an action. They help us interpret what’s coming through the lens of what has come before. They help us know what to look and listen for and what to latch onto.
As Longman points out, we don’t read a newspaper article the same way we read a letter from a friend. The same words read differently in a fictional mystery than a factual biography.
So it is with the Psalms. We don’t read them the way we read Paul’s letters or the prophets. We don’t even read them all the same way. The more we read with genre in mind, the more we’ll find in these poems. We’ll spend time unpacking the genres of specific Psalms as we get to them, but Longman identifies seven basic types. They are:
Hymns, which revolve around explicit worship and praise of God
Laments
Thanksgiving Psalms
Psalms of confidence
Psalms of remembrance
Wisdom Psalms, which dig into God’s will and draw a sharp contrast between wise and foolish living
Kingship Psalms, songs that deal with human and/or holy kingdoms
These genres cross and overlap at times, but seeing how the Psalms resemble these categories helps us know what beats to expect and what structure to follow. Getting a feel for these genres with time and repetition, we will better understand the author’s intent as well as the way God invites us into these Psalms to worship, lament and gaze on Christ.
Read with Jesus in mind. Again, we are meant to see him as the point of these Psalms and, ultimately, the real singer-songwriter. Christopher Ash helps us get our minds right: Let the main line of the Psalm lead straight on to Christ in a way that makes us think, “Yes, it really was necessary that Jesus Christ and no one else should be the fulfilment of this Psalm. Christ is the One to whom this Psalm points and where it leads us.’”
Ash points out that, due to the Psalms’ substance and the truth that Jesus was the most fully alive human in history, much of our interpretation hangs on that human nature, not his divinity. He encourages us, for example, to read Psalm 23 not in light of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, but of the Father leading him through the valley of the shadow of death.
As you read, ask yourself how this Psalm applied to Jesus in his life, death and resurrection. Then ask how that truth applies to you as you benefit from all that Jesus came to do.
Read the Psalms like works of art. Again, we must engage with the individual genres of each Psalm. But more broadly, we have to reorient ourselves to reading the Psalms as poetry. I love the questions Ash lists at the end of his book “Teaching Psalms”:
What do the lyrics mean? As you read a Psalm, consider its context within the book itself and all of Scripture. Trace the structure. Look for repetition, asking what it means that the writer finds the phrase worth returning to. What imagery does the Psalmist use? Does he allude to other parts of the Old Testament, or do we pick up this passage elsewhere in the New Testament?
What does the tune feel like? I love this! Ash asks what instruments you would imagine playing behind these words. Would it be in a sad, minor key or burst forward in a major key with a singalong chorus? Is it Jason Isbell or Jimmy Eat World? Kendrick Lamar or Bach? There’s no right or wrong answer. Trying to hear the music in your head will help you find the mood of the Psalm as you direct it toward God.
What would it mean to join in? How have God’s covenant people, including Jesus himself, responded to this Psalm? What might it be asking or encouraging me to do?
Will I, or will I not, join in? What keeps me from joining the choir here, and responding to this Psalm? How might God want to bless me or reveal himself to me? Ash asks, “Have I honestly joined in myself? How best can I exhort my hearers to get out of their audience seats and join the choir?”
Toward this end, it wouldn’t hurt all of us to read more poetry, and listen to more music. I’m not trying to dictate your cultural experiences. But, for most of us, poetry seems removed from our daily lives. It feels like there are too many barriers to entry.
Reading great poets softens our hearts, and makes them more receptive. It helps us recognize certain rhythms and imagery wherever we find them, in real life or on the page. It teaches us to sit with, not skip quickly through, the text.
So read Mary Oliver. Read Scott Cairns. Read Rachel Welcher and John Blase. Listen to different music. Not just what’s on in the club or the gym. Not just something with utility. Not just something that has a great beat; but something that makes you sit with it and soak it in.
I don’t want all this to seem too academic or high-minded. We don’t all have to become poetry experts or memorize a list of literary devices to get something out of the Psalms. But if we say we really want to know the Scriptures, and want the Scriptures to know us, we need to take them on their terms. The Psalms don’t ask too much of us; they simply ask us to get swept up in the song.
Pray, knowing your place. Context matters. Feel the freedom to pray the Psalms back to God. As you do, rejoice that the church has been praying the Psalms for centuries. Cherish that he knows you, the pinnacle of his creation, so well that he has given you language that truly fits who and where you are.
Synthesizing Peterson and Ash, this is received and responsive language. Received from God to guide and ground you in prayer. Responsive, as you enter a conversation that started long before you arrived on the scene, yet is absolutely specific to you.
Peterson says: The Psalms are acts of obedience, answering the God who has addressed us. God’s word precedes these words: these prayers don’t seek God, they respond to the God who seeks us. These responses are often ones of surprise, for who expects God to come looking for us? And they are sometimes awkward, for in our religious striving we are usually looking for something quite other than the God who has come looking for us. God comes and speaks—his word catches us in sin, finds us in despair, invades us by grace.
Pray, knowing you can’t pray every word on your own. Remember that Jesus is the one who can perfectly pray the Psalms. When you run into words and phrases you can’t honestly pray—and you will—ask God to help you see the ways Jesus prayed them and continues to pray them for your sake. There is something beautiful about coming to the end of ourselves in front of the Bible.
Read Psalms, then pray, “Lord, help this to be true of me as it is true of Jesus.” Pray God will help you delight in the ways Jesus fulfilled these words when you couldn’t. Pray these things, then when you get to those Psalms of praise, let it fly.
The Psalms have saved my faith on more than one occasion. So many times I chafed against cold, emotionless expressions of faith. The Christian life felt disorienting, like drudgery, because I didn’t think I could be myself. I wasn’t sure I could keep going if I couldn’t wrestle, couldn’t cry out, couldn’t doubt. Then I turned to the Psalms and saw that God made space for me, that he loves me right where I am, and wrote songs just for me to sing.
As we engage the Psalms, I hope you’ll dive deep with us. These songs already define us; they speak to every part of our humanity. It’s simply a matter of whether or not we’ll join the chorus. Imagine for just a moment what our church, our city, our homes, our lives would look like if we all walked around with the songs of Jesus stuck in our heads. If we carried those tunes around with us, hummed them to ourselves, even busted out in song without thinking. I want to find out what that’s like. Let’s find out together.