Psalms, Why Read Them?

[HKHaugan]

Have you ever wanted just to get outside of yourself every so often, to get a second look at who, what, why and where, you really are? It is so easy to escape into a land of philosophical denial or arrogant academics without ever getting to the cause of the questions. What the Bible does is to present us with a section of writings called Psalms that go from the outer world to the inner world, to the heartland, the land of the heart, where we really live inside.

The Psalms are the spiritual fertilizer we apply as we plow through our inner conflicts, uncovering them, moving us through them and carrying us onto a plateau where their ideas and principles are the furrows that open us to the healing rain of the Spirit. In the process the field of our heart is able to accept the maturing rays of Sonlight where true reality begins. That reality is who we really are, who really governs everything and to whom we really ultimately belong. The Psalms urge us to rise to the occasion and be honest, heart honest.

The Psalms are a great place to take us out of ourselves and into God. David was always looking out from himself to God assessing where he was in relationship to God as he walked through the world. That’s what makes the Psalms so important.

You see, each of us, is born and grows up in the seclusion of our ego and find ourselves yearning to be a ‘some-one’ but end up being a ‘some-thing.’

So when it comes to honest appraisal the Psalms help reduce our self-preoccupation by shifting us into God’s presence. They both contemplate our failures and lift up His graceful qualities. The pleas of the Psalms are to keep God central in our minds and that means staying in His Word, giving Him praise and thanksgiving from our hearts and bathing in the forgiveness and empowerment that comes from His Spirit.

You know the old saying about the need to walk in another man’s shoes before we make a judgment about him, well that is exactly what the Psalms enable us to do. They take us into another man’s mind and heart. And this is not just any man. This is a man faith-walking with God.

The Psalmist is in Scripture because God has given the Psalmist to us for a purpose. The Psalmist has raised his personal mind, heart and spirit problems placing them before God and then placing God’s conclusions before us. The Psalmist is a sinner who knows he is one and therefore speaks as one of us. We can identify with him and that is what God intended and why they are such precious pieces of wisdom. Man’s problems and God’s answers are in every one.

The Psalms give us three insights and teach us how to readjust from where we have been to where God can lead us.

First, they are personal.
Being personal they reveal the inner struggle of being a person in relationship with God and others. They touch the nerve of our aloneness with its doubts, fears and unanswerable questions, the ‘why-me’s?’ and the misty depressive resignation when it seems the whole world is against us.

Second, they are spiritual.
The writer knows he is dealing with a God he cannot see but knows He is there. This is not mind knowledge but faith knowledge. It is a Spirit inspired insight that uses the mind as a conveyor belt to truth because the mind was made for truth (And remember, truth is a person---Jesus!). It makes the mind a vehicle as opposed to a destination, the heart a relational seeker as opposed to an emotional ‘cul de sac’ and the spirit a faith sharing activator as opposed to being the means to secure a self-protecting comfort zone.

Third, they are character builders.
Each one of us is unique to God and He has given us, in the context of the psalmist’s struggles, eternal principles that build the kind of character that reflects the glory of God as He intended in Creation. Each of us is being reshaped by the Spirit to build intellectual integrity in our mind (Have this mind in you which was in Christ Jesus…Php.2:5), trusting confidence in the heart (…that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened…Eph.1:18) and courageous faith in our spirit (If God is for us who can be against us?…Rom.8:31).

Psalm 8:4 is the Psalmist’s primary question and lies at the foot of each psalm, “What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?”

Now, try this part of Psalm 71 on for size and see where it takes you,
“You, who made me stare trouble in the face, turn me around;
Now let me look life in the face. I've been to the bottom;
Bring me up, streaming with honors; turn to me, be tender to me,
And I'll take up the guitar and thank you to the tune of your faithfulness, God.
I'll make music for you on a harp, Holy One of Israel.
When I open up in song to you, I let out lungs full of praise, my rescued life a song. All day long I'm chanting about you and your righteous ways, while those who tried to do me in slink off looking ashamed (vs.20-22 The Message).”