All Episodes
Displaying 1 - 20 of 83 in total
Episode 1: Why read the Psalms?
In 2020, the year the COVID-19 pandemic threw my family and the world for a loop, I began my practice of reading and journaling on the Psalms every morning. They have ...
Episode 2: Soundtrack
What we call the Old Testament was what Jesus had as Scripture, and he quoted from it frequently, particularly the Psalms and Prophets. In this episode, I propose that...
Episode 3: Call to worship
Where should we begin our exploration of 150 psalms? We’ll come back to Psalm 1 soon, but here, we’ll begin with Psalm 95. It’s a short psalm that illustrates well som...
Episode 4: Call to listen
Some psalms are songs or poems of praise; others are songs of lament or complaint. And often, both praise and lament are woven together in the same psalm. Psalm 95 is ...
Episode 5: The fork in the road
If you were given the task of organizing 150 psalms into a collection, where would you begin? What psalm would you put first? Psalm 1 is the first psalm for a reason. ...
Episode 6: Inheritance
Psalm 1 seems to promise that anyone who is obedient to God’s Law (Torah) will live a blessed and fruitful life. But things don’t always work out that way; sometimes, ...
Episode 7: When life isn’t fair
Psalm 37 raises the question of why the wicked seems to prosper, contradicting the worldview of Psalm 1. It seems unfair. The psalmist tells God’s people not to fret o...
Episode 8: Meekness and weakness
In the so-called Beatitudes at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” It’s a quote from Psalm 3...
Episode 9: A story of hope
When we face serious ongoing challenges, we feel the need for hope, and the Psalms can help. But we can do more than just turn to the Psalms for a spiritual pep talk; ...
Episode 10: What chapter are we in?
Psalm 30 is not a simple story of hope, as if the psalmist merely fell ill and was healed. The background story is complex enough to be worthy of memoir. Our own stori...
Episode 11: Loving the law
Sometimes, as Christians, we prioritize the New Testament in a way that doesn’t properly understand or respect the Old. We may stereotype the Old Testament as being ab...
Episode 12: From A to Z
Understanding Psalm 119 requires appreciating its artistry. The structure is complex and would be difficult for any poet to achieve. But that complexity serves a symbo...
Episode 13: The ideal and the real
Remember Psalm 1? That psalm taught us that there are two paths in life, one of righteousness and blessing, and the other of wickedness and destruction. The way of ble...
Episode 14: Celebrating creation—and its Creator
Studying the Psalms can give us some much-needed perspective. Through them, we learn to see a bigger picture of life. Psalms 1 and 119 help us see the world as the psa...
Episode 15: The one who created us is the one who cares for us
We live in a world in which the stereotypical understanding of power doesn’t include care. But that’s not the psalmist’s understanding of God. Psalm 104 begins with a ...
Episode 16: Wild kingdom
Psalm 104, as we’ve seen, gives a worshipful portrait of God as the one who both creates all that is and then cares for his creation. But seemingly out of the blue, in...
Episode 17: Praising God in the darkness
As suggested before, there are psalms of praise and psalms of lament, and we don’t have far to look to find the latter. Psalms 1 and 2 are foundational in different wa...
Episode 18: Feeling small
Like Psalm 104, Psalm 8 is a “creation psalm,” a psalm of praise for the marvels of creation and its Creator. Imagine the psalmist gazing up into the heavens on a clea...
Episode 19: Fingerprints
We may be used to speaking of creation as the work of God’s hands—or even “hand” in the singular. We never say that it’s the work of God’s “fingers.” But that’s how Ps...
Episode 20: Rulers
Many Christians suffer from self-doubt, from a sense of somehow “not being enough.” And in a culture of shame, the words of Psalm 8, wondering why God should even pay ...