Lessons from Preaching through the Psalms

This year our church has been going through several small books of the Bible whose collective message is that of encouraging the Church to stand firm and persevere in the faith amidst difficulty. Both as a break from this series and as a way to bolster our series (Psalms generally encourage steadfastness) I preached through some of the Psalms this summer. Rather than moving consecutively I rotated through the Psalms based upon the five book division within the Psalms (i.e. I preached on Ps 1, 42, 73, 90, 107 and then back to 2, 43, 74, etc). Because each book has a unique general theme, rotation helped us experience a diversity of psalmody.

Here are seven lessons I learned:
1. Christ Centred. It can easily be taken for granted but the Bible, including the Psalms, are all about Jesus. We learn this from the Emmaus Road experience. However, just after this, in speaking to His disciples, Jesus directly includes the Psalms of speaking of Him (Lk 24:44). They do this in many ways, sometimes secondary to the primary context and sometimes primarily as the exclusive context (i.e. Ps 110). Keeping this in mind helps us not overly individualize the Psalms as being about me.
2. Corporate vs. Individualistic. The corporate nature of the Psalms also helps with this. The Psalms are not about you and were not sung, primarily, by just one individual. They were written by individuals, yes, but sung as part of corporate worship. This realization, like them being Christ-centred, fundamentally changes how we read them (e.g. Ps 42 is not about thirsting for God but thirsting for Him in corporate worship).
3. Context. One of the difficulties of the Psalms is they often don’t have a clear context. One is left to reach for clues and when these are sufficiently vague, to allow the content to guide. However, this want of context also sometimes works beautifully to allow the worshipping community/individual to position themselves in the situation (e.g. Ps 77, like Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh’).
4.Outline. Being poetry means that the Psalms don’t always have a linear flow. However, they often still use other means of organization, like chiasm or repetition, key words or Selah. Being on the lookout for these is challenging but also rewarding.
5. Diversity. The Psalms embrace the whole range of human experience and emotion from the highs to the lows and everything in between. Rotating through the Psalms as we did further ensured this was captured. One cannot get comfortable or play favourites when moving through the Psalms.
6. Length. Many Psalms are short, like Ps 1. However, many are verses long. Sometimes in this expanse of poetry it can be difficult to get a pulse of the text, let alone deliver it in a way that is understandable and relatable. Because of the context, outline, diversity and length, preaching through the Psalms—doing justice to the text and not just imposing one’s ideas—proved sufficiently challenging. I thought—naively in hindsight—that preaching through the Psalms in the summer would not only be a break for the congregation but also the preacher. In hindsight, certain Psalms proved to be some of the more challenging passages of Scripture to preach. However, like all hard work there is satisfaction (even if it didn’t allow me to catch up on other ministry tasks due to ‘easy’ preaching).
7. Selah. A unique feature of the Psalms is the refrain selah, which probably means rest. Our modern culture doesn’t like to pause because then we have to deal with life’s big questions. However, Psalms offers a different angle; it forces us to wrestle with God in the text and our context, a journey of selah that continues long after the sermon has been preached.
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I hope everyone liked and learned from the Psalms. Now we begin 2 Peter.