Learning to Pray from the Psalms

Throughout the history of God's people, from that time in the kingdom to right now, this book of Psalms has given words, given language, given shape to the most intense emotions of God's people, to the deepest, darkest depths, to the highest heights of joy, to the crucifixion, to the resurrection. This book has given words to the people of God. It has it has been the prayer book of the church from its inception.

The following message was recorded at Kingstree Church. May the spirit use it to help you see, savor, and sing the beauty of God in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ. Today,

we're looking at really an overview of the Psalms and of the series, this eight week series that we're entering into. So the goal of this series is to learn to pray from the Psalms, learning how to pray from the Psalms. Now, I don't mean necessarily reading the Psalms themselves as our prayers, though of course that is part of it. That definitely is part of it, but even deeper than that, the hope for this series is that the book of Psalms would begin to shape and order our souls, our minds. We would begin to be shaped by this book such that we would, one, be people more given to prayer, because this whole book is prayer, that we would be shaped by this book, and so be a people more given to prayer, a praying church, a praying people.

And the second goal is that the prayers that we pray would be more closely aligned to the heart of God in Christ. As our soul is being shaped by the Psalms, that the kind of prayers that come out of that soul would be Psalm like prayers, prayers whose priorities and passions and perspectives are shaped by this book, which is to say shaped by the heart of Christ, as we will see. So that's the goal of this series. You can think of it a little bit like when you come to make a fire. Those of you who have made fires before, if you just got this haphazard pile of sticks and twigs, and there's some leaves in there and some rocks, and you think, all right, and you put a light to it, and you get perhaps a little bit of fire, but mostly you get some smoke, and there's maybe spotty fire here and there, and then the whole thing dies out, and it's just that's what it was.

But if you come and you say, Okay, let's get rid of these leaves. Let's push away the dirt. Let's take these sticks that are just laying around and stack them up in order. Let's put some fuel in there, maybe some larger sticks outside, and then you light it, chances are you're going to have a longer burn, a brighter burn, one that gives warmth and heat to the people around it, because you ordered the kindling and the sticks. In a similar way, the goal for this series is to do that to our hearts.

So you can think of your heart, my heart, by nature just left as it is, is a pile of sticks. There's desires. There's fears. There's hopes. There's longings.

There's frustrations. There's confusings. They're all just kind of thrown there like sticks, and then there's the leaves of idolatrous desires for this, coveting this sin here. There's leaves that are all scattered around in there, and if you just try to pray cold out of the heart we have by nature uncultivated, sure, you're gonna get a little fire, Lord help me, or whatever, but the ability for that to sustain and burn without smoking out is going to be difficult, and my hope is that the Psalms would come alongside of us, of course the Lord through the Psalms, and order those sticks of our desires. Take this fear and order it rightly.

Take this passion, order it rightly. Take this uncertainty and place it where it belongs. Order the sticks, the kindling of our affections, and clear out the leaves of those distracting desires or hopes or whatever it might be so that we can light the fire of our soul. The spirit can light the kindling of our soul, and there can be a burning fire of prayer to the Lord, rightly ordered, rightly structured. Now it's burning.

Now it's giving out light. Now it's giving out heat. That's my hope for us as we enter this series. And of course, the series is only eight weeks, but it extends into this whole reading of the Psalms together. That's why we're reading the Psalms together beginning next Monday, but the hope is that this whole church would begin to be shaped by the Psalms.

You look at a rock that sat under a waterfall for a long time, and the rock is shaped like that water, because the water's just been washing over it, and as this Of course, all of scripture, but as the Psalms are washing over us as a people, my prayer is our heart would be shaped according to it, that our prayers then would take on this same form. Now with that said, let me pray for us as we begin this morning. Father, your word is living and active, sharper than the two edged sword, and able to pierce and divide and open and search the souls of your people. And so we want, Father, I want, we want to be sat under your word, especially this day and these coming weeks, to allow the book of Psalms to shape us. This book breathed out from your own heart, given to your people, Father, may it shape us, and today grant that the heart of Jesus in this book, that your excellence in this book, that your love for your people displayed through this book would be communicated, and that your spirit would kindle in each one of us a longing to enter into the Psalms, to plunge ourselves into these words, into these prayers, into these songs, and that we would be a people more closely shaped into the image of Christ.

So Father, come and give me grace now. I can do nothing without the working of your Spirit. So give me grace to speak clearly and faithfully. Give grace to the teachers downstairs as they're teaching the children, and may your spirit now brood over this gathering so that Christ be exalted and you be glorified in him. I pray for this, Father, in Jesus' name.

Amen. So I mentioned this just briefly implicitly, but you might be asking, Well, why the Psalms? Because couldn't any passage of scripture shape my heart into the image of Christ? And absolutely, yes, that's true. So why then specifically the Psalms?

Why is that what we're looking at over these few weeks, and Lord willing, the rest of the year? The main reason is because the Psalms specifically were given to the church as a prayer book, as a prayer book for the church, given to God's people to say, Here, this will give you language to meet me. This will give you the words you need to interact with me. It's prayer book for God's people. Now the Psalms or the Psalter, when you put all the Psalms together, it can be called the Psalter.

That's that, the book. This book was composed over hundreds of years, compiled over time by different writers and authors inspired by the Spirit, but we see the beginnings of it in two Chronicles. Let me read this for you. We're not going to be here long, so you don't have to turn to it. I'm sorry, one Chronicles.

In one Chronicles 16, here's what we find. David is bringing the ark into the tabernacle, into Jerusalem, and it says this, Then he, that is David, he appointed some of the Levites as ministers before the ark of the Lord to invoke, to thank, and to praise Yahweh, the God of Israel. Asaph was the chief, and second to him were Zechariah and Jeliel, Shemeroth, Jepheliel, Mathijah, Eliab, Benaiah, Obed Edom, and Jel. Now remember them. No, not really.

You don't have to remember them. The Lord remembers them. That's what matters. But look what it says next. These ones were to play harps and lyres, so they're playing music before the Lord.

Asaph was to sound the cymbals. Benaiah and Jehaziel the priests were to blow the trumpets regularly before the ark of the covenant, so singing is regularly happening before God. Then on that day David first appointed that thanksgiving should be sung to the Lord and by Asaph and his brothers, and then we get a psalm. Right after that we get one of the psalms. And so there what you see is this initial bringing together of worship leaders, and David's saying, Listen, here's words.

Sing these words before God. Sing these words as a congregation, giving thanks to God. And what we're seeing there is the beginning of the book of Psalms, the origin of the book of Psalms. There's a few things to say about that. We see that these psalms, these poems, are intended to be sung.

That's the first thing. They're intended to be sung. You see David calling them to sing. They're intended to be sung together, so it's in a congregation. That's significant as well.

Sing these things, sing them together, and then they're intended to shape the affections of God's people and aim them at God. See? They should be sung to the Lord. Thanksgiving should be sung to the Lord. Invocation, thanks and praise to the Lord.

So the book of Psalms is given as a book to sing together to the Lord, taking God's people, bringing together their affections, aiming them at the Lord. That's how this book begins, and throughout the history of God's people, from that time in the kingdom to right now, this book of Psalms has given words, given language, given shape to the most intense emotions of God's people, to the deepest, darkest depths, to the highest heights of joy, to the crucifixion, to the resurrection, this book has given words to the people of God. It been the prayer book of the church from its inception, and so it's right then that we come to it and say, Let us too, this little expression of God's people here in Sabine, Ohio, let us too be shaped by this book that has shaped the heart of the church from the beginning, the heart of God's people from the beginning. So that's one reason we're looking specifically at the Psalms. Another is zooming in on that.

Not only has this book shaped the hearts of God's people, this book, the Psalms, shapes the heart of Christ himself, which is an awesome thing. Jesus, our Lord and our God, as a man is shaped by the book of Psalms, by the Psalms. Now, as a first century Jewish man, Jesus would have had much of this book memorized, if not all of them, but many of them, many of these Psalms were memorized by Jesus, which means growing up. Because remember, he's fully human. He grows.

He learns. He understands. He suffers. Growing up, his soul and his prayers are being shaped by the Psalms. Jesus, our God, being shaped by the Psalms.

And we see this. We know this. This isn't just conjecture, because look at him in his suffering. In the midst of suffering, you don't put on a show. You're not putting on a veneer to say, Oh, here's my piety.

When everything is falling apart and your life is being torn to pieces, you're not putting on a show. You're bleeding out your soul, and when the soul of Christ bleeds in the garden and on the cross, that blood is the Psalms. Psalms are what come out of Christ in his suffering. In the upper room when Jesus leaves to go to Gethsemane, it says in the gospel account, He sang a hymn and went out. That hymn he would have sung was the Psalms, was part of the Psalms.

We can probably pinpoint which ones, but the point for right now is when our Lord is going into the darkest night imaginable, his heart says, I need to sing the songs with my friends. That's where God's heart goes as he's going into darkness. I need the Psalms. I need to sing the Psalms. That's what he does.

And then when he's crying out to his father in Gethsemane, he's inhabiting and embodying the role that we find all throughout the Psalms, which is the righteous sufferer who's crying out to God in the midst of his suffering. Jesus is embodying the central figure of the Psalms when he's in the garden, and then of course most powerfully, most poignantly, as Jesus is hanging on the cross, and his life is ebbing away, His body is breaking down, and God feels the suffering of our mortality, and he realizes, My lungs are breaking, and I can't breathe. He cries out the Psalms. He cries out the Psalms. In that moment your brain has just It just grabbing on whatever is closest, and when the brain, when the mind, when the heart of Christ grabs what is nearest to him, it's the Psalms.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Which of course is a Psalm that breaks through into hope in the end, but the point here is he speaks this Psalm, or since that Psalm is set to a tune called the dough of the dawn, he may have sung in his broken voice this Psalm, but the point is he goes to the Psalms. Our Lord goes to the Psalms. So consider, when God becomes a man, the words of the Psalter give voice to his deepest burdens and to his greatest hopes, to his darkest sorrows and his highest joys. This book gives language to God as he walks through the human experience, and we can pick it up and read it.

We can read the book that shapes the human experience of the God man. The human soul of our Lord shaped by this book, you can read it today. You can go home and be shaped by what shapes Christ. That's incredible to consider, and that's my desire for this series, that we would be shaped by the Psalms. Think of the book of Psalms as a steel mold in the shape of Jesus Christ, and think of your soul as molten metal.

It's formless. It's confused. It's bubbling. It's boiling hot. It doesn't have a particular shape because of all the suffering, all the hardship, all the desires, all the joys, all the distractions, and what we're doing, pray, this series is we're learning to take that molten soul that is expressionless and formless and pour it into the steel mold of the Psalms so that it fills out that mold, which is the shape of Christ, and the formlessness and the voidness of my confused soul is given shape as it is poured into the Psalms, and the shape it's given is the shape of Christ, the shape of Christ's own heart.

And the goal therefore then is, as that shaping is happening to the form of my soul, when I pray, it begins to take on the form of the Psalms. Doesn't mean you memorize all the Psalms, but it means, look, the priorities of the Psalms are becoming your priorities. The way the Psalms approach God in the midst of these situations, that's becoming the way you're approaching him. The response of the psalmist to suffering, that's becoming your response. We're being shaped by this book, which is to say shaped by the heart of Christ.

That's the prayer as we enter into this season together, these next few sermons together, and then, Lord willing, again, reading the Psalms the rest of the year. So with all that as introduction to the series, let me give a little bit of an overview of the book, of the Psalter itself, because we're all familiar, I'm sure, with Psalms. Pretty much if anybody has any familiarity with scripture, they probably know John three sixteen, God so loved the world, and they probably know Psalm 23, The Lord is my shepherd. Those are pretty well known, and so you likely know something of the Psalms, and I know for many of you the Psalms are very familiar territory that have sustained you through a lot of darkness. That's the witness of many people in the church, But I want to give an overview of their structure just so we can kind of see, okay, what am I dealing with here?

What is this? It's the biggest book in scripture. It's got 150 chapters, some of them hundreds of verses long, one of them hundreds of verses long, or over a 100. How do I approach this book? How do I approach this book?

So let's think of this as, okay, maybe you're familiar with walking through the trails of the State Park Of The Psalms, but we'll take a quick helicopter ride over the whole park. You can see the whole thing. Oh, okay. The lake's over there. The trail's here.

The mountain's here. Okay, I see. That's what we're going to hopefully do now, and then in coming weeks we'll look at specific parts of that park. So the first thing to say very generally about the Psalms is that it's divided, the Psalter is divided into five sections or five books. Now these are not named like other books in the Bible, but they're five discrete sections of the Psalms, and your Bible likely divides that up and says book one, book two.

If it doesn't, it's not hard to find, but what's important here is that each of these five books orbits around the theme of kingdom. Somewhere in there, kingdom is not far from the center. The kingdom of Yahweh, God of Israel, the kingdom on the earth, his eternal kingdom, this idea of kingdom is central. And the other thing to know about these five books is that every one of them ends in doxology. Doxology just being a fancy word for worship, praise.

Every one of these books ends with praise, which already tells us something about the Psalms. First, it's a royal book. It functions in the context of God as king and the world as his kingdom. The Psalms are a royal book in that sense, and it dovetails nicely with what Pastor Sean is doing in one Samuel because he's talking about the rise of the kingship, and the Psalms is royal book with the kingship of Yahweh at the center. Secondly, though, what this form tells us, this orbiting around kingship and ending in doxology, is that this book is aimed at worship.

This book is aimed to find us wherever we are and bring us along into worship, bring us on pilgrimage up the mountain of this life so that we can stand at the peak of worship, and it's not a shallow plastic praise the Lord, put on a smiley face worship. It's not that. It's not that. It's a blood deep, hard won harvest of tears worship that the Psalms break into, because the Psalms do not shy away, as we'll see here in a moment, from the gritty and the dark and the confusing and the painful. They go down into those places, but they end in worship.

And so the Psalms are shaping us, teaching us how do I move from here to here. How do I worship here when I'm here? The Psalms are geared in that direction. So that's two things the big structure of five books points us to. It's a royal book.

It's a book that's aimed at worship. But then getting closer into this question of the five different books, there are many different genres of Psalms. Genre is just, again, a literary term for kinds, flavors, styles. There's many different types of Psalms that you will run across as you're reading over the next six months, or whatever it is that will be in this eight months. When you first come to the Psalms, might think, okay, it's just a bunch of kind of pious language, a bunch of religious language layered on top of each other one after another, but that's not the case.

It's more like a song. In a song, there are many notes, and you could say, Oh, one note's the same as another, but they're not. The notes are different. There's an A. There's a B major.

There's a D minor. There's an F. The notes are different. Now, they're all notes, but they're different, and together they make a song. Similarly, the Psalms are all Psalms, but they strike different notes.

Some of them strike a D major or a D minor. Some of them a B major. Different notes are being struck, and I'm referring to the Those notes are called genres, styles, types of Psalms. There's many different ones, but four main ones are all that we're going to be concerned with over this series. The Psalms are made up of laments, lamentation, sorrow being expressed to God trust, Psalms of trust in the night thanks, Psalms of thanksgiving and praise, psalms that move our hearts into praise.

Lament, trust, thanks, and praise. Now again, we could get a lot more complex, but those are the big four. Those are the big four, and of those four, lament and praise are the main ones. By far, lament and praise are the main genres you're going to find as you're reading through Psalms over these next months, and of those two, lament and praise, guess which one is the most common? Lament.

Lament. The most common type of psalm that you will find is the psalm of lament, pouring out hardship, suffering, questioning why, how long, what about this. That's where the psalms are the majority of them, and the second most common is praise. Now, only, to me this is fascinating, and not just fascinating, pastorally helpful to our souls. Not only is lament the most common kind of psalm that you're going to find, it is front loaded.

It comes at the beginning. It comes at the beginning, and then it moves into praise. So Avery, if you want to put up that picture, I don't usually use slides, but I'm going to here so you can see this image clearly, that the Psalms move. Okay. So here's an overview of the book of Psalms, the five different books, and you see it on the bottom, those red ones, that's Psalms of Lament, And on the top, the blue ones, that's psalms of praise.

And you can see as you begin, you've got lamentation seasoned with praise. And as you move, as you move through, by the end you have praise seasoned with lamentation. So the songs, the structure of this book moves from night into day, weeping into joy, death into life. The structure of the book is formed in that way, and leave that up, Avery, because there's two things I wanna share about this that I find beautiful concerning the heart of our God, because remember, that's the prayer book he gives us. That's the prayer book the Lord gives to his people.

This what your life is gonna look like is what he's saying essentially. Two beautiful things to see here. First, the Psalms do not belittle or gloss over suffering. They do not belittle or gloss over the sorrow and the lamentation of this life. Praise God that the prayer book he gives to his people is not all praise, is not all happy, is not all, Hey, everything's fine.

If that were the case, imagine what it would be when you come to this book with a broken soul and a broken mind and a life in shambles, you come to this book and you just find, Everything's fine. Everything's fine. Happy, happy, happy, like a motivational Christian book. That's not what the Lord gives us. Praise God.

How alienating would that be to those walking through suffering? Rather, when God gives a prayer book to his people, he gives them a book that goes with them into their deepest agony. Look how it starts. Look how The Lord says, Look, I understand what this is like. Look at the beginning.

It's a book that goes with us into the darkest nights of sorrow, into the wastelands of despair. It meets us there, and some of you have found that, the life that gives. I know for my own self, at some of my deepest points, to open the Psalms and find words shaping the agony of my soul and giving them back to me as prayers has been life preserving, because you say, I don't have words for this, but here's words are given to me. So the Psalms go with us into the darkest places, and they don't just go with us there. They give us words there.

They give you words for wordless sorrow. They give you expression for inexpressible pain, and they give you words that take that suffering and turn it into a God word offering of lament. And that's a grace. That's a gift that is given to us. So the first thing to say about this particular shape of the Psalms is it meets us in lamentation, gives voice to our lamentation, and turns it toward the Lord.

But the second thing, the beautiful thing to say about this is look at the shape of leading from sorrow into joy. Okay, this book does not belittle suffering. I hope that's clear. But it also doesn't give suffering the last word. It is fake to pretend that there is no horrific hardship in this life, and it's fake to pretend that that is the end.

The Psalms, like Christ, hold these two together and are able to say, It is dark, and day will come again. It is night, and the moon is shining, and that's reflection of the sun down into the darkness, it's able to hold these two things together and move us into dawn, into praise, into joy, through sorrow, into gladness, and in that sense, the whole psalter is the crucified and risen Jesus. Crucifixion, resurrection, and God gives to the soul of his church a book that will cause us to inhabit the shape of Christ's life. Not just say, Oh, I know he died and rose again, but to live his death and resurrection, weeping his death in our weeping as we read the Psalms of Lament, rejoicing in his resurrection in our joy as we sing the Psalms of praise. So the book of the Psalms says to the church, Come and enter the shape of your master's life.

Come and live the death and resurrection of Christ, because in fact you are his body, Christian church. We're the body of Christ, and his body is a crucified body that is raised. And so the prayer book we're given is a prayer book that holds together crucifixion and resurrection and moves us, moves us from death into life. What an awesome thing. To make the Psalms, the background music of our life prepares us to walk from death into resurrection.

It shapes our vision to be one that sees resurrection as the end. Right? See resurrection as the end. When the sun goes down, I'm willing to bet most of you don't say, This is it. This is it.

We're done. It's over. It's dark. It's never gonna be light again. You realize, Oh, I've seen this countless times.

It's gonna come up again. I know when the sun goes down, that means the sun's going to come up again. That's burned into your body's senses, and the Psalms are doing something like that for our spiritual eyes so that we can see sorrow, death, pain, loss, grief, and grieve them rightly, but also say of them, They're going to give way to life. They're going to give way to joy. The end of this is the beauty of God in Christ because the crucified one is raised up again.

So that's the shape of the Psalms. Praise God for the shape of this book. You can turn that off, Avery. Now, that was the first big point. First big point, here's the shape of this book.

It's broken into five different books. It has a number of different genres, and it has the shape of sorrow into joy. Now more briefly, but critical for us to get, the second big point about the Psalms is it is about Jesus. The Psalter is about Jesus Christ, and you say, Well, hold on. I've actually read the Psalms, and I never find the name of Jesus in that.

It never talks about him. It never talks about his ministry in Nazareth and Galilee. Well, it doesn't mention Jesus in that sense by name, but in one way or another, every psalm, I'm not just talking about prophetic things, every psalm is about Jesus, about the crucified, risen, and reigning Jesus Christ. That's gonna be critical as we enter into this book. You are reading a book that is about Jesus.

So when you come to a tricky Psalms, say, Okay, where's Christ here? How's this work? That's not just me giving you my own personal hermeneutic. That's Jesus. Let me read what he says.

In Luke 2four 44, and following, he says this, Jesus speaking, These are my words that I spoke to you while I was with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds, this is critical, to understand the scriptures, and he said, Thus it is written, the Christ should suffer, and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name. So what Jesus is saying there is, listen, let me open your minds to understand scripture, and then he says, It is written, the Christ must suffer, die, and be raised, meaning all of scripture is declaring the Christ who suffers, dies, and is raised, and we cannot understand scripture, including the Psalms, until it is read as a witness of the one who suffers, dies, and is raised, and so this book that is so deeply scored by lamentation, this book that moves from the depths of sorrow to the heights of joy, this resurrection shaped book is about Jesus. It's about him. This is what a biblical scholar named Bruce Waltke says, and I agree with this reading.

He says, The writers of the New Testament are not attempting to identify and limit the Psalms that prefigure Christ, like this one's about Jesus, this one isn't. This one talks about him, this one doesn't. Rather, he says, they are assuming that the Psalter as a whole has Jesus Christ in view, and that this should be the normative way of interpreting the Psalms. The New Testament authors are saying the basic way you interpret the Psalms is as being about Jesus. So the book of Psalms belongs about Jesus.

It's fulfilled in his life. It's breathed by his Spirit, and it's revelatory of his heart, and if it belongs to Jesus, then Christian, it belongs to you, because you might ask, This book written thousands of years ago about Jerusalem and Babylon and Egypt and kings whose names I can't pronounce. Well, how's this help me when I don't have a job? How's this help me when I'm on dialysis? How's this help me when I'm losing this relationship?

How does this book about ancient history have anything to do with me? And historically, you could make that argument. Right. It's about a particular people in a particular place at a particular time. But when you realize that this book is from and for and about your Lord, who is your life, when you realize it's about him and you're united to him, now it's yours.

Now the whole book is for you. The whole book is your inheritance. An example I've used before, but I find it inexhaustibly helpful, is think of a king and think of his summer house that's made for him, and the workers are making it just for the king. Beautiful house. And then this king marries a foreign woman.

The workers who made that house had no idea who she was didn't think anything of her when they built it, but now she's married to the king, united to the king, and this house is hers now as well. She can go there whenever she wants. It's her house. So too, the writers of the Psalms were not thinking of us here in Sabina, Ohio. They weren't thinking of this crowd of Gentiles who'd be claiming this book as their own.

They weren't thinking of that. They were thinking of the messianic King, but the King has come. Christ has come, and we belong to him. This book is his. We're his bride, so it's now ours.

This book is your inheritance, Christian. It's the summer house that you can come into at any time, or better put, it's the banquet. It's the banquet of God's own life into which we are invited to enter. And that's why I want to end for us this morning is by looking at a passage of the Psalms that kind of encapsulates the purpose of this series. This is in Psalm 16, and we'll just touch upon it because our time is up, but you can turn there if you'd like.

Psalm 16. So we've seen that the Psalms are structured in five books, that there's at least four different genres, that the main one is lamentation, but it moves us through into praise, that this book is supremely about Christ, and therefore it is for you, Christian. We've seen all these things, and now let's look at what it says in Psalm 16, starting in verse seven. I bless the Lord who gives me counsel. In the night also my heart instructs me.

I have set the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken. Therefore, my heart is glad and my whole being rejoices. My flesh also dwells secure, for you will not abandon my soul to shield or let your holy one see corruption. You make known to me the path of life.

In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Now, in Acts chapter two, Peter says that these are the words of Jesus. These are to be read as Jesus speaking. David is anticipating the Christ, but David is speaking in the voice of Jesus Christ, and so what we find here in this psalm I just read, and you'll find it many other places throughout the psalms, what we find here is the Son praying through the Spirit to the Father.

Those words I just read are the words of Jesus Christ the Son breathed out in the Holy Spirit to God the Father. In other words, what is represented before your eyes on paper and ink is the internal life of God. Right there. We just read it. It's incredible what the Lord lets us do.

Right here is a rehearsal and enacting of God's own eternal life, the internal life, the Son speaking to the Father through the Spirit, and here's the point. This is not here just as something for you to observe as a distant observer. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, that's neat. Oh, that's nice.

This is here for you to enter into. Come into this. Don't just read it. Don't just see the life of God from afar. Enter into it.

Take the words of Christ on your own lips. That's an incredible thing. Take the passions of Christ displayed in these words on your own heart. Enter into the life of God through the Psalms, of course, through all of Scripture, but specifically through the Psalms. See the Psalms as a banquet hall of God's own heart with the doors wide open, and we're like the prodigal son standing at the threshold, and the father is there with his arms open, and the light and the music and the fragrance of the feast are pouring over us, and he says, Come in.

Come in and meet me here, and that's my prayer, that we would do that. We would do that. Not just you individually, though there are individual Psalms, and that's important, but that we as a people would draw near to him through the Psalms, be shaped by him through the Psalms, be made like him through the Psalms together, together. So as an expression of that, we come to the table, because here is the word of God made edible. The reason we're doing this is because Jesus said to do it, because the word of Christ proclaims this as our way to participate in his death and resurrection, to share in him.

So what you're coming to here is an entrance into the same life that's opened to you in the Psalms. You're entering in by faith as you come to the table. The same heart on display in the Psalms, the same heart that we are going to be formed into the image of as we soak in these words, the same heart that laments in all our sorrow and gathers us into its own gladness, the same heart that fulfills the Psalms and the love of the cross and the joy of the resurrection, that heart is accessible by faith at this table as you come in obedience as the bride of Christ, receiving these elements as it were from the hand of our living Lord and participating in his body that he gives for us, in his blood that he pours out for us, in the forgiveness, in the life, So, Christian, we sang this at the beginning, or we read this at the beginning, taste and see that the Lord is good. Taste and see that in the Psalms, and now taste and see that at the table. Let me pray for us, and then we'll partake together.

Father, there's much to see as we begin to enter into the Psalms, and there are limitless riches in this book as your people have declared throughout generations. This book has proven inexhaustible as a source of comfort. Father, I pray that this would not just be a sermon series where we look through a few verses, but truly, Father, you by the Spirit would begin to shape us as a people and as individuals in the form of Jesus Christ as we pray the same prayers he prayed, as we soak in the same waters that formed him, as know the Psalms better, may we be made like the one whose heart is beating through every line of the Psalms. And now, Father, as we come to this table, may we be coming to Christ, to enter into taste and see, to be formed by him, to proclaim him as Lord, and to share in his own life. Lord, do now in this time all that needs to be done in your people's lives.

We look to you in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thank you for listening to this message from Kingstree Church in Sabina, Ohio. To see more of the beauty of God and the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, come worship with us on Sundays at 10AM or visit our website at kingstreechurch.org.