5 Days in Psalm 145
The Holy Spirit drew me into meditating on Psalm 145 this week. When I read through it on Monday morning my heart was stirred with encouragement. So I read through it a second time and then determined to spend each morning in the same place. Here’s a brief summary of my five mornings in this wonderful Psalm and raw entries from my journal. There’s no profound devotional plan here, just one guy’s feeding on the Word being passed on to others who, like me, cannot live on bread alone.
MONDAY: read through Psalm 145 twice, looking for spiritual encouragement from the Lord
TUESDAY: read through Psalm 145 again, found fourteen more qualities of God to add to my “My God Is…” list
WEDNESDAY: read through Psalm 145 again, looked for specific expressions of praise and the psalmist’s personal commitments to be a man of praise
- v. 1 – “I will extol” and “I will bless Thy name forever”
- v. 2 – “Every day I will bless…”
- v. 4 – “one generation shall praise Thy works to another”
- v. 5 – “I will meditate on God” (a deliberate choice!)
- v. 6 – “I will tell of Thy greatness”
- v. 21 – “My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord”
THURSDAY: read through Psalm 145 again, twice. Struck between the eyes by verse 20. “The Lord keeps all who love Him.” This is my soul’s oxygen for today. Spent time praising God that I am kept in Christ forever, no chance of being lost again, and prayed the Lord would keep me close to Him. Spent time in prayer for my family and church members. “Lord, keep all of us. Keep us close to You. Keep us from wandering.”
FRIDAY: Sitting on a second-floor veranda, with the Superstition Mountains at my back (Phoenix, AZ), read through Psalm 145 another two times. The Lord wants me to become a man of praise, to repent of my lifelong negative thinking patterns that contribute so much to my battle with anxiety and low-grade depressive tendencies. “Lord, make me a man who blesses Your name every single day. I don’t want some kind of weird, fake praising pattern that whispers or shouts ‘Praise Jesus!’ a thousand times a day. But I want to live in the atmosphere of praise because of Your truth. I want to breathe in deeply from your Word of your love and mercy and unending grace.”
