Honest, And Yet Appeal – Psalm 77

According to the National Endowment of the Arts, in 2018 less than 12% of adults read poetry in the past year. If you’re in that 12%, hopefully its because you’ve been reading your Bible! Did you know that over 60% of the Bible is poetry? Great Christian author, Eugene Peterson, describes poetry as being written by “poets [who] use words to drag us into the depth of reality itself. They do it not by reporting on how life is, but by pushing-pulling us into the middle of it. Poetry grabs for the jugular. Far from being cosmetic language, it is intestinal. It is root language. Poetry doesn’t so much tell us something we never knew as bring into recognition what is latent, forgotten, overlooked, or suppressed.” (Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer)

The Psalms are not only poetry, they are also prayers. Our prayers to God are to be honest. Deep callings of our needs and our feelings. Our praises and our laments. Our requests and our thanks. They are also to be cries for help, appeals made to God in our times of need. Often, we feel that we enter into the “the valley of the shadow of death” when hard times occur in our lives. But what if we looked at it as though we are born into the valley, living in it daily, through both the good times and the bad. Would that change how you look upon the struggles of life?

Join Pastor Mark Bassett of Our Redeemer Presbyterian Church for a deeper look into Psalm 77.