As I look back over the past 5 1/2 years of ministry, I have been remembering some beautiful moments with the brothers and sisters in our churches in Belize.  Some of the deepest moments are those glimpses into how the Lord has met a saint in his or her worst moment of crisis and grief with the Word of God. So many times there is a Psalm, or even a verse or two from a Psalm that a person clings to as they seek hope and healing. It is always a privilege to be invited in to hear the way someone has experienced God in his or her darkest hour.  Because of my own experience of spiritual transformation through God’s Word in difficult times beginning during my college years, and continuing on even to the present as we have gone through some deep trials this past year, my greatest joy in the ministry is to connect a suffering soul with the beautiful riches that we have in Christ.  

I began a devotional practice almost four years ago with the Psalms that has been a great blessing in my life. Each morning I write out 3 to 4 verses from the Psalms, and in doing so it takes 2 years to write out all 150 Psalms. At the end of this year, I will have written the Psalms out twice, and I am looking forward to starting over again in Psalm 1 in January. I love it because, in meditating on just a few verses each day, the truths in the Psalms have penetrated my heart in a new way. I have come to add many new Psalms to my list of favorites, as I have had the opportunity to slow down and consider the beauty in each one. Each morning I also take what was in my few verses and write whatever attributes of God are in the verses (adoration), write a confession of sin, and write out some thanksgivings. This has further allowed me to meditate on the truths they contain. The Psalms are filled with both God’s glorious attributes and our worship and thanksgiving to him, but also man’s confusion, sadness, sin, and hurt.

As I have been writing out the Psalms and meditating on them, I have begun to appreciate the poetry of the Psalms. One can say God is the creator; or one can say, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). One could say God is all powerful or one can say, “The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the LORD, over many waters….The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars; the LORD breaks the cedars of Lebanon. He makes Lebanon to skip like a calf, and Sirion like a young wild ox.” (Psalm 29).

Just describing an attribute of God is didactic and speaks to our intellect about who God is. It is succinct and efficient. The way of the Psalms speaks to the person as a whole–intellect and emotion. It speaks directly to our souls, to our being. It reaches a place that mere intellectual knowledge can’t reach, especially in moments when we are confused, despondent, desperate or hopeless. There can be a danger at times that we come to the Bible as we would come to a textbook or a how-to manual, so we can get some keys to help us solve life’s problems. But what we really need is soul transformation. And it is not at all by accident that God has made one third of the His Word to be written in poetry–not just in the Psalms but interspersed throughout the historical literature, the prophets, the Gospels and the epistles.

In our ministry we always seek to see spiritual transformation in those among whom we minister. I love how the Psalms help us along in our spiritual journey, not by giving us a course in who God is and how we can relate to him, but by speaking to our soul even when we are hurting so deeply that we can’t any sense out of life in this dark world. Praise God for the Psalms!