Blog
Day 26: Notice the Amazement of Others to Experience a Contagious Awe
I dare you to read this psalm (Psalm 100) without smiling. It may be impossible. When we read these words, the way the author of this psalm (likely David, but perhaps not) exudes gratitude is contagious. It allows us to focus on God’s goodness and how worthy He is of our praise and worship...
Day 25: The Gift of Practicing Grief with a Broken Heart
When you feel grief, the root of this emotion can be from a lot of things. The most familiar are death and loss, but grief is a tricky little booger that shows up in countless facets of life. We feel pain when seasons change, when people move away. The real grief of all these things is the distance between what could have been and what actually is. There is a deep mourning that needs to happen when we also must feel the pain of growth, of moving forward, and when we leave the other things behind. Our sin is no different.
Our choice to sin leaves a huge pile of feelings, of “what could have been” grief...
Day 24: Why Extending Mercy Increases Compassion
The word compassion is a complicated one. Merriam-Webster defines compassion as “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it”. In other words, compassion is a choice to allow ourselves to be emotionally impacted when we become aware of another’s distress, and the awareness motivates us to contribute to alleviating their distress.
With a refresher of what compassion actually means, we can look again at the mercy that David displayed towards Saul despite his attempt to kill him over and over again...
Day 23: Benefits of Noticing and Experiencing God’s Righteous Anger
Are you ever irritated, angry, or tired of noticing the behavior of others who do not rely on God? I am sure my behavior makes others feel this same way. In seasons when we feel deeply connected and united with God, it can often leave room for a huge disparity within us. When we see the behavior of those who are distant from God, we are appalled - and rightfully so. We feel dissatisfied with the way God judges His people. At the same time, we long for grace and mercy for ourselves. We don’t actually want to face the reality of our sin issues ourselves. In reality, the way God expresses his anger to His people throughout the Bible is always fair and reasonable when you look at the entire picture of His relationship with His people...
Day 22: How Despair & Community Impact the Way We Reflect God
The absence of God is revealed in the encompassing feeling of despair. Throughout the Psalms, David was constantly facing despair as he forgot God’s goodness, faithfulness, abilities, and character. However, despair is not an emotion related to the current reality one is found in. Despair is a state of hopelessness. It houses confusion, fear, shame, and isolation.
It is hard to wrap my mind around the concept that David, who had faith to defeat a giant, who was confident in God’s power and might, also was so frequently full of despair. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to read more than a handful of Psalms without hearing David go on and on about his most recent struggle to defeat his deep feelings of loneliness, fear, and confusion...
Week 3: He Longs for Us to Know Him
Below is a 28-day guided study about The Heart of God Through David’s Eyes which was created to invite you to encounter God’s heart in new ways. Below is Week 3 of the study. For the book with all four weeks, purchase a copy on Amazon. Day 21: Our Restorer
Even more than his desire to see Jerusalem rebuilt, David longed for God’s relationships with His people to be restored. This was a yearning of David’s heart: that God would allow His people, including David, to be right with Him again despite their repetitive disobedience.
Since this practice of being restored in his relationship with God was a focal point of David’s life and writing, it makes perfect sense for these words to be the way he finished this prayer...
Day 20: Our Reason
While the actual motivation varies for each individual person, we are each motivated by something. Some people are hungry for success, fame, and fortune; others are driven by time with their family, early retirement, food, and several other tempting motivators.
David was motivated by seeing God at work. He was asking God, in the words we looked at yesterday, to be near to him, restore his joy, and now he was telling God how he would respond to God’s generosity...
Day 19: Our Source
As we follow God, we often call upon Him and think that we can determine what He needs to do if we just pray and ask Him. Then, like an overconfident child, we expect God to follow through the way we want Him to provide. We tell him how to accomplish what He wants to accomplish.
In Psalm 51, David acted as an accurately-confident child. He knew God would provide for him what he asked. When David was asking for God to move and do things, He was already aware of what God is able and willing to do. He was making requests of a loving provider, not telling God how to move or behave.
Day 18: Our Redeemer
When I get my hands dirty with dirt or even food, I have an urgency deep within me to clean them. Regardless of the reason, if I am in danger, or if I simply want to get the substance off, my body sets off an internal alarm that notifies me that solving this turmoil urgently is necessary. In a similar way, I long to get rid of the guilt and responsibility I feel when I sin or disobey God. I often have a focused intention to cleanse my soul of the grime that lingers within me. In the book of Exodus, God connects this inner feeling of sinful grime with a physical solution.