Some of my favorite people doing one of my favorite worship tunes. Enjoy.
Wake up, O Lord! Why do you sleep?
Get up! Do not reject us forever.
Psalm 44:23 (NLT)
Go through almost any CD and you’ll generally find a wide mixture music. A fast paced, energetic song will be followed by an introspective ballad. The next song will have driving intensity and a powerful social message, but the following track will be a sweet song of love. Record producers know that you can’t put together a CD with ten tracks that all sound the same. Variety is the spice of life. As life’s journey contains both peaks and valleys, we need music to express the breadth of the human experience.
When reading through the book of Psalms, we can never forget that it is a catalog of musical lyrics. It was carefully compiled by ancient record producers. Like the CD that slides into the dashboard of our car stereo, the psalms contain a diverse selection of songs which speak to an immense variety of life circumstances.
Everyone experiences crushing defeat from time to time. The greatest sports teams of all time still lose some of the time. Watch the Biography Channel and you’ll see that every person who has reached the heights of success has had to experience tremendous loss on their way up. There is a time for everything under the sun. There is a time for victory, and there is a time for defeat.
The lyric of today’s psalm come out of the confusion and questions which rise up in our hearts and minds after a crushing loss. In those acute moments of despair we remember past victories and when things were good. We feel the injustice of the defeat in light of our self-righteousness. We feel alone and abandoned as if God decided to sleep in and forget about us.
Music reminds us that we’re not alone. Turn up the blues and we find encouragement that others have been there before us. We sing along and our negative emotions find a healthy outlet of expression. Keep listening. Keep singing. The next track on the CD reminds us that these feelings of abandonment and despair are momentary. Better times are just a song away.
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted;
he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.
Psalm 34:18 (NLT)
I don’t care who you are, where you live, or how blessed you are in life – sometimes the blues descend upon you out of nowhere. God’s Message says that the rain will fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. The blues are part of the human experience and many of the lyrics we read in the Psalms come straight out of the blues.
The thing I love about the psalms is that they don’t hide from life. They don’t fake their way through the blues. Instead, they express emotion head on and lay it on the line knowing that God is close to the broken hearted, He rescues crushed souls. God never intended the valley of Death’s Shadow to be circumnavigated or avoided but walked through.
It’s only wading through the blues that we find an honest voice for the song of our hearts.
In times of trouble, may the Lord answer your cry.
May the name of the God of Jacob keep you safe from all harm.
Psalm 20:1 (NLT)
The other night as Wendy and I sat at the I-Cubs game, the score was tied at 1-1 going into the bottom of the 9th inning. On the park’s video screen they played a montage of 40 different locker room and pre-battle speeches from famous movies. As the scenes, some familiar and others less so, played on the music swelled underneath. It was the pre-battle music from one of my favorite movies: Henry V. The crowd began to cheer as the music and words combined to pump everyone up for the bottom of the 9th (though it took the Cubs three more innings to score the winning run).
The first thing I noticed about the lyrics of today’s Psalm is that much of it is not directed as a personal prayer to God, as most of the Psalms are written. The voice of Psalm 20 is directed as a prayer of blessing and encouragement to another person. In this case, the song was sung to bless and encourage the king as he prepared to go out to battle. Psalm 20 is an ancient locker room speech set to music.
Every day can feel like a battle. In fact, Jesus warned every follower to be on guard because our spiritual enemy and the spiritual forces of darkness are constantly on the prowl to devour and destroy. That’s one of the reasons I’ve made a habit of starting my day this way. A chapter-a-day is often my spiritual locker room speech and battle cry before I enter the day’s fray.
Today, as you enter your own daily battle, receive this blessing from one wayfaring stranger to another:
In times of trouble, may the Lord answer your cry.
May the name of the God of Jacob keep you safe from all harm.
May he send you help from his sanctuary
and strengthen you from Jerusalem.
May he grant your heart’s desires
and make all your plans succeed.
May we shout for joy when we hear of your victory
and raise a victory banner in the name of our God.
May the Lord answer all your prayers.
Now go out there and win one for the Gipper!