UNBLOCKING THE WELL OF THE LIVING WORD

Our hearts are like wells. They are to be guarded for they are a well spring of life. How did Jesus guard his heart? He woke up early in the morning to talk to his Father, and the psalms were clearly his prayer book.Matthew Henry says concerning the Psalms: “There is no one book of Scripture that is more helpful to the devotions of the saints than this, and it has been so in all ages of the church.”[1] This Lent prayer devotional encourages the reading of all 150 Psalms for 30 week- days, that is 5 psalms each week-day. Each of those days there will be an encouragement to focus on a couple of verses from one of those 5 psalms.

Listen to the words that Jesus spoke when being tempted by the Devil, for 40 days in the wilderness. Jesus said: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’ (Matthew 4:4). The original expression means ‘is continually coming out of the mouth of God’; it is like a stream pouring forth and, like the stream of a fountain, it is never static.”[2] How hungry are you for Jesus the Living Word, the manna who came down from heaven? Are you in a wilderness, this Lent?..If you are then feed on Him! Let’s hunger and thirst and drink deeply from Jesus the Living Word this Lent.

In his book “Finding God in the psalms” Tom Wright says, “The Psalms are among the oldest poems in the world and they still rank with any poetry in any culture ancient or modern from anywhere in the world …and astonishingly it doesn’t get lost in translation.”[3] The Psalms transform our worldview. He says “People have often supposed that the main difference between the world view of the early Christians and the world view most of us grew up with is that the first is ‘ancient’ and the second is modern”[4] He says “This ..is radically misleading .. the main difference .. has nothing to do with “ancient and modern”..(it) is that the first Christians being first-century Jews believed that Israel’s God had fulfilled his ancient promises in Jesus of Nazareth, and …that God had promised to return and dwell in their midst,” whereas in the modern western world, we have a very different worldview that could be described as Epicurean. “Epicurus.. proposed that the world was not created by God or the gods and that, if such beings existed, they were remote from the world of humans. Our world and our own lives were simply part of the continuing self-developing cosmos in which change, development, decay and death itself operated entirely under their own steam… This is the philosophy that our modern Western world has largely adopted as the norm ”[5]. This rationalist Enlightenment philosophy that universities have adopted for hundreds of years  has strongly influenced the church and hindered it from seeing the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Living Word revealed figuratively in the Old Testament, and the Psalms.

Craig Carter says [6]“A number of years ago I learned an interesting fact about Benedictine spirituality in reading ‘The Rule of St.Benedict.’ I discovered that the monks have traditionally chanted the entire Psalter in worship every week.“Why the Psalms?”… Why not the Gospels? Why not Romans? Why not the Bible as a whole? It is because for Augustine both Christ and the church speak frequently in the Psalms. This was the perspective of the church fathers. When Augustine read the psalms in the light of Paul’s insights about Christ’s crucified human humility, Scripture opened up to him. One way this happened was that he now saw Christ using the Psalms to explain himself. The Psalms do not merely speak of Christ; rather, in the Psalms Christ actually speaks. Many of the early church fathers saw that Christ and the church speak through the psalms, in this way in the second and third centuries. “Second-century writers like Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus continued this Christological reading; so did Tertullian, Cyprian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen in the third century.”[7]

This devotional is an invitation not to study the Psalms but as Tom Wright encourages us, to pray and live them. Christ invites us to pray with Him. Each day, the reader will be encouraged to ask the Holy Spirit to reveal Jesus the Living Word in one of the 5 psalms for the day. Jesus is the living word. Come on a journey with me as we respond to the Lord Jesus Christ’s  invitation to us to pray with him through the Psalms.

References

[1] http://www.ccel.org/ccel/henry/mhc.i.html

[2] Gumbel, N. The bible with Nicky and Pippa Gumbel, Day 41.

[3] Wright, T Finding God in the Psalms, 2

[4] Wright, T Finding God in the Psalms, 16

[5] Wright, T Finding God in the Psalms, 18

[6] Carter, C.A. “ Interpreting Scripture and the Great Tradition.”, Summary, 201- 205.

[7] Cameron, M.” Christ meets me everywhere”, 168, referenced in Carter, C.A. “ Interpreting Scripture and the Great Tradition.”