Quotes about Psalm

This and the following Psalm were don by the Author at fifteen yeers old.

SURRENDER—Pray Psalm 139:23—24: Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. Commit to respond to whatever the Holy Spirit reveals to you.

Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. —PSALM 2:8

St. Augustine adds that God has taught us to praise Him, in the Psalms, not in order that He may get something out of this praise, but in order that we may be made better by it. Praising God in the words of the Psalms, we can come to know Him better. Knowing Him better we love Him better, loving Him better we find our happiness in Him.

But there is nothing to prevent a layman from taking just one Psalm a day, for instance in his night prayers, and reciting it thoughtfully, pausing to meditate on the lines which have the deepest meaning for him.

But consider the mountain-building period of the Flood of Noah's day (e.g., Genesis 8:4,5 Psalm 104:8—9,6 etc.) involving immense volcanic activity acting in conjunction for more than half of the year and surely some volcanic activity that was post-Flood too — which would extend the effects. The point is that immense amounts of fine ash and dioxides were put in the upper atmosphere to linger for hundreds and hundreds of years.

The Hebrew phrase in Psalm 104:8a is the basis for the correct translation of mountains rising and valleys sinking. This shows that mountains and valleys during the Flood were not the same height as they are today. Even today mountains and valleys are changing their height; volcanic mountains, for instance, can grow very quickly, such as Surtsey (a new island) or Paricutin (a volcanic mountain in Mexico that formed in 1943).

Imagine the power of reading a psalm at age eighty that you read daily in your thirties. Rituals can tie our years together.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen. Come, let us bow down and bend the knee : let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. Song "I Will Trust in the Lord" Father, I stretch my hand to you : no other help I know. Psalm 70:1 — 6

Psalm 131 is a maintenance psalm. It is functional to the person of faith as pruning is functional to the gardener: it gets rid of that which looks good to those who don't know any better, and reduces the distance between our hearts and their roots in God.

For centuries this psalm was sung on the road as throngs of people made the ascent to Jerusalem for festival worship. Our imaginations readily reconstruct those scenes. How great to have everyone sharing a common purpose, traveling a common path, striving toward a common goal, that path and purpose and goal being God.

But there is a broad similarity between the directions in the psalm and the contemporary movement known as "behavior modification" which in a rough-and-ready way means that you can act yourself into a new way of being.