Happy New Year! As we welcome 2024, there can't possibly be e better way to start than to be reminded of God's grace and mercy in our lives. 

David in Psalm 32 is coming off of a period of egregious sin and trying to hide it, keep it. Only in the acknowledgement of that sin was he able to find relief and joy, leading him to praise the One who forgave him and glorify his name in song.

Immediately forgiven and instantaneously restored to full fellowship with his Heavenly Father.

The same joy can be ours.

Merry Christmas!! As a gift from the podcast team, Tom reads the Christmas Story from Luke 2.

We pray you and yours have a very Merry Christmas and a special time to remember the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. 

Can we be like the shepherds and proclaim our Savior to the world?

Psalm 31 sees David in the midst of betrayal and abandonment by those he had trusted. This causes him to turn to God.

How often do we look at the season we are in and feel betrayed? Betrayed by our expectations, betrayed by people we've trusted. Who is our first call? Who do we run to when all others have failed?

The truth that echoes this Psalm is that in every season, our God is in control. Because of this we can praise him in every season.

David comes off the heals of a crushing failure in his life that had drastic consequences in Psalm 30. It is easy sometimes to look at the Lord's blessing as personal accomplishments. God warned Israel against this attitude, and David feels the weight of the reality of what happens when we do just that.

When we fail do we turn to God immediately, or do we try to figure it out on our own? If we were to turn to God immediately, he is faithful to turn mourning to dancing, weeping to joy.

What failures have you delayed to give to him? What reconciliation are you putting off? David speaks praise to God and thanks for God's faithfulness to forgive and give exactly what David - what we all - needed: Joy.

David pens a Psalm dedicated to the magnificence of God in a storm he is witness to. How does this translate to praise in our lives? What is the message that God has for us here?

More than the storm is the God of the storm that works in it. Do we acknowledge that God is the master of the storm?

In this Psalm it is difficult not to praise the same way David did - praising the Lord in the storm as the Lord of the storm and finding peace more than despite the storm, but because of it.

David goes once again from a low to a high in this week's Psalm as he engages God in prayer. 

DO we pray often enough? For the right things? Do we feel God is silent sometimes? 

We're not alone. What we can find solace in is that while God may at times seem silent, God is always there. Sometimes his silence is teaching us patience, sometimes his silence is really just a whisper we can' hear because of all of the noise in our lives.

Silence can speak volumes.

Psalm 27 we meet David in a season where he is on the run from Saul.

While he could be complaining and asking God why, we find instead him reaffirming his trust in his Deliverer and he gives us some instruction and insight on what to expect when we follow the One who delights in saving us from every battle.

Psalm 26 may look like David is bragging a little bit, but the only person David is bragging on is God. So much so that he asks God to examine his motivations, purge anything out that shouldn't be there.

How often to we stop and look at what He has done in us? To give Him glory for the marvelous work He has wrought in us?

When was the last time you asked Him to examine you? 

Have you let Him work in you recently?

Psalm 25 puts us once again in the company of David, who has lessons to teach about how we should pray. How we are reconciled, how we are restored through the integrity and uprightness of God, whose integrity and uprightness is above reproach.

He also admonishes the shame out of our lives and encourages us up to lift up our souls, bare and raw before an almighty God who knows our ugly anyway, and reconciles us in his mercy and grace.

Here we are in Psalm 24! A Psalm of triumph, awe and praise, we find it becomes easy to give glory to the Father when we look at the world through the lens David provides here.

We see that while the earth is His, he is also the Lord of the battle and the victory is His as well. He is Jehovah, He is LORD above all!