My voice rises to God, and I will cry aloud; My voice rises to God, and He will hear me. 2 In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord; In the night my hand was stretched out without weariness; My soul refused to be comforted. 3 When I remember God, then I am disturbed; When I sigh, then my spirit grows faint. 4 You have held my eyelids open; I am so troubled that I cannot speak. 5 I have considered the days of old, The years of long ago. 6 I will remember my song in the night; I will meditate with my heart, And my spirit ponders: 7 Will the Lord reject forever? And will He never be favorable again? 8 Has His lovingkindness ceased forever? Has His promise come to an end forever? 9 Has God forgotten to be gracious, Or has He in anger withdrawn His compassion? 10 Then I said, "It is my grief, That the right hand of the Most High has changed." 11 I shall remember the deeds of the LORD; Surely I will remember Your wonders of old. 12 I will meditate on all Your work And muse on Your deeds. 13 Your way, O God, is holy; What god is great like our God? 14 You are the God who works wonders; You have made known Your strength among the peoples. 15 You have by Your power redeemed Your people, The sons of Jacob and Joseph. 16 The waters saw You, O God; The waters saw You, they were in anguish; The deeps also trembled. 17 The clouds poured out water; The skies gave forth a sound; Your arrows flashed here and there. 18 The sound of Your thunder was in the whirlwind; The lightnings lit up the world; The earth trembled and shook. 19 Your way was in the sea And Your paths in the mighty waters, And Your footprints may not be known. 20 You led Your people like a flock By the hand of Moses and Aaron.
- Psalm 77

Reading the Psalms as the New Testament Writers Did

We know from the way the New Testament writers used the Psalms that the Psalms were the book of praise and meditation for the early church. In other words, the early church did not say, "Well, Christ, the Messiah, has come now, so everything written of old is out of date and unhelpful." On the contrary, they saw Christ in the Psalms, and they saw their own experience in the struggles and triumphs of the psalmists.

So we should read the Psalms like they did. Christ didn't come to abolish them, but to fulfill them (see Matthew 5:17). So we should read them as fulfilled, not as abolished. They should be fuller and richer for us, but not nullified. For example, when the Psalms call us to meditate on the Word of God we don't say, "We don't need to do that, we have the living Christ and his Spirit." Rather we say, "We have a richer, fuller Word of God, including the Gospels and the epistles - the testimony of the apostles - as well as of Moses and the prophets." So our meditation becomes richer and deeper - at least it should.

Most of you know this intuitively because when you read the Psalms you see yourselves so often. The experience of the psalmist is your experience. And that is no accident. God put the Psalms in the Bible not only to call us to great heights of praise and worship, but also to comfort us in very dark seasons of discouragement and doubt. The strategy of fighting this kind of darkness is what I want us to look at this morning. Indeed it's the strategy of living the whole Christian life. It is the same strategy that we should use. Only we now have so much more truth and more history and more of God in Jesus Christ than the Old Testament saints did. But the design of the strategy is the same, even if our arsenal of truth is larger than theirs.

Christian Living Means Living on the Word of God

My main claim this morning is this: Christian living means living on the Word of God. We live on the Word of God. Day by day, the written Word of God in the Bible is the means of our relation to Christ. We fellowship with Christ by knowing him in the written Word. We talk to him on the basis of what we know of him from the written Word. We hear him speak to us through what he has shown us of his character and purpose in the written Word. Moment by moment, our vital union with Christ, experientially, is sustained and shaped and carried by the Word of God.

If you don't read the Word and memorize the Word and meditate on the Word daily and delight in the Word and savor it and have your mind and emotions shaped by the Word, you will be a weak Christian at best. You will be fragile and easily deceived and easily paralyzed by trouble and stuck in many mediocre ruts. But if you read the Word and memorize important parts of it and meditate on it and savor it and steep your mind in it, then you will be like a strong tree planted by streams of water that brings forth fruit. Your leaf won't wither in the drought and you will be productive in your life for Christ (see Psalm 1).

Christian living means living on the written Word of God, the Bible. In true Christian living, our relation to the Word is intentional, not haphazard. It's active not passive. We pursue it and don't just wait for it to happen. The Christian life is a joyful project that calls for energy and aim and resolve and determination. It is not coasting or drifting or something that just happens to you like the weather. The Word of God, soaked in prayer, is the substance (in the sense of "the material" or "the fuel") of that joyful project. Our delight is in the Word of the Lord, and on this Word we meditate day and night (see Psalm 1:3).

Let's see this way of life at work in Psalm 77 and then step back and do some planning for living this way in the Word in 2000.

Reading Soaked in Prayer

I said that the Word of God, soaked in prayer, is the substance of the joyful project of Christian living. One of the reasons I say "soaked in prayer," is that so much of the Word of God is prayer. Psalm 77 is prayer. If you are going to read it authentically, you read it as prayer. You pray it. I think this is the way all Scripture should be read. We read it in the presence of God. We read it as read before God and to God. We read it as praise to him or confessions to him or questions to him or pleas to him. God is always listening to his own Word in our mouths or in our minds and watching what we do with it. He cares what we do with it. So we should be aware that he is listening to our reading and should acknowledge to him that he is there and that we want him involved in the reading: helping us understand and helping us believe and receiving praise and thanks and petitions and complaints and cries and questions. The Word that we live on should always be prayer-soaked. It should be Godward reading.

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