A few weeks ago, our family went to the North Carolina mountains to escape from reality for a few days. On our last morning there, I went for a long run before we needed to pack everything up to drive home, and when I got back to the house where we were staying (thanks to the generosity of a member of the church), Lauren and I started talking about the devotional that she was reading. As she shared some of the emotions that came to the forefront during her time with God, I suggested that she read two particular psalms that might be helpful. I remembered the words of John Calvin, who described the Psalms as “An Anatomy of All Parts of the Soul,” for in the words of the one hundred fifty psalms, we can find every single human emotion and every single emotion that God has as well.
The first four verses of Psalm 27 point us toward the strength that we find in the Lord’s presence, and the salvation that God provides for us. These words speak to the help that we so often need when we are in a place where things are not going the way we had hoped or planned. But how can we know the salvation that God seeks to offer to us each? How can we know that “The Lord is the stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid?”
We can only learn about the Lord as we read and study the words of Scripture—words that the Holy Spirit breathed into the minds of writers so long ago, while also making these words relevant to us today. It can be easy to think that these words—the most recent of which were first written nearly two thousand years ago—no longer have meaning to us. Yet there is a resonance we can see and feel in these ancient words, for each of us has had a moment when we too have wanted to dwell in the house of the Lord, to escape from the feeling of being overtaken by hostile forces, and to know that God is our light and our salvation.
But we must read the words to see that God has inspired these words to reach us. We must learn to make time in the midst of our busy lives to learn God’s Word. We must discover the ways in which our Creator is speaking to us to understand just what it is that He desires of us, especially in the midst of a time when we can benefit from reflections of our emotions found in the words of the psalms.