During 2025, Peachtree Church is focusing on the Book of Psalms with a series called Dwell, through which we seek to deepen our conversation with God and open ourselves to hearing his response. The practice of praying three times each day will unite the voices of our hearts and souls as we seek the day when we will see the full realization of the Kingdom of God, promised in Revelation 21:3: “…Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.”
We will email devotionals twice weekly with Monday’s providing an overview of the Psalm as a whole, and Wednesday’s focused on that week’s Daily Dwell.
Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
his love endures forever.Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story—
those he redeemed from the hand of the foe,
those he gathered from the lands,
from east and west, from north and south.Some wandered in desert wastelands,
Psalm 107:1-9
finding no way to a city where they could settle.
They were hungry and thirsty,
and their lives ebbed away.
Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress.
He led them by a straight way
to a city where they could settle.
Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love
and his wonderful deeds for mankind,
for he satisfies the thirsty
and fills the hungry with good things.
Devotional
There are certain events in my life that have given definition to who I am as a person. Many of these occasions have also had a component within them that has helped define my relationship with God. In the history of the Israelites, there were certain events that defined the relationship between God and God’s Chosen People. The three that always come immediately to mind are: the call of Abram (before he changed his name to Abraham), the Passover and Exodus, and the Exile and Return. Each of these occurrences changed the Israelites’ relationship with God in ways that influenced how He caused the words of Scripture to be written and also the lenses through which the Israelites and the modern Jewish people read these same words.
Our Psalm this week looks at a moment in the Israelites’ history when God had just finished leading His people out of the captivity of the Exile in Babylon—when people who had been scattered, not only to the city of Babylon but throughout the empire of the Babylonians and their conquerors, returned to their ancestral home. It was a time of mixed emotions for the Israelite people as they celebrated their return from captivity, while also acknowledging the pain they felt as they began the process of rebuilding their nation.
In that time of confusing emotions, Psalm 107 spoke to the underlying theme of giving thanks to God, to the one who gathered them from scattered places and who led them back to their homeland, where they also knew God dwelt in the Temple. In these words we find that special acknowledgment that those who have gone through a season of grief can understand: we desire to thank the Lord for all that He has done in our lives, even as we need to acknowledge some of the hardships that we have seen along the journey to the blessing. This becomes more evident when we read the entirety of this psalm rather than just the nine verses contained here and in the Dwell Journal for the week.
In the words of this psalm, we hear the fulfillment of the words of Isaiah as the Psalmist writes of God leading the people by a straight way to the city that they will inhabit, as the prophet had foreseen. This is only one of the many details within these words that would have sparked within the souls of the Israelites as they read them. God also desires a similar spark of gratitude to happen for us as we read these words today.
For Discussion
- How does your understanding of the lens through which the Jewish people viewed the high marks of their history influence how we read the words of Scripture?
- Where in your life have you seen the Lord lead you by a straight way? How have you responded to this leading?
Prayer
Lord God, we give you thanks. We give you thanks for the blessings that we can see, yet even more we pray that we might thank you for the hardships that we will one day count as blessings. We thank you that through Christ Jesus we can approach you and that through his life, death, and resurrection, we now know a redemption not simply from the lands, but from death itself. Amen.
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Devotionals