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.
Whoever does these things
Psalm 15:5
will never be shaken.
Devotional
While we were at the beach over the summer, my son, Whit, decided that he wanted to build a sandcastle. He didn’t want it to be just any sandcastle—he wanted it to be one that had a tunnel between the waters of the Gulf and the moat that we had dug in front of it, so the incoming tide would continue to fill the moat. I loved the plan, and even though I had this funny feeling that I knew what the outcome of his idea would be, I helped him with it. Everything worked well for about the first half hour or so, until the water’s path through that tunnel caused the wall on the Gulf side of the moat to collapse, which led to the waters flowing in without any barrier. Whit’s sandcastle was “shaken.”
Our Daily Dwell for this week is a reminder of what it looks like for us to live our lives in a way that keeps us from being shaken like Whit’s sandcastle. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that the “to-do list” in the psalm, which tells us what it looks like to be one who does the right things, is an ideal, especially when we view it through the perspective of our daily lives. There will be days when we get things right, and there will be days when we do not. A better understanding of what God desires from us in relation to this “to-do list” is that we should strive to be one who “does what is righteous.”
Righteousness is more about our relationship with the Lord than it is about our actions as we seek to be righteous. No matter how we strive to do what we know to be right, to be the people who God created us to be, we will fall short. Yet we are all able, even when we are missing the mark in our actions, to seek after a relationship with the Lord. It is through His grace, which we can never earn with deeds, that we find our righteousness, in the depths of the relationship with our Creator to which we are called.
As I consider the righteous relationship that God desires for us to have, I remember these words that Jesus shared: “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock” (Matthew 7:24-25). When we seek after righteousness, we will never be shaken.
For Reflection
- How would you describe your relationship with God?
- Where have you felt that this relationship has been shaken?
- How do you seek to strengthen it?
Prayer
Lord God, we know that you desire for us to follow your commands, but even more we know that you desire that we would draw near to you, to seek after you and the goodness that you promise. Help us to shift our focus to you, more than rules, more than laws, but to the relationship that you have called us each to have with you, our Creator. In Jesus’ name we pray; amen.
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Devotionals