Psalms
How to access God’s resources (Psalm 23)
Ps 23:1-6 Spending a week near a sheep farm a few summers ago, I noticed one evening a sheep that scrambled up the hillside and refused to budge from there when the rest of the flock was brought into the…
The missing ingredient that leads to transformation (Psalm 43)
Ps 43:1-5 My husband regularly teases me about the conversational jumps I make that seem to come out of the blue. The truth is that after saying something, the thought continues in my head so vividly that I forget I…
The way forward when God feels absent (Psalm 42)
Ps 42:1-11 As life expectancy increases, more people encounter the effects of dementia. Seeing a loved one forget details of their lives or confuse the identity of even their nearest and dearest can feel like witnessing the slow death of…
Lessons from the place of distress and remembering the Lord
Ps 102:1-28 One of the things I noticed living in the West is how much more private people are about their troubles and how much harder it can be to know what they are really feeling. Even at funerals, those…
How can we know God’s power in us? (Eph 1:18-23; Psalm 110)
Eph 1:18-23; Ps 110:1-7 A common greeting at Easter is the jubilant little exchange of ‘He is risen!’ answered with ‘He is risen indeed!’. But why does the resurrection matter at all? Is not the cross and atonement for sin…
Tell everyone the amazing things He does
Ps 96:1-13 My former church recently produced a book of testimonies of God’s grace touching lives. One such describes a young woman at a lonely bus stop in Fiji with a threatening gang of young men approaching. Then a van…
The secret of living life well (Psalm 8)
Ps 8:1-9 The beginning of the year is the time for making New Year’s resolutions but unless we reflect on the deeper causes for what we want to change and why, we are likely to repeat the same mistakes and…
Who rules the world? (Psalm 2)
Psalm 2:1-12 What are the things that most worry you when you listen to or watch the news? Is it the way our Western world is increasingly antagonistic to Christian values and becomes more and more confused and erratic in…
The secret of a flourishing life (Psalm 1)
Ps 1:1-6 Part of the year that I worked for a mission reaching out to international students in the UK, I was hosted by an elderly couple who had several grandfather clocks in their house. These cheerfully chimed every fifteen…
What happens when we exclude God from our life?
Psalm 53:1-6 In the early days of their marriage, a dear friend’s husband went off to a two-day conference to another city without telling his wife. He had been a bachelor for so long that he simply forgot he was…