Through My Shades

When I view my life and the world around me and then meditate on the Psalms, it is as if I put on a pair of shades.  The Psalms reveal the truth that we often muddle with the lies and distortions of our fallen world.

Yet for much of my life, I was blind to the Psalms.  God however pressed on me the depth and application of Psalm 1 through the exhortation of a fellow Christian and thus opened my eyes to the rest of the book of Psalms.

   1 Blessed is the man
   Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly,
   Nor stands in the path of sinners,
   Nor sits in the seat of the scornful;

By going through the first verse line by line, this fellow Christian challenged me to carefully inspect who I allowed to influence my life.  What amazed me about verse one was how it seemed to apply to all my struggles, for during that time, I was particularly questioning my addiction to rap music such as Eminem and Lil Wayne songs.  Lyrics full of proud statements and sinful actions constantly filled my head and received my praise, and I felt that the God was yelling at me through this Psalm.  Then in the peak of my distress with the way I was living my life, the piercing ray of verse two set forth what I was to do.

   2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD,
   And in His law he meditates day and night.

Every day, I think of verse one and two like this; I will be blessed if I do not allow modern music to control my thoughts, nor get in situations where people I hang around will tempt me to sin, nor follow everything my friends do.  Instead I will seek God’s word for instruction.  

I do not claim to perfectly follow these words, and the same struggles often invade my life day by day.  But I can say that God has given me a mighty weapon.  He has given me this Psalm to sing and meditate on, and He has given me the rest of His word to guide my life.  I can testify with a multitude of other Christians that the words of Psalm 1 are true and that God blesses the Christian who delights in His word and on it “meditates day and night”.

After my run-in with this Psalm, I went on to study other Psalms such as Psalm 16 and Psalm 51, and I found that every aspect of the Christian life is dealt with in the Psalms.  In Psalm 16 I can sing about God’s guiding hand which leads me toward salvation, while Psalm 51 gives me a prayer to repent of my sins.  Nevertheless with all the variety and depth of the Psalms, every truth seems to go back to Psalm 1.  Rejecting Christ and following ungodly influences will ultimately always lead to uncertainty and despair, while the man who seeks and obeys God through Christ will be blessed beyond measure.

So basically my story is this.  I was dead, but then God saved me from my sins.  Then I was blind to the beauty of the Psalms, but now I see them through the shades of Psalm 1.