Daily Psalms - Classical Psalms Every Day

Psalm 95: Today, If Ye Will Hear His Voice
This is the psalm the monks have been singing at dawn for fifteen hundred years, and you can see why. It opens like a door flung wide: O come, let us sing, let us make a joyful noise, let us kneel before the Lord our maker. The whole earth — deep places and high hills and the sea He made and the dry land His hands formed — is offered as evidence that we are in the right room, addressing the right King. And then, with a turn so abrupt it almost startles, the psalm changes voice. Today, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your heart. The invitation has a deadline written into it. The wilderness generation had forty years to soften and could not manage it. We have, the psalm suggests, today. The astonishing thing is not that God speaks. The astonishing thing is that He is still speaking, and the door He flung wide at the first verse is still open at the last.
00:00 O Come, Let Us Sing
01:00 Today, If Ye Will Hear His Voice

Psalm 94: He That Planted the Ear
This is the psalm for the moment when the wicked seem to be winning and you suspect God may have looked away. The psalmist names the suspicion plainly: "Yet they say, The Lord shall not see, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it." And then he asks the question that ends every such suspicion forever: "He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see?" It is the kind of question that, once asked, you cannot un-ask. The Maker of perception is not unperceiving. The One who built sight does not squint. What looks from below like absence is, from above, simply the patience that has not yet finished. And in the middle of this fierce psalm comes one of the most surprisingly tender sentences in the whole Psalter: "In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul." Even the just judge, it turns out, runs a comfort station for the anxious.
00:00 To Whom Vengeance Belongeth
01:00 He That Planted the Ear
02:00 The Rock of My Refuge

Psalm 93: The Floods and the Throne
This is one of the shortest psalms in the book, and one of the most architectural. Five verses, and they build a single, unshakable image. The floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their waves — and we know what floods sound like, the relentless rising shout of water that does not care for our objections. But over all of it, higher than the noise of many waters, sits a throne "established of old." Established before the floods began, and still established when they have done their worst. The psalm does not deny that the waters are loud. It simply names the One who is louder, and quieter. In five short verses we are reminded that every chaos in our lives has a ceiling, and the ceiling is a throne.
00:00 The Lord Reigneth, Clothed with Majesty

Psalm 92: A Song for the Sabbath
Here is a psalm with a job to do — it is, the superscription tells us, A Psalm or Song for the sabbath day — and watch how it does that job. It does not lecture us on rest. It simply gives thanks. Lovingkindness in the morning, faithfulness every night, music on every instrument the temple could find: these are the sabbath's vocabulary. Then it reaches for two trees. The wicked spring like grass, briefly impressive and gone by Tuesday. But the righteous flourish like a palm tree, grow like a cedar in Lebanon, and most extraordinarily, "shall still bring forth fruit in old age." There is a quiet promise tucked into that line that the world rarely makes and almost never keeps: that the years that look like decline can in fact be the years of a slow-ripening sweetness. The sabbath is not the absence of work; it is the soil in which a long life learns to bear fruit.
00:00 To Show Forth Thy Lovingkindness
01:00 The Righteous Shall Flourish
02:00 Fruit in Old Age

Psalm 91: Under His Wings
Of all the metaphors for divine protection in Scripture, this one is the most disarmingly tender. He shall cover thee with his feathers. Not with armor, not with a fortress wall, not with a battalion of angels — though those appear too — but with feathers. The image is of a mother bird, that small fierce thing, gathering her chicks beneath the warmth of her own body. The God who hung the stars and weighs the mountains in scales is, in this psalm, also the God who broods. And the language of refuge throughout is curiously domestic — secret place, habitation, dwelling — as though the deepest safety in the universe is not a hiding from but a dwelling with. The terrors do not vanish: pestilence still walks in darkness, the arrow still flies. What changes is your address. You live now under wings, and that has consequences a thousand falling at your side cannot undo.
00:00 The Secret Place of the Most High
01:00 A Thousand Shall Fall at Thy Side
02:00 He Shall Call Upon Me