Daily Psalms - Classical Psalms Every Day

Psalm 1: The Tree and the Chaff
The Psalter opens not with a prayer or a hymn but with a choice — and, more quietly, with a picture. Here is a man, the psalmist says, who has sunk his life down into the law of the Lord like a tree sinks its roots toward water, and the result is that when the drought comes (and the drought always comes) he does not even notice. His leaf does not wither. Over against him stands another figure, and the contrast is almost cruel in its lightness: chaff, which the wind driveth away. Not punished, not argued with — simply blown. This is the great sorting of the Psalms, offered before a single prayer has been prayed: you may be a tree or you may be chaff, and the difference is not a matter of effort or cleverness but of where you have chosen to put your roots. Meditation day and night, says the psalmist, as though the law were not a burden to carry but a river to drink from. The tree does not strain to bear fruit; it simply stands where the water is.
00:00 Blessed Is the Man
00:15 A Tree Planted by the Rivers
00:32 The Chaff the Wind Drives Away
00:48 The Way of the Righteous

Psalm 150: The Last Word Is Praise
And so the Psalter ends as it must — not with a question, not with a plea, not even with a lesson, but with sheer, unembarrassed, full-throated praise. Every instrument the psalmist can think of is summoned: trumpet, psaltery, harp, timbrel, strings, organs, cymbals loud and louder still. It is as if the poet, having journeyed through every shade of human experience — the laments, the doubts, the desperate midnight prayers, the songs of deliverance — arrives at last at the only destination that makes sense of it all. Praise God in his sanctuary. Praise him in the firmament of his power. Praise him for his mighty acts and according to his excellent greatness. The repetition is not laziness; it is the only honest response to a reality that outstrips our capacity to describe it. And then comes the final line, the one toward which all one hundred and fifty psalms have been traveling: "Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord." Not every thing that understands, or every thing that deserves to, but every thing that breathes. Your next breath is itself an invitation. Praise ye the Lord.
00:00 Praise in His Sanctuary and Firmament
00:15 The Full Orchestra of Worship
00:30 Every Breath, the Final Hallelujah

Psalm 149: The New Song and the Two-Edged Sword
This is the psalm that makes comfortable readers uncomfortable, and it should. It begins in pure delight — sing a new song, praise his name in the dance, take up the timbrel and harp — and then, without so much as a breath, puts a two-edged sword in the hands of the saints. The high praises of God in their mouth and a blade in their hand. We want these to be metaphors, and perhaps they are, but the psalmist does not seem to think the combination strange. He sees no contradiction between joy and justice, between dancing and the binding of kings with chains. The key, I think, is in that small phrase tucked into the middle: "For the Lord taketh pleasure in his people: he will beautify the meek with salvation." Beautify the meek. Not arm the powerful, not reward the ambitious, but adorn the lowly with rescue. The sword is not given to the proud but to the meek — and that changes everything about what kind of weapon it is. This is the honour given to all his saints, says the psalmist, and one suspects it is an honour most of us are not yet ready to receive.
00:00 A New Song in the Congregation
01:00 The Honour of the Saints

Psalm 148: The Roll Call of Everything
This psalm reads like a conductor tapping his baton on the podium and then pointing, one by one, at every section of the orchestra — except the orchestra is the entire created order. Angels first, then sun and moon and stars, then the waters above the heavens. And then, as if turning from the balcony seats to the floor, he calls up the earth: dragons and deeps, fire and hail, snow and vapor, stormy wind. Mountains and hills. Fruitful trees and cedars. Beasts and cattle, creeping things and flying fowl. Kings and judges. Young men and maidens, old men and children. No one is excused. No one is too small or too strange or too wild. The dragons are summoned alongside the judges, the creeping things alongside the kings. There is something almost comic about the list, and something deeply serious: it implies that the universe is not a machine running on indifferent laws but a choir that has been given a song. And the final verse makes the most extraordinary claim of all — that Israel, this small and often bewildered people, has been brought near to the God whom stars and storms already praise. The whole cosmos was singing before we arrived. We have simply been invited to join in.
00:00 The Heavens Summoned to Praise
01:00 Every Creature, Every King, Every Child

Psalm 147: The God Who Counts Stars and Binds Wounds
The most astonishing line in this psalm is also the most easily missed. "He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite." And directly before it: "He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds." The psalmist places these two facts side by side as though they belong together — and of course they do, though it takes a moment to see it. The same God who catalogues galaxies with the ease of a shepherd counting sheep is also, at this very moment, kneeling beside someone whose heart has come apart. He does not delegate the stars to an assistant so he can attend to the brokenhearted, nor does he leave the wounded to manage while he maintains the cosmos. He does both, simultaneously, with the same infinite attention. And then this strange, wonderful rebuke: he delights not in the strength of the horse nor takes pleasure in the legs of a man. What does please him? Those who fear him, those who hope in his mercy. Not the impressive but the dependent. Not the strong but the waiting.
00:00 Praise and the Broken Heart
01:00 Snow, Ice, and the Word That Melts
02:00 A Privilege Given to No Other Nation