Daily Psalms - Classical Psalms Every Day

Psalm 20: Some Trust in Chariots
This is a blessing psalm — the kind of prayer a congregation sends with a soldier the night before a battle, or a parent whispers over a child going somewhere frightening. "The Lord hear thee in the day of trouble." Every line is a hand laid on someone's shoulder. And then, in the middle, comes the line that has echoed down three thousand years of wars and elections and anxious weekends: "Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the Lord our God." It is not a boast — David had plenty of chariots himself. It is a statement about where a man's deepest confidence is kept. You can have the horses and still know they are not the reason you will stand upright in the morning. The psalm ends with the briefest prayer in the whole Psalter, barely five syllables long: "Save, Lord." As if, at the end, when the benedictions are all spoken and the armor is on, there is only one thing left worth saying.
00:00 The Lord Hear Thee in Trouble
00:15 Send Thee Help From the Sanctuary
00:30 Grant Thee Thine Heart's Desire
00:45 We Will Set Up Our Banners
01:00 The Lord Saveth His Anointed
01:15 Some Trust in Chariots and in Horses
01:30 Save, Lord

Psalm 19: The Sun, the Bridegroom, the Runner
There is no psalm quite like this one, and the reason is that its poet cannot seem to sit still. He begins with the silent speech of the heavens — "there is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard" — a paradox only a poet in love could have written. Then he fixes his gaze on the sun, and the sun is suddenly a bridegroom leaping out of his chamber, a runner exulting in a great race, and we are no longer watching astronomy at all but a wedding and a footrace rolled into one. And then, just when you think the psalm will stay out there among the constellations, it turns inward and becomes the most lyrical passage in Scripture on the loveliness of God's law. The statutes that once felt like a cage become honey. The commandments that seemed a burden become more desirable than fine gold. And the psalm ends with the prayer every maker of words has prayed since: "Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight." The man who started by listening to the sky ends by hoping his own small voice might join the chorus he heard there.
00:00 The Heavens Declare the Glory
00:15 Day Unto Day Uttereth Speech
00:30 The Sun as Bridegroom and Runner
00:45 Nothing Hid From the Heat Thereof
01:00 The Law of the Lord Is Perfect
01:15 Sweeter Than Honey in the Comb
01:30 Cleanse Me From Secret Faults
01:45 Keep Back Presumptuous Sins
02:00 The Words of My Mouth, the Meditation of My Heart

Psalm 18: The Large Place
This is the longest psalm so far, and for good reason — it is a song composed after a great rescue, and when you have been rescued you tend to want to tell the whole story. David does. He tells of the sorrows of death compassing him, the snares that nearly had him, the cry that went up from his distress. And then the language suddenly breaks into something cosmic: God bowing the heavens, riding upon a cherub, flying on the wings of the wind. You can feel the poet reaching for bigger and bigger images, as if no ordinary word could contain what has happened to him. But then, in the middle of all that thunder and lightning, comes the line that has always seemed the quiet center of the whole song: "He brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me." A large place. Spaciousness. Room to breathe again after the walls had closed in. And the reason given is not David's worth but God's delight. Later comes a line that ought to stop every reader in his tracks: "Thy gentleness hath made me great." That what made a warrior king into something more than a warrior was not strength but gentleness, not God's power but God's tenderness. The whole psalm, with all its fire and chariots and trembling mountains, turns on that one quiet word.
00:00 I Will Love Thee, O Lord, My Strength
00:25 The Sorrows of Death Compassed Me
00:50 The Earth Shook and Trembled
01:15 He Bowed the Heavens and Came Down
01:45 He Drew Me Out of Many Waters
02:15 He Brought Me to a Large Place
02:50 With the Merciful Thou Art Merciful
03:20 Thy Gentleness Hath Made Me Great
03:55 Feet Like Hinds' Feet
04:30 Girded With Strength for the Battle
05:00 Beat Them Small as Dust
05:30 The Lord Liveth, Blessed Be My Rock
06:00 Great Deliverance to His Anointed

Psalm 17: Keep Me as the Apple of the Eye
Of all the tender names by which the Psalter asks to be held, this one is the tenderest. "Keep me as the apple of the eye." The Hebrew is even more intimate than the English — literally, "the little man of the eye," the tiny reflection you see of yourself when someone looks at you close enough to catch their own image in your pupil. It is the part of the body we defend most instinctively; the eyelid closes before we even know the threat is there. And David asks to be held like that — not at arm's length, not in the cupped hand, but in the most reflexively guarded place a body has. Then he doubles the request: "Hide me under the shadow of thy wings." Two images in one breath, the eye and the wing, precision and enclosure, the watchful and the warm. And at the end, as if tenderness alone were too small a thing to rest a whole soul on, he reaches further still: "I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness." The prayer that began in the eye ends in the morning after a very long sleep.
00:00 Hear the Right, O Lord
00:15 Thou Hast Proved Mine Heart
00:30 Hold Up My Goings in Thy Paths
00:45 Keep Me as the Apple of the Eye
01:00 Hide Me Under the Shadow of Thy Wings
01:15 From the Wicked Who Compass Me
01:30 Like a Lion Lurking in Secret Places
01:45 Arise, O Lord, Deliver My Soul
02:00 I Shall Be Satisfied When I Awake

Psalm 16: The Lines in Pleasant Places
There is a word in this psalm that most of us have stopped noticing because it belongs to a vanished world. "The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places." Lines — the cords a surveyor dropped to mark the edges of a man's inheritance. In the ancient world, your lot in life was literally drawn with rope. And David, who had every reason to complain about his portion (a man hunted like a partridge through the hills), looks at the boundaries of his life and says: this is a goodly heritage. Not because the circumstances were easy, but because the Lord Himself is the portion within the portion, the treasure the surveyor could never map. "I have set the Lord always before me," he says — not behind, not above, but before, in the line of sight, where the eye naturally rests. And from that single discipline flows the most audacious claim in the psalm: "Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell." The man whose eyes are fixed there does not fear what waits at the end of the road. Even the grave becomes a pleasant place when the Lord has walked through it first.
00:00 Preserve Me, O God
00:15 The Saints in Whom Is All My Delight
00:30 The Lord Is My Inheritance
00:45 The Lines in Pleasant Places
01:00 I Have Set the Lord Before Me
01:15 My Flesh Shall Rest in Hope
01:30 The Path of Life