Daily Psalms - Classical Psalms Every Day

Psalm 42: The Hart and the Waterbrooks
There is no thirst quite like the thirst of an animal that has run too long without finding water — sides heaving, tongue out, head turning desperately toward any glimmer of a stream. The sons of Korah reach for that image, and they will not let it go: "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God." Notice that this is not the prayer of a man enjoying religion. It is the prayer of a man who has lost the meeting place — who remembers leading the festival crowd to the house of God and now hears only mockery, "Where is thy God?" The waves and billows of God himself have passed over him; he is drowning in the very ocean he set out to drink. And yet, three times in this psalm and the next, he turns and addresses his own soul like a friend he must coach back to its feet: "Why art thou cast down? Hope thou in God." Faith here is not the absence of grief. It is the stubborn refusal to let grief have the last word in the conversation.
00:00 As the Hart Panteth
00:20 My Tears Have Been My Meat
00:40 The Multitude That Kept Holy Day
01:00 Why Art Thou Cast Down
01:20 Deep Calleth Unto Deep
01:40 The Lord Will Command His Lovingkindness
02:00 Hope Thou In God

Psalm 41: The Friend at the Bed
David begins this psalm with a strange beatitude — "Blessed is he that considereth the poor" — and only by the end do we understand why he opens there. He is, himself, on a sickbed. He is the poor one now. The friends he once trusted are huddling at the foot of the bed asking how soon they can get on with things. "Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me." There is a peculiar loneliness reserved for those who fall ill in a crowded room — a loneliness Jesus would later borrow this very line to describe. And yet David's prayer is not for vengeance but for mercy: "Lord, be merciful unto me: heal my soul; for I have sinned against thee." He knows that the truest measure of God's favor is not the absence of enemies but the presence of God himself, holding him upright when even his own body has stopped cooperating. "Thou upholdest me in mine integrity, and settest me before thy face for ever." If you have ever been the one in the bed, you know how much that single sentence is worth.
00:00 Blessed Is He That Considereth the Poor
00:20 The Bed of Languishing
00:35 Heal My Soul, For I Have Sinned
00:50 The Whisper of Enemies
01:00 The Familiar Friend Who Turned
01:20 Raise Me Up
01:40 Set Before Thy Face For Ever
01:55 Blessed Be the Lord, Amen and Amen

Psalm 40: The Hand That Lifted
David begins with one of the most physical images of salvation in all of Scripture — a man sunk to the chest in miry clay, unable even to struggle without sinking further, and the hand of God reaching down to pull him up and set his feet on a rock. Notice that David does not say he climbed out. He was lifted. And the first thing that happens after his feet touch solid ground is a song — not a song he composed, but one that is put in his mouth, the way a mother puts a spoonful of something good to her child's lips. But here is the strange and beautiful turn of the psalm: the rescued man does not offer sacrifice, because sacrifice is not what God was after. "Mine ears hast thou opened" — a line so rich that the book of Hebrews would later hear Christ himself speaking it. What God wanted all along was not an animal on an altar but a listening, obedient heart: "Lo, I come: I delight to do thy will, O my God." The miry clay is never the last word. Neither is the rock. The last word is a man who says yes.
00:00 He Inclined Unto Me
00:20 Out of the Miry Clay
00:40 A New Song in My Mouth
01:00 More Than Can Be Numbered
01:20 Mine Ears Hast Thou Opened
01:40 Lo, I Come to Do Thy Will
02:10 Iniquities Taken Hold Upon Me
02:40 The Lord Thinketh Upon Me

Psalm 39: The Handbreadth
This is a psalm for anyone who has ever stood at a window late at night and realized, with a start, how little of their life remains. "Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is: that I may know how frail I am." It is an unusual prayer — not for more days, but for the grace to see how few there already are. David begins by trying to hold his tongue before the wicked, biting his lip until the fire inside him grows too hot to contain. And what finally breaks from him is not complaint but this: every man at his best state is altogether vanity. Our days are a handbreadth, our years a shadow, our whole little hustle of heaping up riches carried on for the benefit of we know not whom. The psalm does not comfort by denying the brevity of life but by reorienting it: "I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were." We are passing through. And if we are passing through, then the only question worth asking is the one David asks at the turn: "What wait I for? My hope is in thee."
00:00 A Bridle for the Tongue
00:20 The Fire That Burned
00:40 Make Me to Know Mine End
01:00 A Handbreadth of Days
01:20 A Stranger and a Sojourner
01:45 My Hope Is in Thee
02:10 Spare Me, That I May Recover Strength

Psalm 38: When the Room Clears
Few psalms are as physically honest as this one. David is not describing some tidy spiritual abstraction but a man falling apart at every seam — arrows stuck fast in his flesh, wounds that stink, loins filled with a loathsome disease, heart panting, eyes dim, strength gone. And the worst of it is not the body but the isolation: "My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my kinsmen stand afar off." Suffering has a way of clearing a room. Those who loved us at our strongest find they cannot bear us at our weakest, and we cannot blame them entirely — the stench is real. But notice what David does in the middle of the psalm: he chooses to go silent. "I, as a deaf man, heard not; and I was as a dumb man that openeth not his mouth." He will not defend himself against the whispers or return the mockery. He will simply wait on God. It turns out that at the bottom of the pit, when there is no breath left for argument, there is still breath for the one prayer that matters: "Forsake me not, O Lord. Make haste to help me."
00:00 Rebuke Me Not in Thy Wrath
00:30 Iniquities Gone Over My Head
01:00 Feeble and Sore Broken
01:20 Friends Standing Afar Off
01:45 As a Deaf Man, a Dumb Man
02:15 I Will Declare Mine Iniquity
02:45 Forsake Me Not, O Lord