Psalm Reading for August 21, 2016

A Mighty Fortress Is Our God! [photo by Holly Hayes]

START WITH SCRIPTURE:

Psalm 71:1-6 

CLICK HERE TO READ SCRIPTURE ON BIBLEGATEWAY.COM

OBSERVE:

The Psalmist is lifting up a prayer of supplication, asking God for deliverance and protection.  He bases his present hopes on the deliverance he has experienced in the past.

It is the righteousness of the Lord that provides the source of deliverance and rescue. This is in contrast to the shame that the Psalmist fears.

The Psalmist uses a common Biblical metaphor of the Lord as a

rock of refuge,
a strong fortress.

If the Lord is his refuge and fortress, God provides a place of rescue from the wicked, unjust and cruel.  They are his besiegers, but God is his strong wall.

More proactively, the Psalmist affirms that the Lord has been with him from the very beginning of his life:

For you, O Lord, are my hope,
my trust, O Lord, from my youth.
Upon you I have leaned from my birth;
it was you who took me from my mother’s womb.

The Psalmist’s present faith in God’s protection is grounded in God’s past faithfulness.

APPLY:  

This Psalm illustrates the vital need to teach our children about the faithfulness of God.

A child first learns about the reality and the faithfulness of God by the example of parents, then by the reinforcement of precept and experience.  And this comes from a strong, caring, nurturing community of faith.

RESPOND: 

Martin Luther, the great German reformer, penned one of the great hymns of the faith that is reminiscent of this Psalm:

A mighty fortress is our God,
a bulwark never failing . . .

There is another quote that has been attributed to Martin Luther that seems appropriate to this Psalm:

The church is always just one generation away from extinction.

Every generation of Christian parents is responsible for teaching and modeling the Christian faith to their children.

Lord, I thank you that you have been with me since the very beginning of my life. Because you have always been my rock and my fortress, I don’t fear the future.  Amen.   

PHOTO:

“a mighty fortress is our god” by Holly Hayes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.