Preaching the Psalms

This Wednesday in Teen Church we're starting a new series in the Psalms. Well be looking at Psalm 1, 25, 32, 45 and 51 together, before leaping in Hebrews at the start of the school year. If preaching the Psalms is anything like as difficult as picking Psalms to preach, i might be in trouble.

I think there are several good reasons for preaching through Psalms, particularly to teenagers, and particularly in the summer. First of all, pragmatically, a lot of people are away in the summer, so it's hard to go through a loing book study and build any kind of momentum doing it. We spent the last school year looking at Mark, and, like i said, we'll spend most of the next one in Hebrews, but with people in and out for a couple of months, doing something that is not, strictly speaking, sequential seems to make a lot of sense.

Also, as with any book of the Bible, the way you preach helps your listeners to know how you read. How you deal with problems with a text as you preach it helps people listening know how you deal with those problems as you read it. This is especially important in the Psalms i think. The Psalms are a Christian book, a book about Jesus from beginning to end. We've lost some of that emphasis in 2013, and i'm looking forward to getting it back. Psalm 1 for example, teaches us about a righteous man. That man is Jesus, not you and me. One of the best ways to teach people to read the Bible well is to preach the Bible well.

This leads to the next point. Luther says that the Psalsm are a miniature Bible. If Jesus isn't the God of the Psalms, then who is? Andrew Bonar encourages us to read the Psalms with one eye on David, and another eye on Christ. Gordon Wenham reminds us that Psalms 1 and 2 introduce us to a rightoeus, royal man, and Psalms 3-150 tell us about this man. We need to know about this man, we need to know about Jesus. Where better than in a book packed with Jesus!

And in a book packed with Jesus through every cirucmstance of life. Want to know how to praise Jesus while you live in a cave, or when your life is under threat, or when everything is going your way, or when nothing is...read the Psalms.

Of course, there are dozens of other reasons, and dozens of themes in the Psalms that we won't cover in just five, but that's no reason for not starting off...