Psalms 1–6

By Amanda Bible Williams

Scripture Reading: Psalm 1:1-6, Psalm 2:1-12, Psalm 3:1-8, Psalm 4:1-8, Psalm 5:1-12, Psalm 6:1-10

Do you ever have moments where it feels like your real life becomes an illustration for something you’ve read in Scripture?

Years ago my youngest son was fighting for his life in the children’s ICU. Days, weeks, and months on end he lay there, a tiny boy in a big hospital bed, surrounded by IV towers and monitors there to support his body and all its systems. Every day, I stood watch next to his bed. And most evenings I drove home, pleading with God to spare my son.

On many of those evening drives, too weary to form prayers, I cried out to God in the form of cry-singing hymns and worship songs in my car. One of those songs was “Surrounded,” sung by Michael W. Smith and written by Elyssa Smith. The simple, repeating refrain goes like this: “It may look like I’m surrounded / but I’m surrounded by you / This is how I fight my battles.”

Driving down I-65 in 2019, I felt like King David in the tenth century BC, fleeing from Absalom for his life. “Lord, how my foes increase!…Many say about me, ‘There is no help for him in God’” (Psalm 3:1–2). The medical diagnoses were stacking up to create a wall too high for my boy and his brilliant medical team to scale. There seemed to be no help strong enough to save.

But the Lord was a shield around him even then. The Lord lifted up my head, right there in the middle of the battle. In the middle of the difficult prognosis, He welcomed my cries and my questions. In the middle of the unknown outcome, He welcomed my weariness and my grief.

The psalms are evidence of a God who invites us to bring our whole selves to Him. These poems and prayers demonstrate the radical closeness we have with God—in every emotion and circumstance, today and every day—through the cross of Jesus Christ. Access, intimacy, and irrevocable belonging are ours because our God pursued us with His presence all the way to death and life again. Underneath every expression of praise, adoration, petition, and lament in the psalms lays an unshakeable foundation: the character of our good God proven in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

I feel needy of the psalms in this season. Lent is a time of remembering and repenting, reorienting our hearts to the truth of who God is and who we are in Him. It requires honesty, patience, and the pain of a heart broken for the reality of sin and suffering. As we read the book of Psalms for Lent, I pray we will respond to the invitation to bare our hearts as before God as His beloved children. May this ancient prayerbook teach us to question and yet trust, grieve and yet worship. Let’s savor the psalms as they lead us day by day, verse by verse, into Holy Week. There we will witness again the act of radical love and power that has rescued our hearts and reconciled us to God forever.

Bless the Lord, O my soul!

Written by Amanda Bible Williams