Sing the Psalms

Hebrews 4:11-13 (NKJV)
¹¹ Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience. ¹² For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. ¹³ And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.

Much has transpired in the last week. We have moved out of the time of Advent and into the time of Christmas. And in the season of Christmas we celebrate! We celebrate the arrival of the long anticipated One; we celebrate the fulfillment of God’s promises in the life and death and resurrection of His Son. The Lord our God has come!

In our sermons this Advent and Christmastide, we have focused upon Jesus in the Psalms. One of the things that we have emphasized is that Jesus is the true Singer of the Psalms. In Him the psalms, all the psalms, reach their fulfillment and culmination. Throughout His life Jesus sang these psalms, meditated upon these psalms, absorbed these psalms into His life and made them part of His being.

Our text in Hebrews urges us to have this same type of faith. After exhorting us to enter into God’s rest, Paul directs us to the Word of God, which is able to slice and dice us, able to show us our faults and illumine our shortcomings. Why direct us here? Why direct us to the Word of God? Because this is the same place that our Lord Jesus went to direct His own walk with His Father. He was a student of the Word of God. He allowed the Word of God to make and fashion Him into the type of man His Father desired Him to be. And though He was free from sin, free from the necessity of going back and redoing things that he had messed up, He nevertheless grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man through the things that He learned in the Word.

And so the author of Hebrews directs us to be students of the Word of God. We are called to be disciples. To hear what He says to us that we might correct our faults and that we might be reminded of the great promises that He has made to us.

So reminded of our calling to be singers of the psalms, let us kneel and confess that we have often failed to permit His Word to shape us and have instead been shaped by other, contrary voices.