Finding Jesus in the Psalms

Dannah: Let's find Jesus in the Psalms. Shall we?

So, I have loved the Psalms for a really long time. When Psalm 130 became a factor in my life (that I testified about this morning), I started a pattern of spending an hour a day in God's Word.

Now, you might say that sounds ridiculous, or you're super spiritual. I don't know. But here's the reality: I was challenged by someone to do that.

It takes me twenty or thirty minutes to stop thinking about myself, my to-do list, my life, the laundry . . . everything. I'm not even really “started” until I'm twenty or thirty minutes in. About twenty or thirty minutes in, I start to forget all of those things. I engage, and I don't want to quit.

But at the beginning, I didn't know what to do with an hour. Like, the clock ticked so slowly. And so somebody said, “Well, read whatever you're reading in Scripture or studying in Scripture, read one proverb a day and read one psalm a day.”

So, since I was about twenty-six years old, that's been my pattern—most days. I have seasons where I don't do that, but that's my regular rhythm. That's my preferred rhythm.

I started to really fall in love with the Psalms through that. But about five or six years ago, I started to feel like . . . You know how you become familiar with the words of Scripture and you start to become a little immune to them, right? So I was like, “I need a new way of looking at some of these things.”

And so I started instead of taking one psalm a day, or a section of a psalm a day, I took one psalm for like twenty days or thirty days. I stayed in it. And some really cool things started to happen in my heart and my life. I started to see the words differently. I became intimate with them. I understood them in a new way.

And since then, two times for the last couple years, twice a year, I've been inviting women to study that psalm that I'm working on with me. I call it the Holy Girl Walk. I talked about it three years ago, and I have done three so far. I've published three so far: Psalm 91, Psalm 92, Psalm 30—“Calm Anxious Thoughts,” “Made to Flourish,” and “Proclaim His Deliverance.”

And in November, we're doing Psalm 130. So, there's a podcast. You can check that out at DannahGresh.com.

But as I've been in these psalms . . . (Oh, I think these books are in the Resource Center. Yeah, they're telling me they are. These people know—the front row knows.)

As you become familiar with Scripture, you start to have new questions about it, right? Because the more informed you are, the more you know what questions to ask.

And one of the questions that I have been asking for about twelve months is, “Where is Jesus in the Psalms?”

I'll tell you in a moment why I got to that place, and what was the catalyst for that. But first, let's talk about what are the Psalms.

The Psalms are songs—we talked about that today. There are 150 songs. You can also consider them prayers. They're written by various authors—David, the sons of Korah, Asaph, Moses, and some anonymous writers.

They are very emotional. They deal with almost every human emotion and instruct us how to deal with that emotion. They're a tutor—they are—they teach us. They teach us how to take that emotion, or the circumstances associated with the emotion, to the Lord. Today, we took the emotion of shame and we learned what to do when we feel that. Almost all the psalms are like that.

Athanasius, who was one of the early church fathers, said, “Most Scriptures speak to us. The Psalms speak for us.” When you don't know how to pray, there's probably a psalm that will help you know how to talk to God about that emotion and that circumstance. So, they're just beautiful.

Let's look at the timeline of the Psalms. One of the oldest psalms is from the year 1489 BC. That's Psalm 90. That's the oldest one, as far as scholars come to agreement and believe. And then, 444 BC—the two youngest are believed to be Psalm 1, which was believed to be written as an introduction to the Psalms after they decided to organize them. They organized them in about the year 444 BC approximately; and Psalm 119, which we're going to spend a whole lot of time in. Nancy was in it last night. We're going to be in it tomorrow morning. That seems to be one of the most recent.

The arrangement of the Psalms we're not going to spend a lot of time in, but there's some interesting facts here. You probably know this, but when they decided to arrange the Psalms in 444 BC, or about there, they put it into five books. 

We're going to come back to this in a moment, but:

• Book One is chapters 3–41. Most of them are written by David.
   
• Book Two is 42–72.
   
• Book Three, 73–89.
   
• Book Four, 90–106.
   
• Book Five, 107–150.
   

Now, you're saying, “That's not 150 Psalms.” That's right, because the first two, which are anonymously written, are believed to be introductory—one of them written for the purpose of introducing the Psalms, Psalm 1, and the other one they decided, “Oh, this works here.”

And then the outro, 146 through 150, which is kind of a celebration, a culmination—“Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.” You know, Psalm 150.

Okay, so we're going to come back to that in a moment, but here's when I began to wonder: Where is Jesus in the Psalms?

Last year my husband and I got to go to Rome, and I loved that because I ate a lot of pasta. But I also loved that because I was like, “Oh, Paul was here!” I wanted to see the prison that he was in, and I did.

But I also got to see something that I didn't expect to be excited about. One day, my husband said he wanted to go to the catacombs. I had seen pictures of the skulls and the catacombs, and I was like, “No!” But he really wanted to go. We were sort of having a fight, so I decided I should say yes.

So I said, “Let's go.” 

He said, “The one I want to take you to is on the Appian Way.” 

And I was like, “Why is that?” 

He's like, “That's the road Paul walked into Rome on.” 

I was like, “Let's go.”

So, the Appian Way, we actually stood on that. We didn't take that picture. My pictures were terrible, but we stood on those rocks. Those are basalt stones that Paul would have walked on. They've been there a really long time, and we stood on the very road where Paul would have walked.

Now, because we were in such an ancient place, these were some of the earliest catacombs. There are two really well-known ones out there, and the one we went to is called San Callisto.

San Callisto is owned by the Catholic Church, and it's just a field. You’re driving and driving and driving, and there's just a field, and there's a little, tiny building with ticket sales. You go down in the ground under this huge field.

Now, this one is very unique, because it would have been first- and second-century Christians that were buried there. They worshiped there before Constantine made it legal to worship publicly.

So, we went down into the catacombs, and this is a really cool thing that the Lord did for us. I know that the man who was our tour guide was a believer, and I believed it with every word he said and explained to us.

But when I got out, I got to say, “What do you think about the words that you told us down there?” 

He's like, “I believe everything I said,” and he was quoting Scripture the whole time he was down there. It was really amazing.

There were no skulls at San Callisto, because they believe in the dignity of human life, and so they have removed the skulls and the bones from the catacombs. They took us through to a place of resting, so that all we saw were empty holes.

But here's what was interesting about San Callisto . . . (Oh, that, by the way, that is a statue of one of the early church martyrs, a woman named Cecilia. She was martyred for the faith. So, they have little rooms there where her bones would have been. At some point in antiquity, they made a statue of her to honor her sacrifice for the faith.)

So, here's what I want you to see, because this is where I started to say, “Where is Jesus in the Psalms?” All through the catacombs, you see that fresco on the wall there. Wouldn't you like to have that in your bedroom? I don't know who that dude is. But throughout the catacombs, there were frescoes of various qualities.

You could see the poorer people that were buried there had sort of hand-drawn scribbles. And then there were these magnificent paintings on some of them. And you saw the ichthus, which you would expect to see, the Chi Rho, which was like the monogram of Jesus. There are just lots of Jesus symbols and a lot of Jonah. Jonah was all over the place. We're not going to go there (I could tell you why). But more than anything, we saw this—the Good Shepherd. The image of the Good Shepherd.

It was one of the most common of the symbolic representations of Christ found in the early Christian art and in the catacombs. And when I saw it, I started to have a question. I didn't know what the question was, but I was like, “Wow, the Shepherd's here a lot.” I know why I had the question now. I'll tell you in a minute. 

But let me show you a couple other pictures—I mean, He's just everywhere. The Good Shepherd was everywhere. And obviously, they were referring back to Psalm 23, right? I didn't know why then, but that's when the question started to rise in me of, “Where is Jesus in the Psalms?”

And now I know why. So let me tell you why.

It was a marvel that Gentile believers who buried their dead and their martyrs, worshiped in these catacombs. They adopted Jewish texts. To us that seems really normal. This is our Bible. All of this is our Bible, right? But that was unbelievable to Jewish believers at the time.

Let me read to you from the thesis of The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation. Big title.

Historically speaking, it was scarcely predictable that the predominantly Gentile Christian community of late antiquity should be drawn to a book of ancient Jewish prayers, much less ascribe to it divine authority. Yet Christians adopted Israel's Book of Psalms in total—[in total]—as part of the treasury of the people of Christ. The Psalter not only offered prophetic teaching and training in spirituality, for many, with a radically Christological perspective, the text mediated the very voice of Christ speaking in the first person.

Did you hear what I said there? We're going to test it.

Speak—the very voice of Christ speaking in the first person—

. . . thus opening a window on the inner life of the redeeming Lord. The Psalms received more comment from the early Christian writers than any other Old Testament book. It was a constant presence in liturgy, a training book for prayer, a source of theological instruction, a blueprint for spiritual advancement, and a key that unlocked the whole Bible.

So, here's what I want to say about this. They were Gentiles. They had no connection to the Jewish faith, and yet they embraced the Psalms, symbolizing that they believed they saw Jesus in them.

So, point number one that I want you to take from today is: the early believers considered Christ the subject of the Psalms.

We're going to go ahead and look at some of the early believers’ quotes and thoughts. I've pulled up some renderings of famous, old, dead guys for you to look at.

Here's what I want to say about this before we look at this. We don't base what we believe on tradition. We do not do that as believers. We base it on the written Word of God. However, we shouldn't be allergic to tradition.

I'm fifty-seven years old, and I hope you didn't hear all of that, but I'm a grandma. There are lots of twenty-year-olds whom I adore that just don't understand that I have walked with Jesus and His Word for almost four decades longer than they have—or five decades longer than they have. And there's a lot of ageism in how they treat me sometimes. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

So I think sometimes that's how we treat the tradition and the history of believers—with that same kind of “they.” Some of these walked longer and closer to the time of when Jesus walked, and yet we kind of think we know more.

Now again, we are going to test. We're going to be like the Bereans and test everything that they've said, and, well, you'll see what I mean.

So first, we're going to look at Justin Martyr. Justin lived 100 to 165 AD. He was one of the earliest and most important Christian apologists who defended the faith. He converted to Christianity after realizing that Christ fulfilled the deepest truths pagan philosophies could only hint at. He was a seeker.

He wrote a book called The Dialog with Trypho. Trypho was a Jew, and basically a big part of the book was arguing that the Scriptures were not their Scriptures, but they were ours.

So again, that's normal to us, right? These are Judeo-Christian texts . . . not to them. And so he was saying, “Listen, I believe that God ordained those words for the people of Israel, and for the people that would follow the Messiah of Israel.” And that was really unheard of.

And here's what he said. He frequently asked the question in this book: “Who is speaking in this psalm?” And his answer is often, “Christ is speaking prophetically.” And he says it about psalms that you might expect, but also about those you might not. Let me give you a few examples.

Psalm 22: You know this: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (v. 1).

And he makes an argument that this is Christ's voice, first and foremost, prophetically spoken through David. David didn't inspire those words. God did. David didn't write them for Christ to speak. Christ chose them.

Psalm 31: “Into your hand I commit my spirit” (v. 5).

Psalm 69: “I thirst” (v. 21).

Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected” (v. 22).

Psalm 45: It talks about the bridegroom King, which we know today in Ephesians 5 to be Christ, right?

See that? He had this deep conviction. Justin had this deep conviction that the Psalms were full of prophetic speech about Christ. We look past a lot of that. A lot of times we don't see it, a lot of times. I've given you some very, very obvious examples.

We could do Habakkuk and all that kind of stuff with Augustine's name too. I'm not quite sure the right way to say it, but you're probably familiar with him. He lived from 354 to 430 AD. He was one of the most influential thinkers in all of Christian history until Freud, which is very modern. Quite honestly, modern Western thought was really influenced predominantly by Augustine.

And he says explicitly—get ready for this one—we are going to test it. This is probably the hardest one for me. Maybe you've heard this before. I hadn't heard this until this year.

He states explicitly that Psalm 1:1, “Blessed is the man that has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly,” is understood to be, quote, “Our Lord, Jesus Christ, the Lord man.” Now, he was one of the first to record that. He was one of the first to assume that and think that. But he wasn't the last.

Let's jump ahead to 1483–1546: Martin Luther. He was, of course, a German monk responsible for the Protestant Reformation. This is a quote from Luther: “The first psalm speaks literally concerning Christ.”

Thus, that shows a deep continuity with the thinkers of the Reformation and the early, early, early church fathers. For the first 1,500 years of Christianity, the mainstream answer to “Who is the blessed man of Psalm 1?” was Christ.

“Today, this is a minority answer. How did we change?” That's Christopher Ash speaking. He is a living guy, not a famous dead guy—famous alive guy.

So I want to posit this thought, and we're going to go a little more deeply into this psalm thing. But it's not really a question of if Christ is in the Psalms; it's where do we see Him?

I had one of my staff members just look at this, and I said, “Kick the tires of my notes. Test the theology.” And she had the same reaction to this Psalm 1 thing that I did.

It was like, “Really?” I'm reading Psalm 1. You could go ahead and turn your Bibles to Psalm 1. “I'm reading Psalm 1: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked.” Of course, Jesus couldn’t do that. “Nor stands in the way of sinners.” Of course, He didn’t. “Nor sits in the seat of scoffers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; on his law, he meditates day and night. He’s like a tree planted by streams of water.”

This sounds like it's about us, anybody? Yeah.

So I wrote to Bob Lepine. I said, “Bob, my friend and I are like struggling with what we’re seeing in antiquity—that Psalm 1 was about Christ.”

So he put it through Logos (the guy that was just on stage). Bob has a Logos account. Here's what he texted back to me:

“Here is what my Logos says:” 

The blessed man in Psalm 1 is indeed interpreted by multiple theological sources as referring to Jesus Christ. The psalm describes a singular, unique individual who truly fits the description—Jesus Christ—who is the only one who can declare the words of Psalm 1 with complete integrity.

Hard to argue with that. 

This is a description of a perfect man, specifically the Lord Jesus, who is not condemned by the law, while believers can rely on spiritual resources to become like the blessed man.

Who else could be described as one who turns aside for nothing, pleases God in everything, and prospers at anything? The psalm portrays this blessed man as making right choices, having right desires, delighting in God's Word, and thinking about them constantly. He flourishes in the right place, remaining evergreen with everything. He does prospering.

The gospel message is that through Jesus' obedience, all the blessings of Psalm 1 become available to believers. On the cross, He took our sin and gave us His righteousness. When Christians recite Psalm 1, they join with this righteous man, affirming the blessings that rest on Him, and pledge to live with His Spirit dwelling in them.

And then Bob wrote, “So, yes, the portrait we find in Psalm 1 describes Jesus.”

I don't know how many of you that's a new thought for you. How many of you have never considered that?

So let's go back then, with that as the introduction to the Psalms. It kind of changes the way you look at everything.

So let's look at that arrangement again, and you can see I've put a couple notes on there of where we see Jesus in the Psalms.

One: he's the blessed man in Psalm 1.

Two: Psalm 2 refers to a promise that a messianic King will defeat evil entirely one day.

Book One is a call to covenant faithfulness. David wrote most of them. Jesus will become the covenant fulfillment to that covenant faithfulness.

Book Two echoes the prophetic writing about the messianic King.

Book Three: the promise and need of a messianic King. In contrast to the exile and the downfall of a kingdom, the book ends with a cry for God to never forget the covenant faithfulness of David from Book One.

Book Four returns to the roots of Israel, claiming God has the true reigning King over all creation.

Book Five affirms that God hears the cries of His people and will, one day, send the messianic King.

And, you see a progression happening. In fact, if you look at many of the psalms, they are lament, and many of them are praise. There's more lament at the beginning and more praise at the end, and less lament at the end.

And then we conclude. We find a centerpiece in Psalm 148:14. God is raising up a horn, and says the horn is Jesus.

Early believers believed they saw this. This is a snapshot. This is a quick look. But early believers saw that, felt that, you could see the whole of Genesis to Revelation in the Psalter. In fact, Martin Luther called it “the little Bible,” because you could see all of Jesus revealed in the Psalms.

Point two: the New Testament writers called the church to the Psalms. We have been called to sing them continually.

Colossians 3:16: “Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.”

I could go into it, but all three of those—psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs—are just different kinds of songs that are written in the Psalter.

Ephesians 5:19: “Addressing one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord.”

Paul speaks about these almost in passing. And the other place that he speaks about—or the whole New Testament speaks about something in passing—is fasting.

I think both of these things, it's almost assumed; that the New Testament believers understood the importance and the priority of fasting and the importance and priority of the Psalms that they didn't detail it. They didn't spell it out and explain it.

That can be frustrating for us because we don't live in a culture where we get it like they do. But they were immersed in the Psalms. They were singing these songs over each other.

What does Acts 2 tell us? When did they gather? They gathered together every day—daily. What did they do when they were together? This: singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs every day. They were in the Psalms.

That takes me to Benedict. He mentions the daily rhythm of the Psalms. He lived 480 to 547 AD. He wrote a book called The Rule of Benedict, which was supposed to help the church at that time understand their daily rhythm of meeting together, like the Acts 2 church.

And one of the things he wrote in there is this:

Anyone who sings less than the Psalter with its customary canticles in the course of a week displays a lack of dedication and devotion, whereas we read of our holy fathers who arduously fulfilled it in a single day what we tepid souls accomplish in an entire week?

In other words, they, we're taking a week to get through the Psalms. Are you kidding me? They were getting through the Psalms—they sang. They knew the songs the way that you know Shane & Shane songs. They're just doing it while they're doing the dishes. They're doing it while they're making the bread. They're singing the Psalms all day long, meditating in their hearts. And then they sing them to each other and with each other. They were that important.

As I said, since the late ’90s, I've been looking at one Psalm every day. I now realize it takes me—if I read one every day, which I don't, because Psalm 119 and others are pretty long—it takes me 150 days. I don't know what Benedict would think of me, but I don't think he would approve.

Number three: we cannot experience the Psalms without Jesus. Just a quick look at a few Scriptures.

About the Scripture: John 1:1–3: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Anytime we open our Bibles, we are with Jesus. He is the Word.

Second Timothy 3:14–15: “Continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from a child you have been acquainted with the sacred writings.” What do they do? They are “able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”

That means Scripture—all of it—exists to make us understand salvation through Jesus.

Tomorrow, I think I'm hearing that Nancy's probably going to be talking about the Road to Emmaus. (She can change her mind, like, she's Nancy.)

Luke 24:27: On the road to Emmaus, Jesus shows up to two grieving believers and says to them, “Beginning in Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” Jesus is in all of the Scriptures.

Acts 2:25–51: if you read that, you're going to see that Peter said the Psalter was a prophetic witness to Christ.

Now, as I was preparing this, I thought to myself: I tell my true girls all the time when I do these workshops, one of the things I do is hold up my Bible and I say this—and you've probably said this too—this is not a book about you.

And all the moms do what you're doing—amen—because we make this about us. We misuse it all the time. However, I might not say that again.

By the way, our next True Girl is called a Pop-Up Party. It's a two-day event. Saturday morning we open the Bible, and we use a simplified method of inductive Bible study to teach girls how to study their Bibles and use it accurately.

It's called the 4Z Method of Bible Study. They zoom out for context. They zoom in for particulars. They zero in: What does it mean for me? We've asked that after we understand what God's saying. And then zip it up in prayer. It's pretty cool.

If you live near Houston, come if you have a seven- to twelve-year-old, or a seven- to twelve-year-old at heart. Anyway, what was I talking about?

Oh, I say this: this is not about us. As I have been studying these ancient thinkers and some modern thinkers—I'm not sure I'm going to say that again about the Psalms. One of the things we quite often do is make the Psalms about us, because we understand the emotion.

I understood what it feels like to be in the depths. Bob and I have understood in the last few weeks what it’s like to walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

These psalmists have been ordained by God to write about human emotion, and so we identify. So the question is: “Is it wrong to see us in the Psalms?” I would have told you before this study, well, yeah, because this is not a book about us; it's a book about God.

Listen, here's what I found. John Calvin, another famous dead guy, 1509–1564, French pastor, theologian, writer, became one of the influential leaders of the Protestant Reformation. John Calvin called the Psalms “an anatomy of all parts of the soul,” saying: “For there is not an emotion of which anyone can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror.”

Now that is why we feel the tension of making it about us, right? Is it okay?

Let me zero in on two people, very alive and well: Mark Futato and Nancy Guthrie. How many of you love Nancy Guthrie? Love her!

In a conversation about the Psalms Nancy asks: “A pitfall I face when I come to the Psalms is that I make it about me.” 

And Mark said: “We hear this about the Bible: it's not about you.” He says, “We say this in popular evangelical culture. And it's a hard thought process to come up against. But covenant is about God and us. The Ten Commandments are about God and us. The Lord's Prayer is about God and us. These are all covenantal. When we approach the Psalms, we do have an intuition to read it through the lens of our experience.”

And this is what he says: “That's actually okay. We should say it's not just about you.” 

I think that's what I will be starting to say to the girls when I hold up my Bible: This book is not just about you. It is first and foremost about Jesus and His redemption story, and then about you.

Now let me continue, because I found something to build on that from Christopher Ash. He's one of my favorite new people that I just discovered. He's the author of The Psalms: A Christ-Centered Commentary by Christopher Ash. He takes this a step further. Let me read what he says:

In arguing for a Christ-centered reading of the Psalms, I have occasionally been misheard as if I were suggesting that individual Christians cannot pray the Psalms. Far from it. This misunderstanding can arise because I draw attention to problems that arise when an individual believer seeks to refer a psalm directly to himself or herself, or because I seek to emphasize how Jesus Christ prays in the Psalms.

The end point for which I argue, however, is that we may and must appropriate the Psalms for ourselves, both individually and corporately. But we may only legitimately do so as men and women in Christ.

If we are outside Christ, the Psalms are not mine or yours to appropriate. If we are in Christ, every word is our birthright as children of God the Father, brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, men and women indwelt by the Spirit of Christ.

To be one in Christ is one of the most important phrases in the New Testament, right? And so, the reason that I can see myself in the Psalms so clearly is not just because they express the emotions that I feel, but also because I am in Christ. I am one with Him. It's also why some people find themselves very frustrated when they read the Psalms—because they are not in Christ.

But there is a drawing here . . . Let's go back to the Good Shepherd. Oh, first, I’ve got a good Christopher Ash quote I don't want to miss: “The reason we see ourselves in the Psalms is because we are in Christ, and these words are about Him.”

So let's go back to the catacombs—the Good Shepherd. Nearly 2,000 years ago, believers painted the Shepherd on the walls where they buried their dead. They clung to Psalm 23 not as poetry, but as promise, because they knew the Shepherd already walked through death—and He’s risen. And they sang these Psalms not about Him, but with Him, in Him—the living Christ. And that is still true for us today.

And so I just want to ask you: are you in Christ? And you might say, “I don't understand that. Where do I start?” Well, I think you start by surrendering your heart and life to Jesus and just saying, “I can't explain it, but I feel drawn to you, Jesus.”

I would hate for you to come to a True Woman conference and not hear the truth of John 3, where Nicodemus comes to Jesus and says, “How do I get eternal life?” 

And Jesus says, “Well, you've got to be born again.”

And Nicodemus says, “Okay, I don't know how that works. Am I supposed to go back in my mother's womb?” It sounded crazy to him.

And Jesus says, “No, that's how you're born of the water. But this whole world—everything in creation—is a story, a parable, an object lesson that teaches us about God, including the birth of a child. Nicodemus, you've got to be born of the Spirit.”

And if you want to be in Christ, you've got to be born of the Spirit. This is the Spirit of Christ that does that—that births you in Christ.

I remember when I did that. My favorite thing at a True Girl event—which is my ministry for seven- to twelve-year-old girls—is to tell the story. I was a very young girl. I remember understanding enough about being in Christ, enough about being born again.

I understood that I am a sinner. Jesus died to erase those sins. I want to live for Him. That's it. I saw God, at that age; it was enough to be in Christ.

And if you have not had that encounter or that experience yet, will you please go to the prayer room and just say, “I want to be born again.”

We don't have a hypey moment of repentance, of sharing the gospel at True Woman, because there has to be fruit and a drawing of the Spirit. There are places where it gets real hypey. We're not going to do that. But we are not going to fail to say, “You must be born again if you want to be in Christ.” That's where you start.

Then the Scriptures start to make sense. They start to come alive. You can read the Psalms, and they're going to be about you—just not just about you. They're going to be about you in Christ.

My goal in this workshop was for you to hunger to see Jesus in the Psalms. I don't know about you, but these are just some of my discoveries. Test them. Kick the tires. Kick out what doesn't work. Tell me if I'm wrong. Be gentle. I'm a newbie. I'm not a Bible scholar. I'm not a Psalm scholar, but I am so curious and so interested.

I am driving without a license sometimes, girls, so if I get it wrong, I'm always eager to know that. But I hope that you're hungry to see Jesus in the Psalms.

Let me pray for you. Father, I thank You so much for these women. Thanks that they chose me today. I feel like a big, big old hug.

Bless them as we go about the rest of our day and our evening. I just want to pray Psalm 119 over them: “Open our eyes that we may see the wonderful truths in your Word.” We can't do that—we can lean in, but only You can open our eyes. Help us see. In the mighty name of Jesus, Amen.