Day 2 (Tuesday): Psalm 145
Today’s Passage
Read the passage – Psalm 145
Read the passage through twice. Consider what the Psalm says about:
- The LORD’s character, reign, and values
- God’s love
- Other people praising God
- The LORD’s attitude to those who love Him
- How does this affect the way we should pray for ourselves and the people around us?
Prayer
- Search my heart and align my motives with Your purpose.
- Now pray Psalm 145 as you think of some of your neighbours. Bring them to God by name.
- Ask God that His reign would be over our neighbourhood, city, and country.
- Psalm 145:4 says, “One generation shall extol your works to another” – Pray that older generations would speak about what God has done to younger generations in our local community.
Go Deeper
John Goldingay, Psalms for Everyone, Part 2: Psalms 73–150, Old Testament for Everyone (Louisville, KY; London: Westminster John Knox Press; Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2014), 215–21.
A student once asked me why the Lord’s Prayer is so different from the prayers in the Psalms, which characteristically cry out to God and issue protests because of urgent needs. I wasn’t sure, but in due course, I worked out what I thought was quite an impressive answer relating to the context of the Lord’s Prayer in Jesus’ ministry. But I won’t bother you with it because I have now realized it was mostly mistaken. The Lord’s Prayer is indeed different from the protest psalms, but it is quite like other psalms that focus more on praise.
Psalm 145 illustrates the point in a variety of ways. It does so by its focus on God’s kingdom or God’s reign. The difference in the Lord’s Prayer is its expression of the wish “May your reign come.” The psalm speaks of God’s reign as a present reality. There is some appropriateness in both attitudes. God is sovereign; the world is not out of God’s control; and God shows that kingly power in providing for the world and for his people. Yet God’s reign is by no means a complete reality in the world or in the church.
In the Lord’s Prayer, that bidding “May your reign come” appears in the context of other biddings, “Hallowed be your name” and “Your will be done.” Such biddings mean more than a commitment on our part to each of these priorities in our own lives. If they were simply disguised acts of self-commitment, they would lose their significance as prayers. But they would also lose their validity as prayers if they did not imply acts of commitment on our part. Psalm 145 focuses on the commitment aspect of our recognition of God.
Songs for Worship and Reflection
