January 18, 2017: Day 18 – Psalm 18

Here’s another Shane arrangement.  But the one that I remember the most growing up is this one:

My first thought is that this would be a great psalm for our soldiers going into battle.  Not only does it speak of God protecting and keeping them safe in His refuge, but he also speaks about God giving them the victory.  It almost feels like a rallying cry of a general as he gathers his troops for the battle ahead.  With Antonio Brown live streaming the victory speech of Tomlin, it places me squarely into that context of a leader encouraging and talking up his troops as they face an uncertain future.  Or, it could also be an encouraging speech by a general as they have just vanquished the foe.

It is a longer psalm and I hope you didn’t lose interest.  It is quite a powerful psalm and like the Shane song, which I love by the way, it goes through shifts and twists and turns.  It gets really riled up in the middle of the psalm as we hear about God’s power and smoke coming out of this nostrils.  It scares the daylight out of you.  But that’s what you want when you are going into battle.  I played basketball in college and it is laughable and maybe even insulting to our soldiers if I even try to use that as an example, but it is all I know, so I’m going to use it fully realizing that it doesn’t even  come close to what our brave men and women experience.  I’ll never forget my high school coach who really laid into us because we were by far the best team in the conference and a team was beating us at halftime that didn’t even deserve to be in the same gym.  Let me just say that what Tomlin said was tame to what we were subjected to.  But we went out and beat the team by 40 points.  

Okay, Elliott Smith just walked into my office.  He is a dear brother from college who is following this challenge in Philadelphia.  Of all things he just said that the challenge has proven to be helpful to him.  It just made my year and the year has just started.  Back to the Psalm.

This Psalm also contains another song which I learned growing up which is this one, found on vs.46.  

I think I’ll leave it there.  Enough said.