Random Thoughts: Michael Card, and Studying the Psalms

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been listening a lot to Christian music artist Michael Card, years after my first acquaintance with his songs in the early 1990s.  The September 2006 Tabletalk issue (recently read from back-copies) included an article by Michael Card, and he has published book commentaries in addition to many songs.  Through youtube I have discovered many “new” songs (to me), from later years, including these songs now among my favorites:  Poem of your life, The Book, To the Overcomers, Starkindler, Morning Has Broken (Card’s recording in a Celtic music style, on the same album with Starkindler), The Promise, and The Edge.

Along with reading a Psalms commentary (“Be” series, Psalms 1-89), I am enjoying this sermon series done in 2016 (from Fred Pugh at Grace Covenant Church), which looks at Psalm 119 in some detail.  The 22 lessons include an introduction plus separate lessons on each of the 21 stanzas.  Particular themes and “key” verses stick out within each stanza, as with these:

• verse 18, “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things from Your law”
• verse 25, “My soul cleaves to the dust” … verse 31, “I cling to Your testimonies” – how we are so drawn to the world and the things of this world, and the need to look up and above this world
• verse 57, “The Lord is my portion”

Psalm 119 includes many themes addressed throughout the Psalms, such as trusting in God, delighting in God, and proper response to affliction.  Pugh often references previous commentaries including quotes from Charles Spurgeon, and mention of Martyn Lloyd Jones’ “Spiritual Depression” (see this previous post).

Michael Card’s song “The Edge” also relates to the topic of Lloyd Jones’ work, with a verse that describes one type of depression – the Elijah experience:

I’ve found that as I’ve traveled
through the inscape of my land,
That mountaintops make valleys in-between.
And when that nameless sadness
Like a cloud comes over me
I look back on all the brightness I have seen.

Both the Psalm 119 study (this lesson, on verses 65-72; “before I was afflicted, I went astray”) and a Spurgeon sermon from my recent reading, reinforce another common theme: affliction and its role in the believer’s life, and as contrasted with the effect of affliction on unbelievers.  Spurgeon’s sermon #774 (now 150 years ago, October of 1867) well states that:

It is generally thought that our trials and troubles purge us: I am not sure of that; they certainly are lost upon some. Our Lord tells us what it is that prunes us. It is the word that prunes the Christian; it is the truth that purges him; the Scripture made living and powerful by the Holy Spirit, which effectually cleanses the Christian. “What then does affliction do?” you ask. Well, if I may say so, affliction is the handle of the knife; affliction is the grindstone that sharpens up the word; affliction is the dresser which removes our soft garments, and lays bare the diseased flesh, so that the surgeon’s lancet may get at it; affliction makes us ready to feel the word, but the true pruner is the word in the hand of the Great Husbandman. … you think more upon the word than you did before. In the next place, you see more the applicability of that word to yourself. In the third place, the Holy Spirit makes you feel more, the force of the word than you did before. Ask that affliction may be sanctified, Beloved, but always remember there is no more tendency in affliction in itself to sanctify us than there is in prosperity; in fact, the natural tendency of affliction is to make us rebel against God, which is quite opposite to sanctification. It is the word coming to us while in affliction that purges us.

Here again, as happens so often, the various materials I read or listen to often overlap in content, addressing similar scriptural themes.  Yet that is how real learning occurs: repeated exposure to the same biblical truths, presented in different ways, whether recent audio sermons, printed sermons or books.