Year 5, Day 223: Psalms 87-88

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Out

• Out: This is the focus of our mission.  These are the people to whom God has called us to go.  These are the people into whom we are focused on attempting to speak God’s truth.

Today I am going to focus solely on Psalm 87.  Psalm 88 is another psalm about feeling alone and abandoned and we have had many of those come and go as we’ve looked at the psalms.  By now, you should be able to handle those psalms and pull out the appropriate meanings and understandings.

With respect to Psalm 87, I have to hearken back to the theological commentary that I wrote three years ago.  In that blog post, I was mindful of the ethnically diverse focus of this psalm.  Yes, this psalm is about God.  Yes, this psalm is about Jerusalem – God’s Holy City.  But this psalm is especially about the non-Jewish people who come and give honor to God.  This psalm is one of the theological underpinnings that allows Paul to write as he does in Galatians 4!

What this really speaks to, of course, is the idea of Out.  How will the nations know to come and give glory to God unless they are told about Him and invited?  How will they ever desire to accept our invitation if we do not demonstrate God in and through our actions and words?  Psalm 87 is only possible if the people of the nations of the world hear about God from those who know Him and see God in the lives of those who claim to have God within them!  We are called out into the world to bring the world in to worship God.  That is fundamentally who we are.

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