Psalm 148 The Rejuvenating Activity of Praise

Prayer and praise change people, not God.  To praise God essentially requires us to willingly put God at the center of our lives. We must surrender all of ourselves to the Spirit.

Psalm 118 Death

Do you respond to the idea of death, with resistance or acceptance? The dramatic stories of the holy week in the Jewish and Christian traditions remind us that we must be willing to face death directly in order experience salvation. Are you in tune with the small deaths that you are confronted with daily? As spiritual seekers, we must die day-by-day to our attachments to the world.

Psalm 118 Rebirth

We celebrate the resurrection of the Christ this week. This triumphant story has a profound connection to our own walk with God. We experience death when we become overly attached to the world and the external. The creative power of God (right hand) raises us up and out of the confusion of our physical and mental fixations. If we open our hearts and minds, Spirit can show us the straight and narrow path (open to me the gates of righteousness), the way to our inner Christ. Only when we surrender our lives to God can we enter into our spiritual domain. It is important to give thanks for each step along the spiritual journey, because thanksgiving makes our experiences more fruitful. As we make this shift, we repossess our spiritual inheritance of abundance, health and happiness (salvation).

Psalm 63 Hunger and Thirst

Making a commitment to the spiritual journey and actively seeking God, we literally tap into the strong human craving to reconnect with Spirit (my soul clings to you). This basic need is frequently described as hunger and thirst. For all human being’s this desire is present, and it is a basic compulsion in us all. Unfortunately, most of us do not understand that this underlying discontent that we all feel is a spiritual need. So we set off to placate the urge with things physical, emotional and mental. But these cannot quench the thirst; only the spiritual journey can do that. So we see many people in orgiastic relationships with sex, falling in love, money and intellectual theories. But at their core they remain discontented because they have not reached towards the heart of the problem. In all of us there is a core yearning that can only be satiated by spiritual enlightenment and a relationship with God.