Psalm 29
January 7, 2024
O God of glory, You are truly majestic. Thank You for passages like this psalm that bring us back to a rightful sense of awe at who You are. Your strength, splendor, power, and holiness are beyond what we can even fully understand. We see glimpses of it in the glory of Your creation—in thunderstorms and mountain scenes, sunsets and hoarfrost. We see glimpses of it through Your actions in history—parting the sea, sending fire from heaven, calming the storm, raising the dead. And occasionally we get to see glimpses of it in our own lives, when You answer prayers, when You whisper Your truths to our hearts, when we see people transformed.
Lord, don’t let us forget the power of Your voice. Your voice shakes the wilderness and strips the forest bare. And Your voice speaks to us through Your Word into our hearts. Teach us to listen with the same kind of awe, expectancy, and worship that the psalmist describes here. May we ascribe to You the glory due Your name and the attentiveness due Your Word.
We believe You do sit enthroned over the chaos of our world and of our lives, and we are so thankful that it does not depend on what human authorities, natural disasters, or personal troubles are over our lives at the moment. We can trust You to be sovereign over all of it and to in the end bring good.
The psalmist prays that You would give strength to Your people and bless Your people with peace, and God, we echo that prayer. Give strength to those this morning who are weary—weary, perhaps, with health struggles or parenting challenges or job discouragement or relational tension or even spiritual dryness. Give us strength to resist temptation, to follow Your promptings, to share Your good news, to complete the work You have given us to do. Give us strength to follow You each day, in dependence on Your Spirit, who lives in us with the same power that raised Christ from the dead.
And oh Lord, may You bless us Your people with peace. Peace even when the world seems to be falling apart—or our jobs, our relationships, our health, our hope. May Your peace that passes all understanding guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus so that we may overflow with hope to a world around us in desperate need of strength, peace, and hope.
We pray all of this in the majestic name of Jesus, and all God’s people said, Amen.