CF Family,
Tonight we enjoyed our third study on the book of Psalms.....our last one is next week. I wanted to encourage you with a thought. Maybe you've notice before how much of a movie has music in the background. Nearly every conversation, embrace, car chase, whatever has music behind it?!?! And the funny thing is, if it wasn't there you'd notice it. For a movie without music will likely be a real drag lacking emotion and drama......two things you're hoping for with the price of admission. A great example of this is how lame a scary movie becomes when you turn down the sound. What once left you wondering how you'd sleep that night quickly becomes as unemotional as a documentary.
So what does this have to do with the book of Psalms? Well, the book of Psalms is like the sound track behind the Story of Israel. The Psalms capture the emotion and the thoughts and the drama and the aroma and the fear and the joy of the events in the life of Israel (and especially the life of a king). If you read the Psalms as supplementary to your reading of the rest of the bible, you'll be caught up in the drama of it. Without it, the rest of the bible may feel slow and even dry.
My encouragement is this......read the Psalms that go along with where you're reading. Sometimes it's as simple as googling a question like "what Psalm goes along with the Babylonian exile"? Then as you read Daniel, for example, you can read Psalm 137 and "hear" the music behind the scene in Babylon.
So my encouragement is this.....READ THE PSALMS along with the rest of your bible. You won't survive on the Psalms alone any more than you would make sense of the movie listening only to the soundtrack. But if you "turn up the music" as you read the rest of it, you're in for a real treat!
