September 6 (14th after Pentecost) - Psalm 125
How easily our confidence in you is shaken, Lord, in thought, word, and deed. Driven often by all the bad news around us we seek comfort in shelters that are no shelter, fabrications of our own making or the false advertisings of others.
Thanks for this reminder that those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved but abides forever. How much we need that reminder day by day. Unless you build our house, as another psalmist has said, we labor in vain who build it. By getting and spending we lay waste our powers, and by listening to false prophets our only hope.
Guard us, Lord, with your mountainous grace that we may no longer be as those who turn aside to their own crooked ways. Save us as your people from the wiles of the wicked and help us to be so grounded in you as to be truly upright in heart. Amen.
September 6 (15th after Pentecost) - Psalm 19
Your Son warned us once, Lord God, not to be like those who seeing do not see and hearing do not hear. Forgive us for that tendency in our own lives, our dullness to your presence all around us in the heavens and on earth.
Sensitize us by your Spirit to the voiceless speech of the heavens that proclaim your handiwork, the sun that comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy. from which nothing is hid.
Give us also a whole new set of eyes and ears on this earth for your Word, which is perfect and sure and right, a true solution to our every need if only we receive and trust it by faith. Revive that sense of awe in us for you. Bathe us--body, mind, and soul--with every sign of your presence, and deliver us by your word from hidden faults of which, apart from your ploddings, we are not even aware.
Let the word of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen!
September 20 (16th after Pentecost) - Psalm 1
O to be guileless, dear Lord, happy in that divine innocence which shuns the advice of the wicked, avoids the path that sinners take, and will not sit in the seat of scoffers.
Why are the daily temptations so strong to be otherwise if not that, losing ourselves like sheep without a shepherd we fail to delight in your word and way?
Make us, Lord, to be like trees planted by streams of living water, which yield their fruit in its season, [whose] leaves never wither. Watch over us lest we, like the wicked, stray from your ways and lose not only our souls but the hope you have promised to the righteous. Amen.
September 27 (17th after Pentecost) - Psalm 124
Your providence is amazing, Lord. As I look back on my life and if I am really honest about it even now, I would have to say with Jonathan Edwards long ago, that you would have every right to condemn me to hell. If you had not been on my side all the time, graciously forgiving my sin, Lord, where would I be?
Attacks within and without from the evil one, always prowling about to seek whom he may devour, have been far greater than I could have stood alone. It is of some comfort to me that even Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German man of faith martyred by the Nazis, confessed himself "a woebegone weakling." But of even greater comfort, to me as to him, was the confession that came after that awareness in his poem from prison: "Whoever I am, Lord, you know I am thine!"
How can I ever thank you, Lord, for the many times I have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers? Indeed, with the psalmist, the snare is broken by your providential grace, and on this day and week I will praise you with all my heart that [my] help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. Amen.
