This week, I drifted from the peace of God into feelings of not being enough. I fell into the comparison trap, feeling small and inadequate. Everyone seemed more successful, more effective than me. My stomach felt tense and sad.
I knew this wasn’t from God – and that I was buying a lie of the enemy.
Then, while I was pondering my favorite psalm, Psalm 95, God brought me out of fear and self-doubt and back into trust. I pray that my meditation on this psalm helps you also get from anxiety to trust – from dwelling on the future or the past into the beautiful present moment of God’s eternal love.
Meditation on Psalm 95
Come let us worship the Lord
Let us not worship anyone or anything else.
and shout with joy
Find the joy in everything we are and everything we do. It’s there if we look for it!
to the rock
The unchanging, eternal God is always there for us.
who saves us
Saves us from what? From sin and the consequences of sin – eternal death in hell. That is the ultimate good news! The cause of our joy.
Let us enter with praise and thanksgiving
Enter what?
Enter this day – this situation. Enter this moment.
Let us enter every thought, word, and task with an attitude of praising God and thanking him for this person we’re seeing right now, this situation we’re living right now.
If we enter this moment with praise and thanksgiving, we will have the right attitude to interpret everything that God is allowing to happen – because we’ll remember that everything comes from him – to do us good – to save us from sin and death.
and sing joyful songs to the Lord.
This reminds us to keep joy top-of-mind at every moment, even in painful times. Why? Because pain is passing away. Joy is eternal, and it’s available to us now, if we’re open to it.
Joy and gratitude are foretastes of heaven. Self-pity, fear, blame, and complaining are foretastes of hell. Will we choose heaven or hell at this moment?
The Lord is God
The psalmist couldn’t put it more plainly. This statement encapsulates the entirety of this psalm, and the entirety of scripture. It is the entire reason for our joy and our reason to trust him.
the mighty God
Yes, we might have other gods like food, comfort, or doomscrolling – but they have no power outside of Almighty God.
The great king over all the gods.
The Almighty King, the one God, is love.
He holds in his hands the depths of the earth and the highest mountains as well. He made the sea. It belongs to him. The dry land, too, for it was formed by his hands.
The psalmist handles eternal things in the first part of the psalm – that we worship the Lord in every moment and praise him with joy because he is love, because he is eternal, because he is greater than the lesser gods we bring into our lives.
The psalmist then asks us to look at the earth – what we see around us.
We can’t see God, but we can look the mountains, the ocean, and sea. Each blade of grass is the work of his hands. Everything is meant to remind us of his power and his personal care for us.
Let us bow down and worship, bending the knee before the Lord our maker. For he is our God and we are his people, the flock he shepherds.
He alone is the one to whom we look to receive everything good. And we are his people, the flock he is shepherding toward heaven.
And we don’t go through life alone – our fellow believers are members of God’s flock, his family. He protects us, guides us, holding us close. And he empowers us to be an example for others.
If today you hear his voice,
Some translations say when today you hear his voice. God is always speaking to us in our hearts, in our worship, in nature, and in our relations with other people. He speaks to us constantly of his power to save.
harden not your hearts
Our hearts can grow hard when we fail to trust God by slipping into regret of the past and worry about the future. When we “play God” by holding other people in judgment.
This hardness of heart comes from one thing: not keeping up our intimacy with God in prayer.
as they did in the wilderness,
Every life has promised-land times and desert-times. Like the Israelites, when we are in a desert time, we can feel alone, helpless, confused, and doubt ourselves. We can be tempted to doubt God, too, as they did when complained to Moses, “Were there no burial places in Egypt that you brought us to die in the wilderness?” (Exodus 14:11).
when at Meribah and Massah, they challenged me and provoked me, although they had seen all of my works.
They provoked God by forgetting his past blessings and his promise. It’s the same for us. The main temptation in a desert-time is thinking that the desert is never going to end. And that there is no promised land after all.
Instead, the virtue of Hope overcomes that temptation. Hope reminds us of God’s promise that he is guiding us to heaven, even when we’re in pain.
One way to overcome the temptation to blame God for our pain is to remember times when God has blessed us. Remember the times when we got unexpected and undeserved gifts. Call to mind the times when we were in pain of mind or body and God brought good out of it.
Forty years I endured that generation –
St. Peter tells us that the Lord endured the rebellious Israelites, as he endures us, to give us time to turn our hearts back to him: “Consider the patience of our Lord as salvation” (2 Peter 3:15).
I said they are a people whose hearts go astray
“Going astray” means we are loving and worshiping something above God.
We worship our own plans – feeling devastated when things don’t turn out as we expect. We worship other people, feeling crushed when we don’t get the praise or recognition we think they owe us.
We become anxious and frustrated when we rely on ourselves alone to decide what to do next and how it should turn out – forgetting to ask God’s help.
The beginning of the psalm tells us that to avoid our hearts going astray, we need to make a decision to enter every moment with praise and thanksgiving. Because even when our plans go astray, our hearts can remain in God.
When we are on track with God, we believe that he is giving us exactly what we need for our salvation, no matter what it feels like at the moment.
And the only way to bring our hearts back on track is to pray. To reach out and make that connection with God, who is always reaching out to us.
and they do not know my ways,
God’s way is first of all love. God showed Martha his way when she complained that she was working too hard. Jesus reminded her that if she kept the eyes of her heart on him as she was working, she would find peace. Martha had given up God to worship her to-do list – and her heart went astray. Even though Jesus was right in the room! she lost connection with his peace.
so I swore in my anger, they shall not enter into my rest.
We can substitute the word “sorrow” for “anger.” Was Jesus angry when he asked, “How many times I yearned to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings, but you were unwilling!” (Matthew 23:37)?
Jesus is sorrowful that we would even for a moment choose anxiety over his peace. That we would choose a foretaste of hell by worrying instead of a foretaste of heaven by trusting.
Instead, we can choose in this moment to connect our awareness with praise and thanksgiving, and see pain as fleeting and temporary. We can choose to focus on the eternal rest God offers us even now, in this moment. He offers us at each moment the peace of following his way.
The last word
We heard from St. Peter earlier. He goes on to say, “Beloved, since you are forewarned, be on your guard not to be led into the error of the unprincipled and to fall from your own stability. But grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory now and to the day of eternity. Amen” (2 Peter 3:17-18).
Are you floundering in your prayer life?
Do you find yourself:
- Inconsistent in prayer?
- Distracted?
- Not sure if you’re doing it right?
Schedule a free, no-obligation Clarity Call with me and we’ll look and see if and how I can help you gain the trust and peace in your life that God intends.
