Philip Yancey said that when he was feeling sad or stressed, people told him to read the psalms, and he would come across one of the “wintriest” psalms and go away frostily depressed. But then he realized that the psalms were not like the other books in the Bible. Instead of God writing to us, it is if we are reading over the shoulder of the psalmist, peeking at his honest prayer journal. The psalms are the inspired prayer book of the Bible, and because life has both great highs and great lows, so do the psalms. “Rife with the pathos of praise and the ethos of agony, the book of Psalms captures better than any other corpus of Scripture, the bi-polar life of faith.” (William Brown) Indeed, ever since paradise was lost, this life is bi-polar, and we need to […]