103:11-12 - Classic verse for reminding ourselves of the incredible love of God. Never forget - that God has removed our sins because He is gracious...we do not save ourselves...we do not earn His favor. He makes our sins into nothing...forgets our failure because He is mercy. Take heart in that truth and offer yourself completely to that mercy.
103:17 - Again, we do not do anything to save ourselves...His love does the work...we just choose to accept it and Him...choose to fear the Lord and after He has made us righteous, we live to bring honor to His name.
104:26 - I love this description - that God has created Leviathan (great sea creature) to play in His oceans. God created the world and all the things in it for His pleasure. There are deep sea creatures that have never been seen by human eyes - why do they exist? Because God takes joy in their existence...He takes joy in their creation. Psalm 104 would be a great Psalm to read up in the mountains...to remember that God has created everything...to think on the vast creativity and love of our God who relishes the moments when His creatures live in the freedom He created them for.
Psalm 105 - This entire psalm is a psalm of remembrance. The writer is thinking back to all the things that God has done for the nation of Israel. He is letting the history of His people fuel his worship of God. Never forget your own story. Never forget how God has moved and worked in your life. Let that knowledge drive you to worship your God.
105:4 - This reminds me of the spiritual discipline of practicing the presence of God. Where you try to consistently enter in to God's presence no matter where you are and what you are doing. As His people, we must continually seek God and rely on His strength - not our own.
106:3 - Blessed are those who observe justice and who do righteousness all the time. Amen to that! God, please let me be such a man.
106:20 - This reminds me of the beginning of the book of Romans - it is heartbreaking. In Romans is says people rejected God and worshipped images of wood and stone. Here we read about the Jewish people rejecting the living God to worship a statue of an animal that God created who eats grass...does it get any more absurd than that? We must make sure that we do not allow ourselves to turn away from worship of the one and only living God, to chase after things that are inferior and meaningless.
106:28-29 - What are the things that we yoke ourselves to that drag us away from God? Do we make sacrifices of our heart, wealth, time, mind, gifts, etc - the the idols of this world?
106:37 - As horrific as this sounds - this still goes on today in the lives of believers. Only now, we do not offer our children as blood sacrifices...now we offer the whole life of our children to the twisted value systems of this world by encouraging them to look and act like our humanistic culture.
106:47 - Psalm 106 is yet another psalm of remembrance, but this one is much different. 105 focused on the good things that God has done for the people of Israel. 106 focuses in on the way that the Jewish people rejected God over and over throughout their history. It is important to remember when we have made mistakes, so that we will learn from them and so that once again we will be driven to worship God because of His wonderful mercy.
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