Devotion Tag

17 Apr Who to Follow: The Middle of Psalm 99

Posted at 11:00h in Discipleship by John Jones 0 Comments

What kind of a person am I? Chinua Achebe describes a kind of man many of us feel. He says, “they were mostly the kind of people that were called ufulefu, worthless, empty men. The imagery of an efulefu in the language of the clan...

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12 Apr Just Tell Me What to Do: The End of Psalm 97

Posted at 11:48h in Discipleship by John Jones 0 Comments

We don’t often think of poetry as bossy. Poetry is not the expected form of speech to issue a direct command. If we receive a direct order in the guise of flowery words, would we ever obey? In an emergency, nobody will move more quickly...

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12 Apr The Pill Inside: The End of Psalm 96

Posted at 11:47h in Discipleship by John Jones 0 Comments

Bait and switch is a marketing ploy to get a dog to eat something it would never eat ordinarily (though most dogs eat anything, anyway). The clever dog owner will tuck the pill into a softened dog treat or sweet potato and even the most...

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10 Apr Who Likes Group Projects?: The Middle of Psalm 95

Posted at 16:29h in Discipleship by John Jones 0 Comments

Group projects are the worst. In a practical little book by Jon Acuff, he says that most professionals, reflecting on their teens years, understand that “group projects in high school are a great way to learn that the world is full of lazy people.” He...

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10 Apr The Bad Day in Which God is Still Present: The End of Psalm 94

Posted at 14:09h in Discipleship by John Jones 0 Comments

The poet’s heart has wandered into a dark place. Surely he does not mean what he says. It has, perhaps, been a very bad day in a very bad week and, for some reason, he has decided to put thoughts to paper. It would be...

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04 Apr The Poet as Sports Agent: The Middle of Psalm 104

Posted at 09:57h in Discipleship by John Jones 0 Comments

At the risk of sounding a bit too much like an English teacher, take a quick skim through Psalm 104 and notice the narrative mode or, specifically, the grammatical person. The way to do this is to look at the action verbs and discern who...

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03 Apr Some of This is Hard to Believe: The End of Psalm 93

Posted at 10:57h in Discipleship by John Jones 0 Comments

A Chinese pastor remarked that “many of my people are only one unanswered prayer away from leaving the church and resorting to Buddhism or animism to solve their problems” (William Edgar, “Are We Really Secular?” in The Pastor and the Modern World, 34). That is,...

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31 Mar Plain Worship: The Middle of Psalm 92

Posted at 11:28h in Discipleship by John Jones 0 Comments

James W. Alexander was a preaching professor at Princeton Theological Seminary in the mid-nineteenth century. He encouraged his preaching students to be open and honest in their preaching. In this, he wasn’t insisting that they use the pulpit to talk about their opinions or past...

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25 Mar A Good Sermon is Good Poetry: The Middle of Psalm 105

Posted at 11:21h in Discipleship by John Jones 0 Comments

Psalm 105 is instruction in praise far more than instruction in history. Indeed, it is an historical psalm, but not history for the sake of history. It is history as it flows from a yearning to praise. In recounting the events the poet is revealing...

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21 Mar Remembering Flows from Praise: The Beginning of Psalm 105

Posted at 10:49h in Discipleship by John Jones 0 Comments

Don’t forget to brush your teeth. How many times have you heard that? Or said that? Whenever you meet someone who knows everything about history, who is particularly generous with sharing what they know, you very often find that person telling you implicitly or explicitly,...

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