Hi, I'm Shelby Abbott, and this is Psalms for Christmas Time, a podcast miniseries from Family Life with pastor and author Dane Ortland. Dane has written a book, In the Lord I Take Refuge, 150 Daily Devotions Through the Psalms. And all this month, with a gift of any amount, not only will your donation be matched, we'll send you a copy of the book to dive deeper into the Psalms and stir your affections for Jesus Christ.
To learn more about how to give, visit familylifetoday.com. Dane, thanks so much for being here with us. Tell me, to start, before we get rolling into our first episode of this mini podcast, what was your heart behind this book in the first place?
Why did you decide to sit down and write this? Great to talk with you too, Shelby. Thank you, brother. The heart behind it really was to take the Psalms in one hand, and our fallen, struggling, discouraged, sinful, fickle, up-and-down human hearts on the other hand, and connect the two. Build some bridges between the two so that we are actually drawing in the refreshing life-giving oxygen of the Psalms for our actual lives.
Not airbrushed Facebook lives, but our actual lives where we're at all the time. Right. And really, in so many ways, give us permission to act the way that you just described. Because we see it splashed across the pages of the Psalms everywhere, right?
Exactly. I mean, there's no human condition that is not covered by the Psalms. The Psalms is not just for us when we are happy. It's not just for us when we are depressed.
It's not just when we need a friend. They cover the whole range of human experience and human futility and human suffering. And so, we can find a place in the Psalms that we can parachute into at any point in our lives and be given God and be given grace and help and life. So, the Psalms are very unique in the Bible in that way.
Yeah. And as I've read through this book, it not just lives in the Old Testament, in the Psalms. You're continually pointing us toward the good news found in Jesus Christ, and I love how you've connected that over and over and over again. Yeah, I'm just trying to follow the direction of the Lord Jesus himself, who, after he had been risen in Luke 24, had a little Bible study with his disciples, and he said, Hey guys, didn't you know all the Old Testament—and he even mentions the Psalms to cover the whole poetry section of the Old Testament—is about me? Not just a Psalm here or there that happens to be quoted at length in the New Testament, the whole 150-poem Psalter finds its fulfillment and ultimate meaning in the Lord Jesus. So, I wanted to reckon with that Psalm by Psalm.
Yeah, it's a really important reminder to help us remember that when we're reading the Bible, we're reading it through the lens of Jesus Christ himself. That's good. So, okay, so this is our first episode.
I want to hop into a specific topic with each episode that we do. So, today we're going to talk about loneliness. As I thought about loneliness and this season that we're in right now with Christmas, most people, when they think about Christmas, they think about family, they think about get-togethers, they think about being in the context of community, but there's a significant amount of us who don't have those things.
And not only do we not have those things, we can even be amongst people and still feel very alone. And it's helpful to know that there is good word for that in the scriptures, specifically we want to talk about Psalm 68. Psalm 68, father of the fatherless and protector of widows, is God in his holy habitation. God settles the solitary in a home.
He leads out the prisoners to prosperity, but the rebellious dwell in a parched land. Can you just unpack that a little bit for us? Help us to understand what the Lord has to say to us in the Psalms if we're experiencing loneliness right now. Loneliness is pervasive, it's real, it's profound. I mean, I think really every one of us could say to some degree we all experience loneliness.
It's not just some little peripheral slice of the body of Christ. Loneliness is real. And there in Psalm 68, where we read about God being the father of the fatherless and protector of widows. That's profound consolation for us here in this holiday time, because while we do desire, and it's a healthy desire to have human friends, real friends, who know us, who are in the foxhole of life with us, we all deeply desire that, when we find ourselves without that, we don't have to be torpedoed emotionally, because we have the father of the fatherless and the protector of widows. The text goes on to say, God settles the solitary in a home.
He leads out the prisoners to prosperity, but the rebellious dwell in a parched land. So yes, we as believers, Shelby, we will battle loneliness. That is true, that's real, okay? But we will never do so alone. We have a father who has given us his son, and actually God is within us by his Holy Spirit testifying and causing us to call out Abba Father. So we can take fresh refuge in the friendship of God himself, and the reason we know we can do that is the holiday season we are in. God sent his own son to prove in the incarnation, in the birth of Christ, to prove to us, this is how far I will go to ensure you are never finally alone.
Such a great reminder. Again, gospel comes back to that. I recently ran across a person who I was talking, sitting at a lunch table with, and she revealed to me that she is a widow, and her husband died 11 years ago. And she said to me, from her perspective, I know now why the scriptures talk so much specifically about orphans and widows. It's become real to me in a new way. And I've found comfort in Christ in a way that I never had before when my husband was still here.
And I thought, man, that is sad celebration. She's experiencing loneliness, and therefore she's experiencing more of the gospel because of her loneliness. I love that. And as we're believers here in this holiday season, Shelby, yes, we want to draw strength from our friends in the local church, fellow believers, brothers and sisters in Christ.
We need that. We who are not as that widow you spoke with alone in that way need to be moving towards widows and orphans and so on, and we need to keep speaking to one another the truth and ourselves drinking down the wondrous truth that God is with us. I mean, Emmanuel, God with us, this is the whole point of what we are celebrating right now. God has proven his solidarity with us. It's not only that he sent his son to die and rise again on our behalf.
It is also that he is deeply relationally with us, and we can draw strength from his love moment by moment. Yeah, Dane, thank you so much for pulling our attention toward the good news that God is with us in this season. We're going to continue this conversation with many more episodes coming up, talking through the Psalms with Pastor Dane Ortlund. Hey, that was a great conversation with Dane.
I really enjoyed that. If you want to go deeper, Dane has written a book called In the Lord I Take Refuge, 150 Daily Devotions Through the Psalms. All this month, during the month of December, with a donation of any amount that you give to Family Life, we will send you a copy of this book that Dane has written. To learn more about how to give, visit familylifetoday.com. This podcast has been a production of Family Life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-07-11 07:16:57 / 2023-07-11 07:20:31 / 4
