Psalm 95; 97-99

Today’s psalms are joyful and are about giving praise to the Lord…about his holiness and his great mercy and love.

I am confused with Psalm 95.  In the beginning of the psalm, the words are written in the third person.  David tells us to worship the LORD.  But here, the person changes:

Come, let us bow down in worship,
let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;

⁷ for he is our God
and we are the people of his pasture,
the flock under his care.
Today, if you hear his voice,

⁸ do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, ^[a]
as you did that day at Massah ^[b] in the desert,

⁹ where your fathers tested and tried me,
though they had seen what I did.

In verse 8 the words jump as though they were written by the LORD himself, and not by David.  I’ve noticed this happening several times before and am not sure what it means.

Is the LORD speaking through David?

I’m having a hard time focusing tonight because my old friend panic has come to town.  Obsessive thoughts threaten to creep in over my mind.  I’ve been fighting them by cleaning and by distracting myself with reading and now with writing this blog.

My daughter hasn’t been feeling well the past couple of days…just feeling queasy and icky.  She felt well enough to play at a friend’s house…and while she was there, her friend got sick!  We came home, and I made her take a shower.  Lord, I pray your protection over her sweet little body.  Don’t let her catch a virus, I ask you…I beg you, to guard her in the name of Jesus.  Lord, you are sovereign over all, including over our health.  I pray for your healing.  I ask you to give her peace (she’s feeling afraid now, too…ugh, please don’t let her “catch” my phobia!) and protect her from my neurotic junk.

I wish I could crawl into a cave and stay there.  I wish I could erect a force field around my family that would repel stomach bugs.  I wish I wasn’t me.

But wishes aren’t reality.  The reality is my daughter needs me to be strong.  She needs to know that I will not fall apart.  And without the Lord, I don’t see how that’s going to happen.  Frankly, I don’t see how it will happen WITH the Lord, but I have faith.  It’s tiny faith right now, like a mustard seed.  But out of that seed will grow something stronger than a force field: a faith field.

Lord, I put us under Your protection.  It all comes down to trusting you.  Please give me the faith it takes to trust.