Somebody Else’s Mail

Our generation has a tendency to leap straight from text to personal application, even when the distance between the two approaches the breadth of the Grand Canyon.

There are indeed innumerable things we can learn from eavesdropping on someone else’s relationship with our Lord and Savior, but we will learn them best once we have first identified what each writer was saying in his own day, then moving on to apply them to our own hearts. If you don’t first go through the exercise of asking what a passage of scripture meant to its original audience, you run the risk of appropriating for yourself both promises and warnings unrelated and unrelatable to your own life and experience.

I’d like to approach the Psalms from the angle. Yes, they are somebody else’s mail, but there are rich lessons in them for us provided we know where to look.

Somebody Else’s Mail (1)

Introduction to the Psalms