Psalm 146

This Psalm was interesting to me because of the amount of praise that is in this Psalm. The Psalm literally starts off with a call to praise. The Psalmist wants to praise God with his whole life and and give his whole life to praising him. This Psalm gives a lot of warnings and promises. Mostly we are told not to depend on the things of this world, ultimately they amount to nothing and only hurt people. Also we are told that God helps. God alleviates physical illnesses, he loves people, he protects us, all from his eternal rule. I like this Psalm because it give me the promise of peace, and a response to it. God loves me and protects me, therefore I should praise him. It answers many questions such as the origins of the world and how long has God existed. He made the world and he is eternal. This Psalm just reminds me to keep what is Godly and eternal close and to keep away the things that are temporal and of the world. 

Psalm 121

I chose this Psalm for two reasons. One, because this Psalm reminded me of the song Praise You in This Storm by Casting Crowns, secondly because it has an interesting focus on God and what he does. Through this Psalm I feel like we learn a lot about God and the nature of him. Because God is our protector we can tell that he loves us. From God protecting us from harm you can tell that he has a life that he wants us to live for him. Also because he protects us in what we do we can see that we have a purpose in life. This Psalm though does raise some questions. The phrase of God protecting us from all harm. People could look at this Psalm and say that this Psalm is nothing but a lie, bad things happen to God's people all the time. I would like to think that that question would be reserved to Non-Christians but Christians are very capable of asking the same question. This Psalm gives me a lot of peace. Knowing that my help comes from God is provision in all situations. No matter what is going on God is there and for me. This definitely gives me encouragement and strength in hard times. I would like to use this congregationaly, but I would like to use it in another method than call and response or simply reading it. The only creative thing I can think of would be to split it up into four two verse chunks, reciting the verse and singing a song that is in line with the verse and using it as the framework for the worship service.