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The Sinner/Saint Devotional: 60 Days in the Psalms
There is a Psalm for just about everything. Defeated? It’s there. Joyful? That’s there too. Angry with God? There are a lot of Psalms for that. Some of them give us great comfort, and some of them make us uncomfortable, but in the end, all of them point us to Jesus.This is a 60-day devotional that deals with us right where we are because that is where the Psalms deal with us. You won't find a bunch of platitudes or Christian fluff. The Psalms are too gritty and honest for that. This devotional is written by and for real sinners in daily need of a God offering real promises of forgiveness, grace, and hope.
- GenresNonfiction
190 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2018
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29 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 13, 2021
Enjoyed savoring the Savior through the Psalms these last two months. Entries are short and many of them are packed with great nuggets from various authors looking at different Psalms in light of the bigger and broader Gospel story. Great devotional!
July 30, 2020
Some of my favorite lines in the devotional...
God's word is always a promise to us, a revelation of God's will, intentions and faithfulness.
No one, pastors or laypeople, goes to the house of the Lord for entirely pure, selfless, God-loving motives.
Our strength to resist, wrestle, and fight against sin and death is not our own. Likewise, our good works, our holiness, our all is from God. The Lord provides our good works to us.
The Bible says we are to love God with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds and all our strength but we don't come anywhere close in our hearts and minds. We're divided and often lazy. Even the best of us have this wickedness within that doesn't go away...Turns out, there is only one who can pass the high bar of God's judgement, and it ain't you or me. It is only Jesus.
The only thought that clears the clouds is to remember that God sees my fickleness, and His steadfast love and faithfulness do not diminish because of it.
He did all of this so that when we fail, when our faith falters, Jesus' perfect record stands in our broken place.
God's goodness and mercy...are actively pursuing us. They are chasing us down.
God is holy and we are not. Thus everything wrong flows from this essential wrongness.
...we don't do stuff to get the blessing. We get the blessing, and then we do stuff.
When you don't know who to thank, you start thanking yourself. Praise turns inward. This is a double bondage. When you only have yourself to thank, you end up having only yourself to depend upon.
The hardest part of praying is learning to pray against my own feelings.
We do not begin our existence as humans with a clean slate. We are conceived as fully flawed people, heirs of corruption...The sin in which our mothers conceived us conceives in us all manner of evil.
...to be blessed is to be favored.
Justification...is justice done to sin and grace given to you.
We, like the psalmist, only cry out for grace when we have made a mess of life, are trapped in our self-destructive habits, and feel God has forsaken us...Nobody thinks to pray for grace who has not first been knocked down and terrified by sin and death.
...the Law...calls a thing what it is. It exposes the heart. It accuses us - every time.
The blessed one is "planted" ... passive...The blessed one will do what he was created to do - produce fruit.
More often we prefer to live our lives in the light of reason and experience. Faith is not opposed to these things, but nor does it submit to them either.
...we learn to listen to what God says about us over what our hearts say about us.
...walking in faith is simply this - grabbing onto God's promises despite our changing moods and circumstances.
Every time you pick up His word and expect to be made whole by it, you're spending time in His presence.
The more burdensome the secret and the more thought devoted to it, the more perception and action were influenced in a manner similar to carrying physical weight.
The message of the world is to become a better you, to become stronger, more organized, healthier, wiser. The message of the psalmist is to see who you really are, a reject in need of a Savoir.
So the question isn't, "Am I bearing fruit?" Your question should be, "Am I trying to do something (anything) apart from Christ?" Lack of effort isn't the sworn enemy of fruit bearing. Self-sufficiency is.
Abiding is staying put [not abandoning faith]. If you stay put [in the faith], God might just do something through you.
Faith always has these three sentences:
Have mercy!
On me!
O God!
We are all sheep gone astray. Let us return to the shepherd and overseer of our souls, for the freedoms we crave are slaveries in disguise.
Those honest prayers show that you trust God and love Him, that He is your safe person, to whom you can continually come.
The real challenge is not to let our complaints turn into ingratitude...
We subvert worldliness and rebel against rebellion by following our gracious Savior as the king whose subjects are truly, finally, eternally free!
He suffered for my failures and gave me His victory.
The worst thing that could happen to us is always getting the Jesus we want.
...to truly know God is to recognize Him in suffering and the cross - to feel like Jesus is your foe but to believe, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, that He is your friend, your very life.
The labor of love that God performs in us often hurts like hell. He often executes our dreams and hopes so we might die and rise to God's dreams and hopes for us.
What a strange friend we have in Jesus. But he's the best friend any of us can have. Because when our eternity is at stake, when life itself hangs in the balance, He'll rush into the thick of the fight, with eyes blazing with the fires of a divine love for us that will never, ever go out.
...He is calling out the notion that hard work achieves peace. It does not. We cannot work our way out of our problems.
The God of peace is not intimidated by life's worst. After all, He faced the worst, for us, and He has won.
...it's only in giving ourselves to Him by trusting, relying on, and resting in the work He's done that we can find our souls revived or restored.
Both the righteousness of faith and the righteousness of works are the fruit of the gospel, which is at work in and through us.
A great deal of God's word is filled with venting from many of God's faithful followers. We call them laments.
Far from being offended or embarrassed by our laments, I would dare say God invites us to bring our deepest laments directly to Him...come to God with pure hearts. God would rather have us venting honestly than faking it deceitfully.
...we approach God being completely covered by the ongoing intercession of His Son.
Every morning may it be our first thought, "I am loved unfailingly by God." His love inspires our trust.
The reality of the forgiveness of Christ in the face of your sin should fill your heart with joy.
The sound of our oppression, our bondage, and our shame, threatens to drown us out. It is overwhelming. The voice of the accuser, our enemy the devil, rings so loudly in our ears as to shake our very souls. He mixes the truth with his lies, declaring condemnation over us for our sin. So we must sing our own song but louder still.
He heals the brokenhearted, even if that broken heart is a result of our own sin...He does not deal with us according to our sin.
Your Lord takes responsibility for your salvation. It both comes and is sustained by God's own hand...He will be your salvation and the quality of that salvation.
God will be for us what we cannot be. He will give to us what we do not have. He will sustain us beyond our abilities.
In the many dark nights that the faithful bear, we must not lose heart. The enemy will lash and strike, the flesh will doubt and argue, but God will be the helmet shielding us from ultimate harm.
God's word is always a promise to us, a revelation of God's will, intentions and faithfulness.
No one, pastors or laypeople, goes to the house of the Lord for entirely pure, selfless, God-loving motives.
Our strength to resist, wrestle, and fight against sin and death is not our own. Likewise, our good works, our holiness, our all is from God. The Lord provides our good works to us.
The Bible says we are to love God with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds and all our strength but we don't come anywhere close in our hearts and minds. We're divided and often lazy. Even the best of us have this wickedness within that doesn't go away...Turns out, there is only one who can pass the high bar of God's judgement, and it ain't you or me. It is only Jesus.
The only thought that clears the clouds is to remember that God sees my fickleness, and His steadfast love and faithfulness do not diminish because of it.
He did all of this so that when we fail, when our faith falters, Jesus' perfect record stands in our broken place.
God's goodness and mercy...are actively pursuing us. They are chasing us down.
God is holy and we are not. Thus everything wrong flows from this essential wrongness.
...we don't do stuff to get the blessing. We get the blessing, and then we do stuff.
When you don't know who to thank, you start thanking yourself. Praise turns inward. This is a double bondage. When you only have yourself to thank, you end up having only yourself to depend upon.
The hardest part of praying is learning to pray against my own feelings.
We do not begin our existence as humans with a clean slate. We are conceived as fully flawed people, heirs of corruption...The sin in which our mothers conceived us conceives in us all manner of evil.
...to be blessed is to be favored.
Justification...is justice done to sin and grace given to you.
We, like the psalmist, only cry out for grace when we have made a mess of life, are trapped in our self-destructive habits, and feel God has forsaken us...Nobody thinks to pray for grace who has not first been knocked down and terrified by sin and death.
...the Law...calls a thing what it is. It exposes the heart. It accuses us - every time.
The blessed one is "planted" ... passive...The blessed one will do what he was created to do - produce fruit.
More often we prefer to live our lives in the light of reason and experience. Faith is not opposed to these things, but nor does it submit to them either.
...we learn to listen to what God says about us over what our hearts say about us.
...walking in faith is simply this - grabbing onto God's promises despite our changing moods and circumstances.
Every time you pick up His word and expect to be made whole by it, you're spending time in His presence.
The more burdensome the secret and the more thought devoted to it, the more perception and action were influenced in a manner similar to carrying physical weight.
The message of the world is to become a better you, to become stronger, more organized, healthier, wiser. The message of the psalmist is to see who you really are, a reject in need of a Savoir.
So the question isn't, "Am I bearing fruit?" Your question should be, "Am I trying to do something (anything) apart from Christ?" Lack of effort isn't the sworn enemy of fruit bearing. Self-sufficiency is.
Abiding is staying put [not abandoning faith]. If you stay put [in the faith], God might just do something through you.
Faith always has these three sentences:
Have mercy!
On me!
O God!
We are all sheep gone astray. Let us return to the shepherd and overseer of our souls, for the freedoms we crave are slaveries in disguise.
Those honest prayers show that you trust God and love Him, that He is your safe person, to whom you can continually come.
The real challenge is not to let our complaints turn into ingratitude...
We subvert worldliness and rebel against rebellion by following our gracious Savior as the king whose subjects are truly, finally, eternally free!
He suffered for my failures and gave me His victory.
The worst thing that could happen to us is always getting the Jesus we want.
...to truly know God is to recognize Him in suffering and the cross - to feel like Jesus is your foe but to believe, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, that He is your friend, your very life.
The labor of love that God performs in us often hurts like hell. He often executes our dreams and hopes so we might die and rise to God's dreams and hopes for us.
What a strange friend we have in Jesus. But he's the best friend any of us can have. Because when our eternity is at stake, when life itself hangs in the balance, He'll rush into the thick of the fight, with eyes blazing with the fires of a divine love for us that will never, ever go out.
...He is calling out the notion that hard work achieves peace. It does not. We cannot work our way out of our problems.
The God of peace is not intimidated by life's worst. After all, He faced the worst, for us, and He has won.
...it's only in giving ourselves to Him by trusting, relying on, and resting in the work He's done that we can find our souls revived or restored.
Both the righteousness of faith and the righteousness of works are the fruit of the gospel, which is at work in and through us.
A great deal of God's word is filled with venting from many of God's faithful followers. We call them laments.
Far from being offended or embarrassed by our laments, I would dare say God invites us to bring our deepest laments directly to Him...come to God with pure hearts. God would rather have us venting honestly than faking it deceitfully.
...we approach God being completely covered by the ongoing intercession of His Son.
Every morning may it be our first thought, "I am loved unfailingly by God." His love inspires our trust.
The reality of the forgiveness of Christ in the face of your sin should fill your heart with joy.
The sound of our oppression, our bondage, and our shame, threatens to drown us out. It is overwhelming. The voice of the accuser, our enemy the devil, rings so loudly in our ears as to shake our very souls. He mixes the truth with his lies, declaring condemnation over us for our sin. So we must sing our own song but louder still.
He heals the brokenhearted, even if that broken heart is a result of our own sin...He does not deal with us according to our sin.
Your Lord takes responsibility for your salvation. It both comes and is sustained by God's own hand...He will be your salvation and the quality of that salvation.
God will be for us what we cannot be. He will give to us what we do not have. He will sustain us beyond our abilities.
In the many dark nights that the faithful bear, we must not lose heart. The enemy will lash and strike, the flesh will doubt and argue, but God will be the helmet shielding us from ultimate harm.
March 30, 2019
I do not care for devotionals as such because as a Pastor once said they are often just another person's quiet time with God. Many of the daily readings are direct exegesis of Scripture, not the author's time with God. The Sinner/Saint Devotional is quality Law/Gospel preaching.
December 31, 2022
Excellent devotional!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews