I typically don’t like “How Not To” articles. They lend themselves to sounding as if some arrogant know-it-all is telling everyone about all the mistakes they’ve made. It’s not my purpose to make you regret sermons you’ve preached or derive some sick pleasure in playing the elitist. I’m certainly not trying to put distance between you and the Psalter you love.
I have one big idea here that I want to make specific in a series of ways. The big idea is this: don’t preach the Psalms in isolation.1
DON’T PREACH THE PSALMS IN ISOLATION
Preachers often read the psalms without regard for their various contexts. But we shouldn’t isolate individual statements within a psalm from the literary structure of the whole psalm, we shouldn’t isolate individual psalms from their context in the book, and we shouldn’t isolate the Psalter as a whole from either the rest of the Old Testament or the New Testament. So here comes a list of “Don’ts” that all have to do with not isolating the psalms from the context intended by their authors.
Just to be clear: I think the individual psalmists intended phrases and lines to be read in the context of the
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