sola scriptura fame – started his lectures not on Romans or Galatians, but with the Psalms. They were his window to Christ. When you read the Psalms of Ascent, you start with reading a psalm where the author has experienced some scary vicious nastiness. In fact, though he is for peace, they are for war. But that psalm is intended to speak the language of the soul and help us on the road to Christ. It does so by modeling a kind of honesty that is rare in churches, rarer in pulpits, and absent from some theologies. He does not have all the answers. Life can be hard. This thing called suffering is, though God is in charge, still, well, suffering. It hurts. It makes the psalmist angry. He wants to take revenge. He wants those who hurt him to be hurt in return – twice as bad as he ever was to teach them a lesson. In saying such things, the Bible is not approving of our bare-knuckled tendency towards anger at those who offend us, or hurt us. It is allowing us, by recording a model for us, to deal with the raw energy of a wounded individual in light of the glory of Christ. It is a journey – a journey, step by step, to joy. Pastor Moody’s new book Journey to Joy will be released later this month from Crossway.]]>