You have heard many times that our culture is disintegrating around us. You have seen for yourself that this is so. You have heard that all evangelical attempts at political lobbying are like putting a band-aid on cancer.
What shall we then do? You know generally that the answer lies in reforming the worship of God. But what, specifically, can you do for the church, and in a larger sense, for your nation? There are a handful of key things you can do, and which we want to teach you to do. One is catechizing your children. Another is learning to sit down at the Lord’s table according to His Word.
But one area where we have the most work to do is in the area of the psalms. So set yourselves to learn the psalms, and learn to do it with a will. Set yourselves to learn the difficult ones, and to love them. Defer to the judgment of wiser times than our own. Exult in the fact that God inhabits the praises of His people, but lament the fact that for some generations now we have been building Him lean-to’s and shacks to inhabit instead of the mansions He has provided in His divine songbook, the psalter.
Our time is like that of Jehoshaphat. We live in a time when the choir must go out against the enemies of God in the vanguard of the army. Because we do not know how to sing the war psalms of the prince of peace, we languish as we do.