One of the reasons that we still love the Psalms, three millennia later, is that they are songs.

This is Hebrew poetry that was written to be sung.

They were written by hearts that had been moved, and they captured those emotions

and bottled it up in verse so that other people might read and experience those emotions,

that later generations would worship our God together, even 3,000

years later in Sweden. For Christians today, we have at least three ways that we should read

every psalm. These are not options, like pick an option, but we read every

psalm in these three ways. One is the original reading, the original author. This one tells us

it's from David to an original audience, which would have been 3,000 years ago. The second way is in relation to Jesus.

The God who inspired and preserved these Psalms

sent his own son at the center of history

and every Psalm has something to tell us about Jesus.

How Jesus fulfills the Psalm

and, amazingly, how God himself as man as Israelite would have taken these psalms on his lips

so you can imagine Jesus speaking every psalm in the first century a third way then is is how these Psalms relate to the church, the New

Covenant Church. These Psalms are for today. These Psalms are for the church. Paul says everything

written in former times was written for you that you may have hope.

And so the Psalms are all written for the church.

And we need to have all three of these perspectives in mind this morning, but I want to focus especially on the last one.

The church.

And not just the global church or the universal church, but you in particular, my dear new Swedish friends, brothers and sisters in Jesus.

If I might be so bold,

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