Psalms, psalms, so many psalms...

I have to pick two psalms to preach on in the upcoming school holidays. There are a number of ways to go about this task and the most obvious route is to pick the psalms most obviously about Jesus. Or at least psalms that are quoted in the New Testament (which often happen to be the same as those most obviously about Jesus).

The downside of this is that we know some 'important' psalms well, but we miss the breadth of the emotions expressed elsewhere. There are two ways to remedy this. The first is to arrange a series emotionally, which is kind of like that guy in that movie (John someone in High Fidelity??) who arranges his music albums autobiographically. But again, the temptation here is to encourage a superficial reading of Psalms which merely lumps them into categories without seeing the unique portrayals. The other course of action is instead to work your way through numerically.

In not wanting to cover recent ground I decided to go through the previous preaching programs to see what had been studied in the sporadic (did somebody say "filler"?) series on Psalms over the past decade. Over ten years, we have covered around 30 psalms (some weren't enumerated) with only 5 being repeated. Historically my church have done a bit of all three approaches. We've covered many of the biggies, looked at 5 emotions, but also for a time just started at Psalm 40 and worked through to the mid 50s.

In the end, seeing they hadn't been covered for about 8 years I decided to preach Psalm 1 and 2. Yeah. yeah, I know you're thinking 'Well that's original'. But why not? I haven't done them before, and they are both important in terms of biblical theology as well as in framing our understanding for all of Psalms.

The plan is that next year I'll do Psalm 3 and 4. If I average two psalms a year and Jesus doesn't come back I'll finish in 75 years. It will be 2087 and I'll be 102 years old. At least the psalms are all relatively short towards the end as I imagine standing for long periods of time may be a problem by then.