Introduction : Songs of Ascent

For this tennis season, we want to set a discipline of traveling through the Scriptures. Every time we turn the pages of this ancient book, we are thrown into the lives of pilgrims, saints, sinners, and Christ. In a sense, we are on the road with them, learning from them, seeing their joys and mistakes, watching how God interacts with them, and ultimately finding out what it means to be a human who is in a relationship with God.

This season there will be daily readings for us to reflect upon. There will be some thoughts and reflections on the passages in the form of a devotional, and then we will all leave our thoughts, feelings, convictions and prayers in the comments below.

To provide direction, we will study a very limited part of the Scriptures over the next 60 days. We will look into 15 different Psalms, spending four days on each of them. The Scriptures have purposefully been chosen to be short, for we would like to spend a bit of time with each of them. Rather than just read the Scripture and move on, we should sit with the words of the Bible and see how they are alive and speaking to us. We will let them sink in and provide meaning. We will do this by practicing the ancient art of lectio divina.

Lectio Divina literally means "spiritual reading." It is a reflective way of meditating on a Biblical text. Below is the form to this type of reading.

There are four stages, typically to this discipline.

Lectio — READ - a prayerful, slow, heart-centered reading of a sacred text

Read the passage. Then slowly re-read the passage, and perhaps even read it again a third or fourth time, as slowly as possible. Instead of analyzing the text, keep an open mind. Let the text read you. Be open to discerning a particular word or phrase that speaks to you with particular meaning or relevance. When you encounter such a word or phrase, stop reading!

Meditatio — THINK - a deliberate pondering of the message in the text

Ponder thoughtfully about what this particular word or phrase means to you, and how God could be using this word to communicate with you.

Oratio — PRAY - responding to God’s message with honest, sincere prayer

You may feel inspired to engage in your own verbal, prayerful response to God’s word. Pray honestly, simply, sincerely. Remember, you pray not to make a good impression, but to simply be intimate with the One who loves you. Eventually the words will drop away; at this point allow the wordless silence to embrace you as you simply sit in God’s presence.

Contemplatio — LIVE - deciding how you will live in response to God's message to you.

As you sit without words, be thankful for what God has given to you today. Think and decide how you will take the message and live it out today.

This is lectio divina, and it is extremely powerful. We will all sit with the passage throughout the day, and though the Word of God is of old, it will renew and refresh us as it is still alive and acting in us. This way of reading Scripture allows for us to receive that.

Under each daily reading, there will a devotional that is meant to be for the entire team. Things that we can learn together from the passage. It will be more academically based, often reflecting on the original language of the passage and perhaps commentary by various authors. It will give us a common understanding to compliment the personal understanding that we gleaned from our lectio divina time.

And so, the Psalms we study are going to be Psalms 120-134. These are categorized in our Bible as the Songs of Ascent. They were songs that religious pilgrims sung on their way up to worship in Jerusalem. See, Jerusalem was up on a mountain, and so no matter which way you approached it, you were going up. These pilgrims would sing songs of joy and desperation, of peace and of calamity, of hope and of sorrow. The songs were to prepare their hearts as they went to worship in the temple, the place that was filled with the presence of the LORD.

These are the songs of life, ones that we too sing along the road that leads us into the presence of God. Our prayer is that we will see these Psalms as integral to our development as disciples of Christ. Thank you all for coming on this journey togehter.