Pastor's Ponderings: Old Testament bible study of Psalm 27 (August 14, 2025)

August 14, 2025:  Thursday Bible Study on Old Testament of Psalm 27

Blessings and Peace be with you this morning.

I hope that you received some of that rain that we got on the East Side last night. It rained hard for about 30 minutes. It is the most rain that we have seen all summer long at our home. I am still praying for more today, tonight, Friday, and Saturday, and won't the reduced temperatures be a real gift after all the heat we have had here in Tucson? A reminder that on the last Friday of this month our Foodies of Faith lunch bunch will be headed to the Cheesecake Factory at Tucson Mall. That date is Friday, August 29th, and we will meet at the restaurant unless you need a ride. Please sign up at church, or you can call the Church office and leave a message. Melody and I will both be driving that day if you need transport to get to the meal that morning. On that same weekend we will have our Donut and Coffee fellowship hour before church on August 31st at 9AM. You can sign up to come and bring donuts or appropriate dietary food to meet the needs of those who can't really eat donuts. We will have that Fellowship hour set up in the Narthex of the Church. Next Wednesday, Melody, Jesse, and I will be helping get Logan moved up to NAU in Flagstaff. We will not get home until sometime after midnight since Logan must wait until 5:30PM that day to get moved in. So next Thursday morning I will be taking the morning off, so there will not be a Psalm study next Thursday. Thanks for understanding. Please keep Logan and Sharyn in your prayers as they both must adjust to some new realities in their lives. We keep telling our young men that for every hour of college classes you are in, on most days you should plan to study 4 hours to support your learning curve in that class. I think that this feels overwhelming for them when they are just getting started. College studies are really a full-time job, and working to pay the bills must be added on top of that. I know all about this, and residential graduate school, committing the whole family to it means even more study and more hours of work to make ends meet, and then you are faced with the costs you just can't cover. Four years of graduate theological training cost us over $100,000 forty years ago. I just can't even begin to imagine how students and graduate students do it today. Well, that's enough of my attempts to bring a reality check to students and parents alike. Today we are getting into Psalm 27. I am amazed at how far we have already come in our moving through the Psalms!

Having been in graduate studies in Chicago and Des Moines for four years, having to learn worship, music, fellowship, and covering the bills when as an intern you were only given $500 to live on, means that there has to be a lot of multi-tasking taking place on the part of the student, their spouse, and all of the people who are committed to helping prepare that student for ordained ministry in the church.  Yes, this is a particularly Lutheran approach to how a student is prepared for ministry in Christ's Church. But in all that was going on back then for us, there was one thing that was most important to the preparation for ordained ministry. That one thing, in the face of everything else was the heart of faith which the presence of the Spirit brought into Her alongside journey with both Melody and Me. In Today's reading of the 27th Psalm, it becomes clear quickly that King David is buried in multi-tasking every day. Sometimes that means he is off battling some army trying to usurp the promised land, and to take over its wealth and Israel's people, and sometimes it means that David is maneuvering through the ins and outs of the people themselves and any intrigue and dissatisfaction that might be moving against him at home.  And for David, as we well know, it may have had to do with personal relationships too. Running a nation was no picnic for David or any other leader, and it certainly is not today in our overly complicated world. But David found that "One Thing" that he needed to find comfort in. For him it was living his life and leading the people of Israel while living in the presence of the Holy One of Heaven and Earth. David uses the terms of living in God's house, but David really does not mean living in the Temple, which was waiting to be built by Solomon later. He is focused on the living presence of His LORD. That "One Thing" means that David can be confident of all the assistance that the LORD provides for him every day. We call that having hope. But hope without the promise of the inbreaking Spirit, and the LORD'S intervention at every turn, is really no hope at all. If someone had just talked to us through their personal development of theology and materials written from opinion, where would our faith and hope in Christ be? There would be no confidence in the promise. It seems that was only some contrivance of a person. But you and I have the eyewitness of the disciples, and the witness of over 2000 years in the hosts of witnesses who can speak to us about their real experience of the Holy One, Jesus Christ, and their lives have been filled with Christ's promises before the Cross, on the Cross, and after the Cross as He revealed everything about the Love of His Father in heaven for His created children.  But there is more here to that "One Thing" than meets the eye. In Philippians 3 Paul says "One Thing I Do", In Mark 10, Jesus tells the rich young man, "There is One Thing you lack", In Luke 10 Jesus says to Martha when she is so busy around the house, "Only One Thing is needed", and in John 9, the blind man who has been healed by Jesus says "I know One Thing"  That One Thing is the real hope we know through our Savior and Lord.  When David says for "Just that One Thing I have asked" we already know what kind of a man David is in his life. Yes, he is certainly fallible in many ways, but in the tribulations of his life, David is the LORD'S king who leads his people because of the LORD'S steadfast faith in his life.

In your own life do you know what your "One Thing you need, or want, or have already, and for all of us this is the real answer to the whole of our living faith experience?

Thanks for being with me today. I hope that our "One Thing" is always Jesus Christ.

In His Love, with strong hope, Pastor Kim