Christian Meditation for A Bigger Life with Pastor Dave Cover

While all the Psalms were written centuries before Jesus was born, Psalm 47 (much like we saw in our last episode on Psalm 45) brings the future reign of Jesus into our present praises. And in doing so it helps us to lift up our eyes to see the bigger horizon of our bigger story. It really is amazing how the Holy Spirit inspired these psalms with prophetic insight to see a future better detailed i...

Everyone has a mental narrative inside their head of what story they want to live and whether or not they are fitting inside that narrative right now in their lives. And what happens is we have a false narrative inside of our head that is not reality, and so it causes discontentment or misinterpretation of the events in our lives. And it causes us to pursue a false reality for what story we want f...

I often ask myself what did the apostles who saw the risen Jesus know about Jesus that I don’t know? I read where a Jesuit once said of Dorothy Day that she lived “as though the truth were true.” That’s a big statement when you really think about it. Seems simple yet it’s profound. Do I live as though the truth were true? Do you? When we read the letters of the apostles and the story of their live...

It’s easy to get drawn in or intimidated by culturally powerful people. Especially when they are culturally powerful or prosperous because they openly disregard or reject God’s righteousness. It can cause us to lose courage in our faith and commitment to God. All this was something David could relate to. And even Jesus quotes from this psalm in Matthew 5:5 as David puts all of this back into the r...

Anyone who takes the Bible seriously knows we live in a world where there is real evil. And that evil can take deep root in people’s lives so that they are motivated to bring evil into our lives. To do us harm. To hurt us in some way. That was David’s circumstance as he prayed Psalm 35. And I think his prayer is a great example for us as we deal with people with evil intentions in our lives. What...

Imagine writing a letter to a loved one without ever imagining them in your mind as you write. Not much of a conversation. Now imagine conversing with God without using your imagination. Again, not much of a conversation. But the Bible gives us poetic pictures of God for us to use to imagine him in a way that brings his reality to life in our minds and hearts. Revelation 22:1-5 is one of those pas...

As you come before God to pray, what are you usually thinking? To some degree you are using your imagination, picturing in some way God with you and listening to you. But in the Psalms David imagined much more than that. If you pay attention you’ll notice that his language of prayer is filled with intimate and powerful mental images. He used his imagination to picture his relationship with God in...

As a psalmist uniquely inspired by the Holy Spirit (Matt 22:43), King David’s prayers were often prophetic; describing poetically/figuratively what will ultimately be literal in the future through the Son of David, the Messiah (the Christ). For example, we see this regarding Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection in Psalm 22. And I think we see this in Psalm 30 regarding the resurrected future of Ch...

I think in some ways the reason we lose emotional control at work or at home or in traffic or wherever is because we keep too much emotional control when talking to God. We have it backwards. Learning to be more emotionally expressive, even dramatic, to God in our prayer life is an important way to become more like David (and Jesus) in our relationship with God. And that helps us be more like Jesu...

What is the number one truth of life in the Bible? The Bible’s big truth for your life? Here it is: Only God’s will brings life; and every other will brings destruction. Dependence upon God brings life; independence from God brings death. This is the entire Bible’s first equation. This is what all of human history will ultimately show the universe a billion years from now. This is the ultimate les...

Why should you choose God over anything else? I always have to remind myself why following (seeking, trusting, obeying) Christ is always worth it more than not. My guess is you do too. This is a great Psalm to remind you of who God really is for you, and why you desire him more than anything or anyone else. Take some time to let God speak to you and then let’s take a moment to speak back to him in...

Jesus’s words in Matthew 10:29-31 have been some of his most important words in my life because of their powerful picture of God’s detailed care and involvement in my life. Jesus emphasizes our eternal value to the God who created everything in this universe! But the context of these verses makes these words far more than just comforting. They are words that draw the battle lines in our heart of w...

We all worry. We all deal with anxiety. Most of the time it’s the back-burner feeling that’s like a slow leak in our joy. In Matthew 6 Jesus directly challenges that kind of anxiety and worry. Think about it this way -- the creator of the universe -- YOUR creator -- became human and is telling YOU why you don’t have to live a life pushed around by your worry and anxiety. Let’s take a moment togeth...

The risen Jesus told his disciples that ultimately what is written in the Psalms points to him (see Luke 24:25-27, 44 below). We especially see this in Psalm 24, written by King David a thousand years before Jesus was born. I love these messianic psalms of David (psalms that specifically describe to us something about the Messiah) because they show me how God has his ancient, eternal, bigger story...

Jesus quoted the first line of Psalm 22 on the cross. It was a prayer of anguish as he took upon himself the wrath of the Father for the sins of his people. But it was also Jesus’s way of pointing his disciples to the rest of Psalm 22. And it’s amazing! Let’s discuss why it’s amazing together in this episode. Mark 15:24–34 ESV 24 And they crucified him and divided his garments among them, casting...

Jesus saw the Psalms as written by their human author, but also by the Holy Spirit (see Matt 22:41-46 below). Although King David lived over a thousand years before Christ, he is one of the Bible’s primary foreshadowing figures of Jesus as Christ. That’s why the Messiah was often referred to as “the son of David” (Matt 1:1, 9:27, 22:42). So sometimes the Spirit would speak foreshadowing prophetic...

This is a rare Psalm where David no longer feels any threats to his life. God has completely delivered him from all his enemies, including his most dangerous enemy in King Saul. The poetic images David uses in this Psalm are so illustrative in ascribing to God what ALL of us will joyfully want to say the moment of our resurrection, when we ourselves will be completely delivered from all our threat...

Usually when we get past the wall of not wanting to pray, and just start praying aloud to God, it feels good to our soul. And we realize it wasn’t that hard after all. When we can take the “horizontal” concerns in our life that weigh us down and make them “vertical” by bringing them to God, we start to see them in light of God’s presence and love and future in and for our lives. And the burden of...

 What narrative for your life are you living into most of the time? That’s the big question from Psalm 14. There’s the narrative of “the fool” who lives most of the time as if “there is no God.” Then there’s the narrative of those “who understand” and “seek after God.” All of us are somewhere in the middle of those two. But one big purpose of this podcast is to live into the reality of God’s prese...

Our life won’t make any sense to us in any given moment if we don’t keep Jesus’s return as the focus of our life’s story. Revelation 21:1-7 is one of the best places in the entire Bible to do that. Especially when reading it in meditation and prayer. And for that reason it’s always been one of my favorite places to turn to re-focus my mind and heart in prayer. Let me lead you in a time of meditati...

This is one of those Psalms of David where he starts off accusing God of ignoring him and forgetting about him. It says something about God that he would want to inspire David to write such an honest Psalm and put it in His Word as part of Scripture. God wants our honest prayers. And then David does what he always does; he focuses his mind and heart on the promises of who God really is for him. Th...

 I’ve been praying through the Psalms for over 40 years now. So inevitably there have been some verses in the Psalms that I’ve personally found particularly powerful for prayer. I come back to them over and over, which means eventually I had them memorized and easily accessible to me anywhere in whatever circumstance. That’s how we know Jesus meditated on and prayed the Psalms over the years of hi...

In our last episode we looked at Psalm 38 and David’s frustration with himself for being his own worst enemy. It’s a psalm where David confesses his overwhelming sin and how that’s made his life stink and fester. I’m thankful the Holy Spirit has inspired such prayers for us in our own sinfulness. We all know what it’s like to be our own worst enemy. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit has also give...

Psalm 38 is a great example of the power of poetry to make us feel. We can feel David’s own misery and frustration with himself in this psalm. He realizes how much his own stupid and foolish sins have stunk up his life and his relationships, and he needs God’s help. Powerful word pictures in this psalm convey to us his anguish. It’s amazing how poetic words like this can actually transfer the emot...

In Colossians 1:12-20, Paul is finishing a prayer he has for the Colossian believers, and then he quotes what many scholars believe was an early Christian hymn. As such, these are some of the most powerful truths in the Bible. And the more we understand them, the more we will want to live into God’s bigger story of life and light and love and glory that Jesus came to give us. In this episode we wi...