Life pushes us in unpleasant directions. Living a life of faithfulness to God can become a challenge in the face of immense pressures to conform to modern culture and a godless lifestyle. We certainly don’t have the strength within us to push back. Scripture challenges us to keep Christ and his kingdom as the top priorities in our lives, but we have bills to pay, a mortgage to keep, a boss to please, a family to raise, and temptations to face.

One of the best antidotes for the venom that threatens to paralyze my own spiritual life has been Psalm 73, one of the handful of “wisdom” psalms found in our collection of 150. Asaph, listed as the psalm’s author in the heading, reminds us of one simple fact: God is good. Nothing else is good as God.

The psalm opens and closes with this truth, which then frames the entire discussion of pressures in life that are not so good. The opening verse of the psalm says "God is good to Israel," God’s people. The last verse, verse 28, concludes…

Ah, sunshine. It's marvelous stuff. When we are happy, we walk on it. When it gets on our shoulder, it makes us kinda melancholy-happy. And when we are angry at the man, we tell it to go away.

But there is an even better way to see sunshine. Psalm 19 lays out a great lesson for us about sunshine and the Bible, and how we need to be connected to the shining light of God's Word.

David's great psalm tells us of the importance of Scripture. It's a very famous psalm, and rightly so, used often to help us understand the natural revelation of God in the heavens (verse 1). Other times, the psalm is used to make the point that the written revelation of God in the Bible is perfect, sure, right, and more valuable than gold (verses 7-10).

There is a specific structure to the psalm, with the first six verses speaking of natural revelation, the next five verses proclaiming the value of biblical revelation, and the final three verses showing us how to use the Word of God to combat si…