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Speaker: Jerry Cisar
In 1704, Prominent Scottish politician Andrew Fletcher wrote, “I knew a very wise man… that… believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation, and we find that most of the ancient legislators thought that they could not well reform the manners of any city without the help of a lyric, and sometimes of a dramatic poet.”
Why would Fletcher, as a member of the Scottish parliament and actively working to make laws, think that ballads had more power to reform a nation that mere laws? I might offer that he understood well how songs get inside a person in a way that laws do not.
As we explore the Psalms this Sunday, I want to offer that the Psalms are given as a means of meditating in God’s law day and night. That the way we follow the path of the blessed one in Psalm 1 is by use of the Psalms themselves. The Psalms, the ballads of the people of God, may well do more to transform the people of God than the laws themselves.