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Growing up in the UK, royal weddings were a big deal. The one I remember most was the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana in 1981. A national holiday was declared and all-day street parties around the country celebrated this fairytale marriage. TV networks even employed lip readers to guess what the happy couple were saying to each other. The joy of the day lifted the spirits of the whole nation for months.

In Psalm 45, David reports on an even happier royal wedding, the marriage of Christ and the Christian. We don’t need lip-readers to guess their words because they wrote them down here. Use these loving words to remember your marriage and revive your joy

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We all want our children to win, don’t we? Whether it’s soccer, basketball, football, or mini-league, we want them to win. That’s why we sometimes get demented on the sidelines. But sometimes, despite our best efforts on the bleachers, they lose—not a good feeling for them or us. We do the post-mortem on the way home and try to find someone to blame—usually the referees—or a lesson to learn.

Psalm 44 is a post-mortem after a serious loss for the church. If Psalm 43 was “We Win!”, Psalm 44 is “We Lost!” It’s a painful time for the defeated church as the pathologist performs an autopsy to learn from the loss. Here’s what he comes up with: Learning from losing turns losing into winning.

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Even if we haven’t been victims of lies personally, all Christians are victims of group slander. Every day, Hollywood, the music industry, the mainstream media, Madison Avenue, and corporate HQ’s churn out movies, shows, songs, articles, commercials, and HR policies that soil, smear, and slander Christians. Misrepresentations, caricatures, distortions, and outright falsehoods darken our days and our hearts, distance us from God, and dampen our prayers and praise. In Psalm 43, a fellow-victim of slanderous lies guides us out of the darkness of lies and into the light of truth. He says, When lies get you down use God’s truth to lift you up.

Sermon notes on on Daniel 4:1-33.

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Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the famous British medical doctor turned preacher, asked: ‘Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?’ Our own thoughts—influenced by the world, our sin, or our enemy—can undermine our identity and joy in Christ.” But he didn’t just diagnose the disease, Dr Lloyd-Jones also prescribed the medicine of preaching to yourself as demonstrated in Psalm 42. Here’s the prescription: Listen less to yourself and preach more to yourself.

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We live in an increasingly merciless society. Make one mistake and the social media mobs will come for you and cancel you in seconds. There’s no forgiveness, no second chances. Numerous actors, singers, CEOs, politicians, professors, students, and employees have been cancelled for one misstep, even from their dim and distant past. When this scares us, we need to use Psalm 41 to remind us that the merciful get mercy but the merciless get justice.