Psalm 117 is tiny, but it stretches our hearts wide—pointing us to the Lord’s overwhelming love toward His people and to a loyalty that never expires. Then it invites praise that’s big enough to be heard by every nation.

A Mercy That Is Greater Than Our Mess

Psalm 117:2 says, “For His loving devotion is great toward us, and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever. Hallelujah!” Sit with that for a moment: God’s love isn’t described as adequate or barely enough—it’s great. Not because we’ve been impressive, but because He is.

That’s why the gospel feels like air in your lungs. “But God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). When you’re tempted to measure God’s love by your latest win or failure, come back to the cross—His love has already spoken louder than your accusations.

Faithfulness That Outlasts the Week

God’s faithfulness doesn’t rise and fall with your spiritual energy. You can have a day where prayer feels easy and a day where it feels like you’re dragging your feet through mud—and His faithfulness doesn’t budge. “If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself” (2 Timothy 2:13).

So today, don’t just try harder—lean harder. “Because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed, for His mercies never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness!” (Lamentations 3:22–23). New every morning means you can stop replaying yesterday like it gets the final word.

Praise That Refuses to Stay Private

Psalm 117 isn’t content with a quiet corner of worship; it calls the nations in. The God whose love holds you steady is the same God gathering worshipers from everywhere, and He means for your life to be part of that invitation.

Jesus said, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19), and heaven will be filled with “a multitude too large to count, from every nation and tribe and people and tongue” (Revelation 7:9). Praise becomes a witness when you speak of His faithfulness, sing when you don’t feel like it, forgive because you’ve been forgiven, and share Christ with the next person God puts in your path.

Lord, thank You that Your loving devotion is great and Your faithfulness endures forever. Put a Hallelujah back in my mouth today, and send me to live and speak in a way that draws others to You. Amen.

In this hour of all-but-universal darkness one cheering gleam appears: within the fold of conservative Christianity there are to be found increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself. They are eager for spiritual realities and will not be put off with words, nor will they be content with correct `interpretations' of truth. They are athirst for God, and they will not be satisfied till they have drunk deep at the Fountain of Living Water. This is the only real harbinger of revival which I have been able to detect anywhere on the religious horizon. It may be the cloud the size of a man's hand for which a few saints here and there have been looking. It can result in a resurrection of life for many souls and a recapture of that radiant wonder which should accompany faith in Christ, that wonder which has all but fled the Church of God in our day. But this hunger must be recognized by our religious leaders.

Current evangelicalism has (to change the figure) laid the altar and divided the sacrifice into parts, but now seems satisfied to count the stones and rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not a sign of fire upon the top of lofty Carmel. [See 1 Kings 18 for the allusions.-ccp] But God be thanked that there are a few who care. They are those who, while they love the altar and delight in the sacrifice, are yet unable to reconcile themselves to the continued absence of fire. They desire God above all. They are athirst to taste for themselves the `piercing sweetness' of the love of Christ about Whom all the holy prophets did write and the psalmists did sing.

There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles of the doctrines of Christ, but too many of these seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals oft he faith year after year, strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence, nor anything unusual in their personal lives. They minister constantly to believers who feel within their breasts a longing which their teaching simply does not satisfy. I trust I speak in charity, but the lack in our pulpits is real. Milton's terrible sentence applies to our day as accurately as it did to his: `The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.'

It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God's children starving while actually seated at the Father's table. The truth of Wesley's words is established before our eyes: `Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions,yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is proof of this.'

Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for the dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of people who hold `right opinions,' probably more than ever before in the history of the Church.Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the `program.' This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.

Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the living God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such way as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience, they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.

This book is a modest attempt to aid God's hungry children so to find Him. Nothing here is new except in the sense that it is a discovery which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame.

A. W. Tozer Chicago, Ill. June 16,1948.

It is the voice of my Beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to Me, . . . for My head is filled with dew, My locks with the drops of the night. - Song of Solomon 5:2

Men that bear precious gifts for the world do not often need to beseech that they shall be accepted, but He comes to it and "prays us with much entreaty that we should receive the gift." We are mostly too proud to sue for love, especially if once the petition has been repulsed, but He asks to be let into your heart because His nature and His name is Love, and, being such. He yearns to be loved by you, and He yearns to bless you. His asking entrance is, then, a revelation of His tenderness, a revelation of His lowliness, and also a revelation of His patience. Repulsed, He continues to plead; neglected and unanswered, still that uninterrupted craving admission goes on; Like Peter at the gate of Mary’s house, " He continues knocking." Christ never gives up anybody, Christ never abandons as hopeless the task of drawing any to Himself. We are weary of trying to reclaim the "irreclaimable " people, and we talk very glibly - some of us- about the "hopeless classes" that are outside the reach of moral influences, and the like. There are no such classes in His vision. With patience of a God, patience that accepts as its own the limits which He set for ours, "until seventy times seven," He will not be put away: but He pleads with you, my brother! as He did when you were a little child; as He did in the hot heyday of your early youth, when passions were strong, and novelty was attractive, and bonds were unwelcomed, and religion seemed too serious for the brightness that was around you; and as He has done with some of you in the maturity of life, when cares have burdened your hearts, and the deceitfulness of riches and the anxieties of life have made such a din that you could not hear His fingers on the door. He pleads with us all, and after every repulse: " I will yet plead with you, saith the Lord." At your heart, dear friend, by all your mercies and by all your cares, by the sudden impressions that have been made upon you, by the quick monitions of conscience, by the emotions of the mind within, by the words of human teachers, by His Book and Gospel, by all life and all nature which are in His hands, and by hidden ways which only a Divine foot can tread. He draws nearer to us, pleading with us - all for this, that we will let Him come into our hearts.

So, dear brother, when He stands before you with the old summons and the old promise on His lips, "Lift up your heads! O ye gates! and the King of Glory shall come in," I beseech you fling wide your hearts; say to Him: " If Thou hast judged me to be faithful, come and abide in my house "; and He will enter in, and bring with Him His gifts - peace, pardon, purity, and blessedness, and He and you will, even on earth, sit together at His table.

When after tossing and toil on the midnight sea the morning brings us to the shore, we shall find Him waiting with His welcome and a feast spread and prepared by His own hands, to which He will honour us by bidding us bring the results of the long night of labour; and so in highest fashion this great word will be fulfilled, and at His table in His Kingdom the King Himself shall sup with us and we with Him.