Bless the LORD, O My Soul

Read Psalm 103 in full before proceeding; it is twenty-two verses. Notice how David calls his own soul to bless the LORD, and how he refuses to forget all His benefits, naming them one by one. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

The LORD is compassionate and merciful; he is patient and demonstrates great loyal love.
Psalm 103:8

The last psalm called all the earth to bless the LORD. This one turns the call inward, and aims it at the one heart hardest to move: our own. Praise the LORD, O my soul! With all that is within me, praise his holy name! Praise the LORD, O my soul! Do not forget all his kind deeds! (vv. 1–2). David does not wait to feel like praising; he commands his own soul to do it. He turns and addresses the deepest part of himself, summoning a heart that may be dull or downcast or forgetful, and tells it, in effect: remember who God is and what He has done, and bless Him. It is one of the most practical and most beloved psalms in the book, and it teaches a lost art, the art of preaching to one’s own soul.

And it does not only command the praise; it shows us how. Psalm 103 is, among other things, a method: a pattern any believer can follow when the heart needs rousing. It begins by turning to address the soul directly. It goes on to name God’s benefits, deliberately and specifically, beginning with the forgiveness of sins. It moves from the gifts to the character of the Giver, dwelling on His mercy and grace and patience. It sets our frailty against His everlasting love. And it widens, at the last, from the single soul to the whole creation. That is a pattern worth learning by heart, for the days when our own praise runs dry: address your soul, count the mercies, dwell on who God is, remember how small you are and how great His love, and join your voice to the larger song. The psalm gives us not only reasons to bless the LORD but a road into the blessing, a path the dull heart can walk until it finds itself, by the end, truly singing.

And then David does the very thing he commands: he refuses to forget all his kind deeds, and begins to name them, one glorious gift after another. He is the one who forgives all your sins, who heals all your diseases, who delivers your life from the Pit, who crowns you with his loyal love and compassion. The psalm is a deliberate act of remembering, of calling to mind the goodness of God, benefit by benefit, until the dull soul catches fire and the downcast soul lifts its head. This is not the manufactured cheerfulness that denies trouble; it is the disciplined memory that refuses to let trouble crowd out the goodness of God.

From the benefits the psalm moves to the character of the God who gives them, and here it reaches its summit. The LORD is compassionate and merciful; he is patient and demonstrates great loyal love (v. 8). This is the oldest and dearest description of God in all the Scriptures, the very words God spoke of Himself to Moses. And David presses into what that mercy means for sinners: that God does not deal with us as our sins deserve; that His loyal love towers over us as the skies are high above the earth; that He removes our transgressions as far as the east is from the west; that He has compassion on us as a father has compassion on his children, for he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust (v. 14 ESV).

Every line of it opens onto the gospel, for the benefits David names were secured at a price he could not yet see. God can forgive all our sins because His Son bore them; He does not deal with us as our sins deserve because He dealt with His Son as our sins deserve instead; our transgressions are carried away as far as east from west because the Lamb of God took them away; and the God who knows our frame came, in due time, to take that frame Himself, to become dust with us and for us. The mercy David sang has, on this side of the cross, a face and a wound.

So we will learn, with David, to preach to our own souls, to address the dull and downcast heart and command it to bless the LORD. We will walk the catalogue of benefits, beginning where the psalm begins, with the forgiveness of sins. We will stand at the summit of God’s merciful character, and at the tender truth that He remembers we are dust. And we will end where the psalm ends, with the whole creation summoned to the praise our own souls began. Praise the LORD, O my soul! Do not forget all His kind deeds!

Praise the LORD, O my soul! With all that is within me, praise his holy name! (v. 1; older translations, Bless the LORD). The first thing to notice is simply that David is talking to himself. Not muttering, not brooding, but preaching to himself: turning to address his own soul as a pastor might address a congregation, and calling it to its duty and its joy. This is a profoundly important spiritual practice, and one we have largely forgotten. Most of our inner unhappiness comes from listening to ourselves (to the running commentary of our fears, our grievances, our gloom) when we ought instead to be talking to ourselves, taking our wayward soul in hand and preaching truth to it. David does not ask his soul how it feels; he tells it what to do. Praise the LORD, O my soul! And he summons not a part but the whole of himself, all that is within me, every faculty and affection conscripted into the praise of God’s holy name.

We met this practice already, in the downcast psalmist of Psalm 42 who asked his own soul, Why are you depressed, O my soul? and answered it, Wait for God! It is the same move here, turned now toward praise. And it matters enormously for the life of faith, because our feelings are not the masters we so often let them be. A soul left to itself will drift toward gloom and forgetfulness as surely as water runs downhill; it must be summoned, addressed, and led. The believer who has learned to preach to his own soul is not at the mercy of his moods. When the heart is flat and prayer feels like ash, he does not wait passively for the feeling to return; he takes his soul by the collar, turns its face toward God, and says, Praise the LORD!

Praise the LORD, O my soul! Do not forget all his kind deeds! (v. 2; older translations, forget not all his benefits). And here is the content of the self-preaching: do not forget. For forgetting is the soul’s chronic disease. Not that we lose the facts (most of us could recite that God is good and gracious), but that we lose the felt force of them, let them slide into the back of the mind where they no longer warm or steady us. The cares of the day, the griefs of the season, the sheer pull of ingratitude crowd the benefits of God out of view, and the soul grows dull as though it had received nothing. Against this, David sets the discipline of deliberate remembering. He will not let the benefits be forgotten; he will name them, hold them up, count them over like a treasure, until the remembering rekindles the praise. To bless the LORD, it turns out, begins with the simple, strenuous refusal to forget how good He has been.

There is great practical wisdom in this for the downcast and the anxious. When the soul is sinking, its instinct is to rehearse its troubles: to run the same fears and griefs around and around the track until they wear a groove. David’s remedy is to interrupt that rehearsal with a deliberate counter-rehearsal, a stubborn, specific recalling of what God has actually done. We see the same instinct in the lament psalms, where the sufferer, drowning in trouble, suddenly turns to remember God’s deeds of old and finds his footing again. It is not a denial of the trouble; it is a refusal to let the trouble be the only thing in view. Name the mercies. Count them over: the forgiveness received, the prayers answered, the providences that carried you this far, the daily bread you never went without. A soul that has been made to remember the goodness of God is a soul much harder to drown, because it is holding, against the weight of its fears, the heavier weight of what God has already proven Himself to be. And when the darkness is deep or lasting, this remembering goes hand in hand with other care: bring your burden to your pastor, and to a doctor or counselor as well, for God cares for us through such helpers too.

Who Forgives All Your Iniquity

He is the one who forgives all your sins, who heals all your diseases, who delivers your life from the Pit, who crowns you with his loyal love and compassion, who satisfies your life with good things, so your youth is renewed like an eagle’s (vv. 3–5). Here is the catalogue of benefits, and the order is not accidental. The very first benefit David names, before healing, before rescue, before satisfaction, is forgiveness: who forgives all your sins. This is the fountainhead of every other mercy, the gift without which no other gift could finally do us good. A man healed of every disease and satisfied with every good thing, but unforgiven, would still be lost; a man forgiven, though he suffer every affliction, is safe forever. So David puts forgiveness first, and marks it with that sweeping word all: not some sins, not the respectable ones only, but all your sins, the whole sorry account, forgiven.

The benefits cascade from there. He heals all your diseases, and we must read this with care, for the psalm is not promising that the believer will never be sick, a promise the rest of Scripture and the experience of every saint plainly contradict. It is the language of a God who is the healer of His people, body and soul, whose healing is real and constant now in ten thousand mercies we never trace to Him, and whose healing will be total and final at the resurrection, when every disease is undone forever. He delivers your life from the Pit; the verb is the kinsman-redeemer’s word (older translations, redeems), and it means He buys our life back from the grave, from destruction, from the power of death. He crowns you with his loyal love and compassion, setting grace on our heads like a royal crown. He satisfies your life with good things and renews our strength. Benefit upon benefit, the list runs on, and David’s point is plain: look how much you have been given; how can such a soul stay silent?

And the believer who reads these benefits with the gospel in hand sees what they cost. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses: the forgiveness of all your sins was purchased at Calvary, where the Son of God paid the whole account. The delivering of our life from the Pit was accomplished when He went down into the Pit Himself and rose, breaking its power from the inside. The healing of our deepest disease was won when, the Scriptures say, by his wounds you were healed. David named the benefits; the gospel names the price, and the Giver. Every gift in this catalogue is a gift of the same Lord Jesus who bought them with His life, which only makes the soul’s forgetting the more inexcusable, and its blessing the more fitting.

Linger a moment longer on that word all, for it is the very word the guilt-haunted soul most needs and least believes. Forgives all your sins. Not the small sins only, while the great ones are held against us; not most of the account, with a shameful remainder still owing; not the sins of the respectable, while the scandalous are left out. All. The believer who lies awake convinced that some particular sin is too dark, too repeated, too much, to be forgiven has set his own verdict against the plain word of God. There is no iniquity in the whole record of a repentant sinner that falls outside that all, for the blood that bought the forgiveness is of infinite worth, and what it covers, it covers wholly. The same psalm that will shortly carry our transgressions as far as the east is from the west does not leave a few behind within reach. When God forgives, He forgives all; and the soul that has grasped this has lost its last excuse for despair.

Slow to Anger, Abounding in Steadfast Love

From the gifts, David turns to the Giver’s character, and reaches the dearest words in the Old Testament: The LORD is compassionate and merciful; he is patient and demonstrates great loyal love (v. 8). These are not David’s own coinage; they are the very words God spoke of Himself to Moses on the mountain, when He passed by and proclaimed His name. They are the nearest thing the Old Testament has to a definition of God, quoted and echoed all through its pages, the sentence God’s people reached for whenever they wanted to say the truest thing about who He is. Compassionate and merciful: disposed to pity and to give. Patient: slow to anger, not quick-tempered, not easily provoked. Great loyal love: overflowing, lavish, rich in the covenant love (older translations, steadfast love) that has anchored every psalm in these sessions. This is the God David is preaching to his soul.

And David adds a line that the soul under a cloud of guilt badly needs to hear: He does not always accuse, and does not stay angry (v. 9). God’s displeasure at sin is real (the psalm is not soft on sin), but it is not endless. His anger has a limit; His mercy does not. There are believers who live for years under a vague, settled sense that God is perpetually displeased with them, as though His face were fixed in a permanent frown, and this verse is meant to lift that cloud. The LORD does not nurse His anger or hold a grudge against His own; He does not stay angry. To those who fear Him, the season of His chastening passes, but the loyal love abides, for, as another psalm puts it, His anger lasts only a brief moment, and His good favor restores one’s life. The believer need not crouch under an imagined and unending divine displeasure. His anger is always just, and toward His children it is brief; the love is forever.

And then he draws out what this mercy means for sinners, in three of the most comforting lines in Scripture. First: He does not deal with us as our sins deserve; he does not repay us as our misdeeds deserve (v. 10). Stop and feel the weight of that. If God dealt with us as our sins deserve, giving us exactly what our record has earned, not one of us could stand. But He does not. He withholds the deserved verdict; He treats us not as our sins demand but as His mercy chooses. Second: as the skies are high above the earth, so his loyal love towers over his faithful followers (v. 11), a love not merely large but immeasurable, rising infinitely above us. And third: As far as the eastern horizon is from the west, so he removes the guilt of our rebellious actions from us (v. 12). East and west never meet; travel east forever and you never arrive at west. That is how far our sins are carried from us: not east from north, which could be measured, but east from west, an infinite and unbridgeable distance. The forgiven sin is not filed away within reach; it is removed beyond all finding.

But how can the just God not deal with us as our sins deserve? A judge who simply waved away crimes would not be merciful but corrupt; sin cannot merely be ignored. And here the psalm, read with the gospel, opens onto the cross. God does not deal with us as our sins deserve because He dealt with His Son as our sins deserve instead. The deserved verdict was not waved away; it was carried out upon Christ: God made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we would become the righteousness of God. The reason our transgressions are removed as far as east from west is that the Lamb of God lifted them onto Himself and bore them away, as the scapegoat of old carried Israel’s sins out into the wilderness, never to return. God can be both just and merciful (can refuse to repay us as our misdeeds deserve without ceasing to be righteous) because at Calvary justice and mercy met, and the debt was paid in full by Another. This is why David’s soul, and ours, has cause to bless the LORD.

He Knows Our Frame

As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on his faithful followers (v. 13). For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust (v. 14 ESV, where the NET has made of clay). After the soaring lines about heaven and earth and east and west, the psalm bends down very low and very tender. God deals with His people not as a stern magistrate but as a father with his children, and a good father does not expect of a small child the strength of a grown man. He knows our frame. He understands how we are made: how weak, how easily overwhelmed, how quickly tired. He remembers that we are dust: He has not forgotten that we are creatures of the ground, frail and finite, formed from the earth and returning to it. There is unspeakable comfort here for every weary and struggling believer: the God we so often imagine as a hard taskmaster, impatient with our failures and disappointed in our weakness, is in fact a Father who knows exactly what we are and pities us in it.

This does not excuse our sin (the psalm has just spent its strength on the gravity of sin and the wonder of its removal), but it does temper the way God deals with us. He is gentle with our frailty. He does not pile burdens on the bruised or break the bent reed. When we come to Him weak, exhausted, barely holding on, He does not despise us for it; He remembers we are dust, and He is tender. The believer who is hard on himself, who berates his own weakness and assumes God must be even harsher, has not yet reckoned with this verse. The Father knows your frame better than you do, and His knowledge moves Him not to contempt but to compassion.

For some, this is the hardest truth in the psalm to believe, because the word father carries old wounds. Those who grew up under a harsh, or absent, or impossible-to-please father can find it nearly unbearable to imagine that God’s fatherhood is tender, and they quietly assume that the Father in heaven must be a larger version of the father they knew. This verse pries that assumption loose. The compassion God shows His children is not modeled on our fathers; our fathers, at their best, were faint and broken copies of His. He is the Father from whom all fatherhood takes its name, and His compassion is the real thing of which every good earthly father’s tenderness was only a glimpse, and every bad one, a tragic counterfeit. Whatever you learned to expect from the word father, the LORD invites you to unlearn it here, and to receive instead the pity of a Father who knows your frame, remembers your dust, and bends toward your weakness not to crush it but to carry it.

And the gospel deepens this past all expectation, for the God who knows our frame did not stay content to know it from above. In the fullness of time He took it. The Son of God became dust (the Word became flesh) and lived inside our frame, with all its weariness and hunger and tears and breakable bone, so that now, the Scriptures say, we do not have a high priest incapable of sympathizing with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way just as we are. He knows our frame not only as its Maker but as one who wore it. When we come to Him weak, we come to a Savior who has been weak; when we bring Him our dust, we bring it to One who became dust for us. The compassion of Psalm 103 has, in the Lord Jesus, walked our roads and felt our frailty from the inside.

And against the backdrop of our frailty David sets the one thing that does not fade. A person’s life is like grass. Like a flower in the field it flourishes, but when the hot wind blows by, it disappears (vv. 15–16). We are grass: here in the morning, gone by evening, the place where we grew soon lost to sight. But (and everything turns on that word) the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him (v. 17 ESV, where the NET’s continually loses the everlasting). Our lives are a breath; His love has no beginning and no end. And so the believer’s security is not anchored in his own brief and fragile life, but in a love that was old before the mountains and will outlast the stars. We are dust; His love is everlasting; and because we belong to that love, even our dust is safe.

From Everlasting to Everlasting

The LORD has established his throne in heaven; his kingdom extends over everything (v. 19). Having descended to our dust, the psalm lifts its eyes to the throne. The God who stoops to pity frail creatures is the same God whose throne is established in heaven and whose kingdom extends over everything that is. There is no tension between the tenderness and the majesty; the hand that is gentle with our weakness is the hand that holds the universe. And this universal King, we know, reigns now in the person of the risen and ascended Lord Jesus, seated at the right hand of the Father, His kingdom extending over all, so that the compassion and the sovereignty David sang are joined in one throne, where the Lamb who bore our sins now reigns over all things for the good of His people.

And so the psalm, which began with one soul preaching to itself, ends by summoning the whole of creation to the same praise. Praise the LORD, you angels of his … Praise the LORD, all you warriors of his … Praise the LORD, all that he has made, in all the regions of his kingdom! (vv. 20–22). The single voice swells into a universal chorus: the mighty angels, the armies of heaven, every work of God in every corner of His realm, all called to bless His name. It is a foretaste of the scene at the end of the Bible, where every creature in heaven and on earth is heard ascribing blessing to God and to the Lamb. The soul that learned to bless the LORD in its own small chamber discovers that it has joined a song as wide as the cosmos.

There is real comfort in that widening, for it means the believer never praises alone. The single soul, summoning itself to bless the LORD in the quiet of its own chamber, is in fact lending its small and faltering voice to a chorus beyond counting: the powerful angels, the warriors of heaven, the whole creation in every region of God’s kingdom. Our praise on our best day is a thin and wavering thing; but it is taken up into a song that the mighty ones of heaven have been singing since before the world began and will go on singing when this world is past. When we bless the LORD, we are not starting a song but joining one already in full voice. And every gathering of God’s people for worship, every solitary believer blessing God over a kitchen sink, is a rehearsal for the day when the whole redeemed creation will sing it together, face to face, so that the smallest, weakest praise we offer now is already part of the everlasting music of heaven.

And then, having summoned the angels and the hosts and all the works of God, David turns one last time to the heart where he started: Praise the LORD, O my soul! (v. 22). The psalm ends exactly where it began, with the soul commanding itself to praise; but now the command comes after the long, deliberate remembering of all God’s benefits and all His mercy, and so it lands with the full weight of everything between. This is how the practice works. We begin by telling our dull soul to bless the LORD; we go on by naming, slowly and stubbornly, what He has done: the sins forgiven, the life delivered from the Pit, the anger held back, the transgressions carried beyond the horizon, the frame remembered, the love that never ends; and we find, by the end, that the soul we had to command at the start is now ready, of itself, to sing. Praise the LORD, O my soul! Do not forget all His kind deeds! And having remembered them, you will not need to be told twice.

Gathering the Threads

We learned, in this richest of thanksgiving psalms, the lost art of preaching to one’s own soul. David does not wait to feel like praising; he turns and addresses the deepest part of himself, summoning a dull and forgetful heart with the command, Praise the LORD, O my soul! Then he obeys his own command by refusing to forget all his kind deeds, naming them one by one. We saw that forgiveness comes first in the catalogue (who forgives all your sins), the fountainhead of every other mercy, secured for us at Calvary; that God’s healing and delivering reach body and soul, now in part and fully at the resurrection; and that every benefit was bought by the blood of the Lord Jesus, who paid the whole account. We climbed to the summit of God’s character, compassionate and merciful … patient and rich in great loyal love, the very words God spoke of Himself to Moses, and watched David draw out their wonder: that God does not deal with us as our sins deserve, that His loyal love towers as high as the skies above the earth, that He removes our transgressions as far as the east is from the west.

And we saw how the cross makes all of it possible: God does not deal with us as our sins deserve because He dealt with His Son as our sins deserve instead, and our transgressions are carried beyond all finding because the Lamb of God bore them away. We knelt at the tender heart of the psalm (he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust) and found a Father gentle with our weakness, deepened beyond all telling by the Son who took our frame Himself and became dust with us, a high priest who sympathizes because He has worn what we wear. We set our fleeting, grass-like lives against the steadfast love that is from everlasting to everlasting, and found our security not in our brief days but in His unending love. And we ended where David ended, the single soul that learned to bless the LORD now joined to the praise of angels and hosts and all the works of God, and, having remembered all His benefits, no longer needing to be commanded, but blessing the LORD at last with all that is within.

For Discussion

David begins by addressing his own soul: Praise the LORD, O my soul! … Do not forget all his kind deeds! (vv. 1–2). What does it mean to preach to your own soul rather than merely listen to it, and why is deliberately remembering God’s benefits so important when the heart grows dull or downcast (compare Psalm 42:5)?
The first and greatest benefit named is that God forgives all your sins (v. 3). Why does forgiveness come first in the list, and how is this benefit secured for us in Christ (consider Ephesians 1:7)?
The psalm says God does not deal with us as our sins deserve; he does not repay us as our misdeeds deserve (v. 10). How can a just God not repay sin as it deserves, and how does the cross, where God dealt with Christ as our sins deserve, make this possible?
As far as the eastern horizon is from the west, so he removes the guilt of our rebellious actions from us (v. 12). What does this image tell us about how completely God forgives, and how does it comfort a believer who is still haunted by past sins?
He knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust (v. 14 ESV). How is it a comfort that God is a tender Father who understands our weakness, rather than a harsh judge? And how does the Lord Jesus, who took our frame, deepen this comfort (consider Hebrews 4:15)?
A person’s life is like grass, but the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting (vv. 15–17; v. 17 ESV). How does the contrast between our fleeting lives and God’s unchanging, eternal loyal love give the believer a security nothing in this life can?

Looking Ahead

Psalm 103 blessed the LORD for His benefits in general. The next psalm narrows to a single, specific deliverance, and the gratitude of a person who has been brought back from the very edge. Psalm 116 is the testimony of one who was nearly overwhelmed by death and was rescued, and it begins with the most personal of confessions: I love the LORD because he heard my plea for mercy, and listened to me. As long as I live, I will call to him when I need help (Psalm 116:1–2).

We will follow this rescued soul as it asks the question every grateful believer must (How can I repay the LORD for all his acts of kindness to me?) and gives its answer: I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the LORD (Psalm 116:13 ESV; the NET reads I will celebrate my deliverance). We will ponder the startling line that precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints (Psalm 116:15 ESV), and we will see how this thanksgiving of one delivered from death points to the Lord Jesus, who lifted a cup in an upper room and went down into death to bring His people up from it. After blessing the LORD for all His benefits, we will learn how to render Him our thanks.

Read Psalm 116 in full before the next session; it is nineteen verses. Notice the love that rises from being heard, the question of how to repay the LORD, and the cup of salvation the psalmist lifts in thanks.

Closing Prayer

Bless the LORD, O our souls, and all that is within us, bless His holy name! O LORD, You are merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Teach us to preach to our own dull and forgetful hearts, and to forget not all Your benefits: that You forgive all our iniquity, redeem our life from the pit, and crown us with steadfast love and mercy. We bless You that You do not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities, but have removed our transgressions as far as the east is from the west.
We thank You that You can be both just and merciful, because You dealt with Your own Son according to our sins, and laid on the Lord Jesus the iniquity of us all, that He might carry it beyond all finding. We bless You that You know our frame and remember that we are dust, and that Your Son took our frame Himself, becoming dust with us, a high priest who sympathizes with our weakness because He has worn it. Our days are like grass, but Your steadfast love is from everlasting to everlasting; anchor our fleeting lives in Your unending love, and let us bless You with all Your angels and all Your hosts and all Your works, world without end. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.