WHAT’S YOUR STORY? If you were to sit down with a group of people and tell them your life history, what would you say? And just as importantly, what would you not say?

Some of us are very private people; we’re loath to tell others anything personal about ourselves. Some go the other way: Here I am, in all my messiness. Take it or leave it! Either way, when we do tell our stories, we can’t say everything that could be said. It’s not just that we edit the story in the moment we tell it, deciding what does or doesn’t feel safe to say. It’s that we’ve been editing the story our entire lives. We remember and include what best fits the story we’ve learned to tell about ourselves — good or bad — and downplay or leave out the rest. And we do that even if we never speak the story aloud.

Of course, there are also times in which we intentionally only tell parts of the story to achieve a particular purpose. If I’m trying to encourage someone, for example, I first listen to make sure I understand the difficulty. Then, if they seem open to it, I might tell them a story of how I or someone else struggled with something similar but overcame it. What I don’t do is tell them a story of abject misery. It’s not that I’m being disingenuous; it’s that telling a tale of woe in that situation would defeat the purpose.

Preaching is often that kind of purposeful storytelling. While a pastor may want the congregation to be familiar with the whole sweep of the biblical narrative, a given sermon will only tell a portion of it. Sometimes we tell stories of failure, but other times we tell stories of triumph. Some sermons emphasize examples of sin, but others emphasize righteousness, grace, and mercy. After all, congregations need encouragement too. They need messages of hope.

And one way to build that hope is to focus on stories of the faithfulness of God.

AS I’VE MENTIONED in previous posts, Psalm 105 builds on a song of praise which was used by King David to celebrate bringing the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem. The song takes up a full 29 verses of 1 Chronicles 16; the first 15 verses of Psalm 105 (that’s a third of the psalm!) mirror the first 15 verses of the song. Imagine Asaph and his associates leading the people in worship before the ark with these words:

Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name;
    make known among the nations what he has done.
Sing to him, sing praise to him;
    tell of all his wonderful acts.
Glory in his holy name;
    let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice.
Look to the Lord and his strength;
    seek his face always. (Ps 105:1-4, NIV)

The people are directed to praise God, to retell his “wonderful acts,” to make known to the whole world the mighty things God has done on behalf of his people. Why has God done this? Because he made a covenant promise and intends to keep it, as the psalmist declares in verses 8 to 11:

He remembers his covenant forever,
    the promise he made, for a thousand generations,
the covenant he made with Abraham,
    the oath he swore to Isaac.
He confirmed it to Jacob as a decree,
    to Israel as an everlasting covenant:
“To you I will give the land of Canaan
    as the portion you will inherit.” (vss. 8-11)

As the people wandered through the wilderness, God also protected them from hostile nations:

When they were but few in number,
    few indeed, and strangers in it,
they wandered from nation to nation,
    from one kingdom to another.
He allowed no one to oppress them;
    for their sake he rebuked kings:
“Do not touch my anointed ones;
    do my prophets no harm.” (vss. 12-15)

This is where the psalmist stops mirroring David’s song and begins embellishing on the theme of God’s actions on behalf of his covenant people. The psalmist tells the story of Joseph’s rise from slavery to power in Egypt, and how Jacob and his sons subsequently came there and prospered. When the Egyptians began to fear and mistreat the Israelites, God sent them Moses to bring them out. A full thirteen verses of the psalm are devoted to the story of Moses and the plagues, culminating in the statement that Egypt was glad to see them go. A brief description of God’s provision of manna, quail, and water in the wilderness follows, then the psalmist circles back to a final restatement of the theme of God’s faithfulness to the covenant:

For he remembered his holy promise
    given to his servant Abraham.
He brought out his people with rejoicing,
    his chosen ones with shouts of joy;
he gave them the lands of the nations,
    and they fell heir to what others had toiled for—
that they might keep his precepts
    and observe his laws. (vss. 42-45)

The last word of the psalm is a resounding hallelujah or praise God. It’s all good. It’s all positive. There’s nothing here but stories of the faithfulness of God.

But we know, of course, that there’s more to the story.

Note how the psalm ends by pointing to the other side of the covenant relationship: God did all these things for the people “that they might keep his precepts and observe his laws.” Anyone familiar with the Old Testament narrative knows that the people were routinely disobedient, sometimes flagrantly and tragically so. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s hard for me to read the psalmist’s description of God’s provision of food and water in the desert without thinking about the faithless way the people rejected Moses and threatened to return to Egypt.

That’s gratitude for you.

Such a one-sided retelling of the history, though, is appropriate to David’s celebration of the coming of the ark to Jerusalem. That is the base upon which the psalmist builds. Worship doesn’t have to begin with the recognition and confession of sin; it begins with the adoration of God, with gratitude for God’s covenant faithfulness.

I think of Moses’ warning to the people before they entered Canaan: Don’t forget. Don’t get so comfortable in the Promised Land that you forget how you got there, how God is the one who brought you there. You did nothing to deserve it; it was God’s doing, not yours. David’s song is an exercise of communal memory, of remembering the past faithfulness of God as the people say thank you for God’s faithfulness in the present. The psalmist begins with that song, elaborates on it, and directs the congregation to grateful praise. It’s always right and good to remember the grace and faithfulness of God.

Is there more to the story? Of course.

But if we want that, we have to read Psalm 106.