Some of you are old enough to remember swapping stacks of vinyl records and playing different songs at a party. Some of you hipsters have rediscovered that and think vinyl is cool again. Others of us remember what it's like to make a mixed tape. Maybe we made one for a boyfriend or girlfriend or maybe you would work out or run with that precious little piece of plastic stuffed inside a Sony Walkman. Yet most of us now live joyfully in a digital age. We load up Google play, iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, or Amazon Music and we queue up playlists of our favorite stuff from time to time. In many ways our lives dance to the music we make. The late Scottish statesman Andrew Fletcher once wrote:

“Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”
"I said I knew a very wise man so much of Sir Christopher's sentiment, that he 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."

What he and many have recognized is that music, poetry and creativity actually shape our story as a human race. The songs that get in our heads, that connect to the heart bring a passion and focus to our lives. They also bring out of us new songs and new poetry and new life and stories. It is God that has intended this to be so. How do we know? He has a songbook in the middle of our Bibles!

This summer we will journey back into the Old Testament and into the books of Psalms. For two months in June and July we will look at a mixed tape, a digital playlist of some of God's top 150 songs. So put on the beats headphones, our scrappy ear buds, or just let the songs play loudly in your home. We are going to dive into God's playlist friends. To see wonders in his inspired and multifaceted, lyrical Word.