Adult Lesson Plan

Read Psalm 102:1-2 aloud:

Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee. Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble; incline thine ear unto me: in the day when I call answer me speedily.

Then read verse 12:

But thou, O Lord, shalt endure for ever; and thy remembrance unto all generations.

Ask the class: what do you notice about the gap between verse 2 and verse 12? Do not rush to fill it. Between those two points, the psalmist describes burning bones, days like withered grass, ashes for bread, sleeplessness, and the feeling of being plucked up and thrown aside like a sparrow alone on a housetop. Eleven verses of this. Verse 12 does not resolve any of it. It does not say "and then God answered" or "and then the suffering ended." It turns. "But thou, O Lord, shalt endure for ever." The pivot is not relief; it is a shift of gaze from the psalmist's diminishing life to God's permanence. That shift is itself an act of faith, and it does not require the suffering to stop first.

The psalm's superscription calls this "a prayer of the afflicted when he is overwhelmed, and poureth out his complaint before the Lord." The Psalter categorizes this as prayer in good standing, not as a lesser form of worship to be graduated from once maturity arrives. What kind of God receives a complaint poured out? This question is worth sitting with before moving to the next beat.

Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord.

Ask one question: if Psalm 102 is the beginning of a prayer and Psalm 150 is the end, what happened in between? Give the class sixty seconds before moving to the doctrinal discussion.

Read Psalm 139:1-4:

O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.

Ask: what do you notice about the direction of the knowing? The psalmist is not trying to know God; God is searching him. The Hebrew verb for "searched" in verse 1 is the same word used for a miner probing rock or a general scouting terrain. God's knowledge of the psalmist is active, thorough, and prior to any response the psalmist might make.

Then read verses 23-24:

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

The psalm opens with God searching and closes with the psalmist inviting that search. David is not merely observing that God knows him; he is making that knowledge an act of covenant accountability. God told Oliver Cowdery, "There is none else save God that knowest thy thoughts and the intents of thy heart" (D&C 6:16). The psalmist's invitation treats omniscience not as surveillance but as the foundation of the most honest relationship available.

One word worth noting: "I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14) is among the most quoted lines in contemporary culture, typically lifted from its context to mean something like "you are special." In the psalm, the context is verses 13-16: God knit the psalmist together in the womb, saw his unformed substance, and wrote his days in a book before any of them existed. The claim is theological, not self-affirming: before you were capable of worshiping, you were known.

Read Psalm 110:1:

The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.

And verse 4:

The Lord hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.

In Matthew 22:41-45, Jesus quotes this psalm and asks the Pharisees why David would call his own descendant "Lord." The question was unanswerable within their framework because they assumed the Messiah was merely David's biological heir. Jesus is pressing them to see that the figure in Psalm 110 holds an authority that exceeds Davidic descent. The Melchizedek claim makes it sharper still: Israelite kings came from Judah, priests from Levi, and the two offices were constitutionally separated. The figure who holds both is outside the Mosaic system entirely, which is Paul's entire argument in Hebrews 5-7.

Then read Psalm 118:22:

The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.

This verse is quoted three times in the New Testament: by Jesus in Matthew 21:42, by Peter in Acts 4:10-11 before the council that participated in the crucifixion, and by Peter again in 1 Peter 2:7. The repetition is not accidental. Peter reads the council's own decision back to them from their own scriptures, standing in chains. Then read Psalm 118:25-26, the hosanna cry that the crowd shouted at the Triumphal Entry (Matthew 21:9). These psalms were not assembled as proof-texts after the fact. Nephi established the principle: "All things which have been given of God from the beginning of the world, unto man, are the typifying of him" (2 Nephi 11:4). The psalmists wrote about their own king, their own temple, their own crises, and God simultaneously encoded a future figure into every line. Ask the class: Psalm 116 and Psalm 118 were almost certainly among the psalms Jesus sang at the Last Supper before walking to Gethsemane. What did those words become in that upper room?

The dominant doctrinal thrust of Psalm 139 is that God's omniscience is not a general theological attribute but a personal, continuous, intimate knowledge of every individual. "Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off" (Psalm 139:2). There is no flight from this presence: not to heaven, not to Sheol, not to the uttermost sea, not even to darkness, which "is as light to thee" (verse 12). God's knowledge of the psalmist precedes the psalmist's own self-awareness, reaching back to formation in the womb.

For adults who feel unseen, this is not comfort offered in the abstract. The Lord told Oliver Cowdery directly: "There is none else save God that knowest thy thoughts and the intents of thy heart" (D&C 6:16). Alma taught that "our thoughts will also condemn us" at the judgment because they were known throughout mortality (Alma 12:14). The psalmist's response to all of this knowledge is not defensive but inviting: "Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting" (Psalm 139:23-24). That invitation transforms omniscience from a fact about God into a covenant practice for the believer.

President Russell M. Nelson taught that "the joy we feel has little to do with the circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the focus of our lives" ("Joy and Spiritual Survival," October 2016 General Conference). Psalm 139 makes that same argument structurally. The psalmist's circumstances do not change between verse 1 and verse 23. What changes is the direction of attention. When the psalmist turns from observing God's knowledge to inviting it, that turning is itself the spiritual act.

Discussion questions for Path A:

• If God knows every thought before you speak it (Psalm 139:4), what is the purpose of prayer?
• Psalm 139 describes God's knowledge of you as preceding your birth. Does that change how you think about your identity or your choices now?
• The psalmist asks God to "see if there be any wicked way in me." Most people would rather conduct that inventory privately. Why would you invite God into it rather than handling it yourself?
• Where in your life right now is God's knowledge of you a comfort, and where does it feel like accountability?

The New Testament quotes the Psalms 326 times, drawn from 115 different psalms. This week's reading contains the single most-quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament (Psalm 110:1), the cornerstone prophecy repeated by Jesus, Peter, and Paul (Psalm 118:22), and the hosanna cry from the Triumphal Entry (Psalm 118:25-26). These connections are not coincidences discovered by early Christians reading backward. Jesus treats David's authorship of Psalm 110 as a given and uses it to press the Pharisees beyond their category of Messiah as merely a royal descendant.

Nephi established the hermeneutical principle: "All things which have been given of God from the beginning of the world, unto man, are the typifying of him" (2 Nephi 11:4). The psalmists were writing about their own crises, their own king, their own temple worship, and God was simultaneously encoding a future person into every line. Psalm 116 describes a near-death experience and a decision to "call upon the name of the Lord." Sung as part of the Egyptian Hallel at Passover, it was almost certainly among the psalms Jesus and his disciples sang before walking to Gethsemane (Matthew 26:30). Those words acquired a meaning in that moment the original psalmist could not have fully anticipated.

Discussion questions for Path B:

• Jesus uses Psalm 110:1 to ask a question the Pharisees cannot answer. What was the question, and why could they not answer it within their framework?
• Why would God encode prophecy about Christ into songs that Israel would sing at festivals for centuries before Christ arrived?
• Where do you see the pattern of Psalm 118:22 (rejection followed by exaltation as the cornerstone) showing up elsewhere in scripture or in your own experience?

The Psalter's arrangement is theological. It begins with a description of two paths and ends five books later with a five-psalm chorus of pure praise. The sequence from Psalm 102 (bones burning, days like smoke) to Psalm 150 (every breathing thing praise the Lord) does not skip the suffering. Psalms 137, 102, and the anguish of Psalm 22 are inside the same collection as Psalms 146-150. The praise at the end is not naive; it is reached only by passing through the lament.

The Saints in Winter Quarters were commanded to "praise the Lord with singing, with music, with dancing, and with a prayer of praise and thanksgiving" (D&C 136:28) during a forced encampment in which people were dying of cold and disease. That was not a counsel to perform happiness. It was a theological instruction about where to put the gaze when circumstances are catastrophic. The Psalms make the same argument: praise is not a feeling that arrives when suffering ends. It is an orientation that can coexist with ongoing pain when the gaze shifts from the diminishing self to the enduring God. President Russell M. Nelson said the same thing in different words: "The joy we feel has little to do with the circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the focus of our lives" ("Joy and Spiritual Survival," October 2016 General Conference).

Discussion questions for Path C:

• The Psalter kept Psalm 137's grief and rage and Psalm 150's all-creation praise in the same liturgical collection. What does that tell us about what God tolerates in worship?
• Is there a difference between choosing to praise God in the middle of suffering and pretending the suffering is not there?
• Where have you seen the lament-to-praise arc in your own life, and how long did it take to travel?

Psalm 102 describes a man who ate ashes for bread and compared himself to a sparrow alone on a housetop (Psalm 102:7-9). The image is specific: not just sad, but isolated, visible to everyone and connected to no one, perched somewhere exposed. Most adults in the class know that state. They showed up to work the Monday after a hard diagnosis, sat through a family dinner carrying grief no one else in the room knew about, or sang hymns in sacrament meeting while something inside them was still burning. Psalm 102 does not prescribe a resolution for this. It prescribes a pivot: "But thou, O Lord, shalt endure for ever." Invite class members to identify, privately, one area of their life right now where they are functioning but not fine. Ask them to write down, on a slip of paper they keep for themselves, a single line from this week's psalms they can return to when the sparrow feeling comes back.

Psalm 139 was written for a particular kind of doubt: not "does God exist" but "does God know I exist." "Thou hast searched me, and known me" (Psalm 139:1). Most adults have had seasons when prayer felt like sending letters to an empty address. The psalm's answer is not "try harder to feel the Spirit" but a set of factual claims: God was present at your formation in the womb, God saw your unformed days in advance, there is no place in the universe you can travel to escape his presence, and even the darkness is not dark to him. Invite class members to consider writing Psalm 139:23-24 as a personal prayer this week, word for word, and sitting with what it feels like to genuinely invite that search.