Heart Songs for Every Saint: Engaging with God Through Times of Darkness & Light

… William Philip offers thoughtful meditations on six key Psalms for our reflection and encouragement. It has got me reading the Psalms more, where I have found much comfort and strength. I’m glad I read this book.

I think that is Willie Philips’s design with these Psalms: to give us a taste and hook us on the Psalms. No dodging nasty questions, nothing superficial here; just solid, ‘thought–full,’ nourishing exposition in perfectly lucid prose. (And don’t you dare pass up his treatment of Psalm 88).

With commendable honesty about life in the real world, these expositions are wonderfully God–centred … This is Biblical preaching at its best – exegetically profound, pastorally warm–hearted and truly Christ–exalting. It did my heart good!

We are able to come to God with heartfelt worship, thanksgiving and devotion, as well as lament and hope. Our spiritual life is enriched by the Psalms with their emotional range and relevance to every season of life.  

With our feelings and worries so easily all over the place, it is a wonderful thing to read these six expositions of six excellent psalms (’heart songs’) and find anchor. William Philip gives such careful attention to God’s text and such fitting application to His world that I found myself buoyed up again by the truth and grateful for a small book of pastoral help that I can give anybody and everybody.

Following a splendid introduction to the Psalter, this marvellous little book exemplifies the very qualities it identifies in the Psalms. As it takes us through Psalms of protest, penitence, pain, promise pilgrimage and – finally – praise, I found ‘my imagination, stirred my emotions excited and my intellect fed’. It is a wonderful blend of raw human experience, intelligent contemporary insight, and good, old–fashioned heart–warming piety. What a lovely book to own, read and give away liberally.