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Psalm Prayers: Praying the Psalms for Spiritual Formation
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About Psalm Prayers: Praying The Psalms For Spiritual
EARLY IN MY JOURNEY WITH CHRIST I was exposed to the idea of praying the Psalms. I was at a prayer conference, and the speaker devoted one hour to guiding those assembled in prayer, using selected readings from various psalms for guidance. The presenter removed isolated texts from their original context and wove them together in a marvelous combination that stirred my soul and encouraged me to continue the practice. In the week after that, I read each of the 150 psalms and underlined the passages that I deemed “helpful” for prayer. I enjoyed praying through the underlined portions, but doing so did not provide any balance for my prayer life. After all, I love a good steak, but if I ate steak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for months and months, I would lose any sense of appreciation and enjoyment. Prayer is a gift God has given us to use in every season of life, not just in the happy, clappy times. My psalm prayers changed after reading Eugene Peterson’s, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer. Peterson challenged me to pray every word of every psalm in the order in which the final psalm editors have them arraigned. I took this challenge cautiously and proceeded to pray through a few psalms, in order, every day. As I prayed them, I wrote reflections on my prayers in my journal. Right off the bat, of course, I’m praying that God will break the teeth of the wicked (Ps 3:7), and before too long I’m expressing fear, discouragement, and anger (at my enemies and at God himself!). By the time I finished praying the multitudes of hallelujahs at the end of the psalms, I had prayed every conceivable human emotion. I had engaged in praise of the High and Holy One on Mount Zion (Ps. 48) and cried out from the deepest pit of depression (Ps. 88). I had offered thanksgiving repeatedly, confessed personal and corporate sin, begged God to destroy my enemies, and expressed my impatience with God’s lack of action. I had celebrated a marriage of the king and asked God to do some of the most awful things to repay people for the terrible things they had done. I wasn’t sure I knew how to pray all these things. I’m still not sure. I don’t think there is one proper way to pray the psalms. We either pray the psalms, or we don’t. But if we do, we must first respect them as honest prayers of people who, in many instances, lived in far different circumstances than we do. In other words, the psalms were not written by twenty-first century, affluent North American Christians. And yet, when prayed by those same Christians, the psalms open us to ways of praying we would not otherwise experience. The book of Psalms contained in our Bibles today was developed over a period of around six hundred years. One hundred fifty psalms were written by many different people. Over the years editors arranged the psalms into various collections for different purposes. The final editors grouped the psalms into five books, probably to correspond with the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament). Each book concludes with a doxology. After I completed my first journey of praying the entire book of Psalms, I expanded my experiment of psalm - praying to include other people. I am blessed to be a part of three different weekly prayer gatherings at my church. Each one has a slightly different purpose for their prayer time, but all of them are primarily focused on intercessory prayer for the congregation. I introduced my new-found practice of psalm- praying to each group. Every week we would all pray the same psalm. Let us pray . .
