Praying the Psalms
Download MP3I think one of the most beautiful truths about Christianity is that we are not primarily handed a set of rules. We're not told that if we follow the eightfold path or if we cling closely enough to the 5 pillars that we're gonna be rewarded in this life and hopefully in the life to come. But we rejoice that Jesus went before us and perfectly obeyed all of the rules on our behalf so that we are welcomed into a relationship with the living God. Isn't that amazing? And what's true about every relationship?
Speaker 1:How do you grow in a relationship? You spend time with the person. You learn their likes and their dislikes. You learn their dreams, their ambitions, their passions. You talk to them and you listen.
Speaker 1:And we know this is true of personal relationships. Well, if God, who made everything including personal relationships, why wouldn't it be true that this would be the same way we would grow in our relationship with God? The main way that we grow as Christians. The main way that we are formed as believers. The main way that we grow in intimacy with God himself is through prayer.
Speaker 1:And don't take my word for it. I want you to listen to these words for some very profound people. So this is from Charles Spurgeon. If any of you should ask for an epitome of the Christian religion, I should say it is in one word, prayer. Martin Luther, to be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.
Speaker 1:If prayer is as vital to the Christian as breathing is for all of humanity, then we ought to beg the Lord to teach us to pray. It is absolutely imperative that we know what prayer is and how to do it. And some of us, we might struggle in prayer, or we might feel like our prayers are bouncing off of the ceiling. Right? Anybody ever been there?
Speaker 1:We might feel like we're bored in prayer or something like that, or we're praying the same things over and over and over again. And throughout Christian history, if you came to a pastor and you asked him, how do I grow in intimacy with God? What do I do when it feels like feel like my prayers are bouncing off the wall? How do I get out of this spiritual rut? How do I learn to pray?
Speaker 1:By and large, the answer that you would've gotten throughout history would've been, immerse yourself in the Psalms. And if you miss everything else tonight, and that's okay if you do, I want you to hear me say this one thing. The main way that you will learn to pray is by regularly working your way through the Psalms, and learning to pray them as your own. And let me give you three reasons why that's the case. 1st, the Psalms remind us that all of our lives are lived before God.
Speaker 1:Every single morning, I wake up and my default position is to believe 2 lies. Right? I wake up and I think I'm the king of the universe. Everyone else exists for my benefit. And the second lie that I believe is that something other than Jesus will give me what my heart really wants.
Speaker 1:This peace, or this joy or this satisfaction. And I've started just in the beginning of this year by beginning my mornings trying to pray through a couple of psalms So that before I help Aaron, prepare breakfast or we run between screaming and fighting or crying child, that my heart would remember Psalm 29. That I'm not the king. That the Lord sits enthroned forever as king. That I would remember Psalm 63, that the steadfast love of the Lord is better than life.
Speaker 1:And I would remember before I set out to my job that unless the Lord builds the house, the laborers build in vain. It's in vain that you wake up early. And it's in vain that you go to bed late eating the bread of your anxious toil, for he gives to his beloved sleep. I can go to bed knowing Psalm 121. That when I go to sleep, that the Lord watches over me because he who watches over you and all of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.
Speaker 1:Praying the Psalms reminds us that there is a God who made us, that he is king, and that he is good. I mentioned earlier that Calvin's church sang the Psalms twice a year and that Benedictine monks worked their way from Psalm 1 to 150 every single week. Why would they do that? Why would they think it was so important to work their way through all of the Psalms, and not just latch onto the ones that spoke directly to them, or that they found the most meaningful? Let me let Eugene Peterson explain.
Speaker 1:Quote, left to ourselves, we will always pray to some God who speaks what we like hearing, or some part of God that we can manage to understand. What is critical is that we speak instead to the God who speaks to us, and everything that he speaks to us. The Psalms train us in that conversation. We would rather pray, exploring our own spiritual capacities with God as a kind of background music without bothering with the tedium and complexity of the scriptures. End quote.
Speaker 1:You guys hear what he's saying? Left to ourselves, we're always going to bend towards a God or the parts of God that we understand, or that we like, or that make sense to us. And we're probably gonna shy away from or ignore the parts of god that maybe we don't like, or that we don't understand, or that are confusing. Does anybody ever come up against Psalm 7 where it says that God is angry with the wicked every day? That he has wet his sword and he's ready for judgment?
Speaker 1:I don't know what to do with that song. But praying these things reminds us that there is a real God, and that he is not me. And only a real God can really change us. So the Benedictine monks, so Calvin's church, worked their way through all of the Psalms, so that they would know that they were praying to the only God who really is. The second way that the Psalms teach us to pray I just made an unintentional rhyme.
Speaker 1:I feel really good about that. Is that the Psalms give us the language that we need to learn how to pray. And just as kids learn how to talk from hearing their parents speak to one another and to speak to them, so too we learn to talk to God, right, by reading his word, which was written down for us. We learn the language of God in the prayer book he authored for us, so that we might know how to pray. And as we do this, our prayers are transformed.
Speaker 1:And if we grow bored in prayer, if we feel like we're just praying the same things over and over again, if we if if you've ever prayed this prayer, and I know that probably all of us have, Lord, thank you for this day. Bless my family. Be with me as I go to work. In Jesus name, amen. That's okay.
Speaker 1:Working your way through the Psalms doesn't mean that you won't pray for those things. It just means that the way that you pray for those things will be deepened. Instead of just saying, Lord, bless my family. Maybe with Psalm 2 in the background of our minds, we would think, okay. Blessed is the one who takes refuge in God.
Speaker 1:Lord, I pray for my family. I pray that they wouldn't find their refuge in what they do or their abilities or their wealth or their friends or their future or their family. May they find their refuge in you, and you alone, and in your word. May they place all of their hope and their trust in you, and in your word. Not only this, but if we let scripture guide our prayers, we're gonna start praying less self centered prayers and more God centered prayers.
Speaker 1:I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with college students asking me how they can know if what they're praying for is in God's will. You can rest pretty assured that if you are praying God's words back to him, you are praying in God's will. Yes. You should pray about whether or not you should take this job, or whether or not you should date this girl, or whether or not you should move. But you should pray with the Psalms echoing in the back of your head.
Speaker 1:Psalm 115. Not to us, oh Lord. Not to us, but to your name. Your name be the glory. I ought to pray with Psalm 147 in my mind.
Speaker 1:Great is our Lord and his understanding is infinite. Lord, I don't know what I ought to do about this job. But your understanding is infinite. You know exactly what I ought to do. And I'm not my own.
Speaker 1:I've been bought with a price. I wanna live my life for your glory. I don't know what step I would take would be for your glory, but lord, may you lead and guide and direct my paths as I pray. The third way that the Psalms teach us to pray is that the Psalms express the whole range of human emotions and experience. This comes from John Calvin and it's on the back of your worship guides.
Speaker 1:I think this is incredible. I'm only gonna use a piece of the quote. I've been accustomed to call this book, the Psalms, an anatomy of all parts of the soul. For there is not an emotion of which anyone can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror, or rather, the Holy Spirit has here drawn to the life all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities. In short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are want to be agitated.
Speaker 1:What he's saying is that we learn to praise God by praying the praises of the songs. We learn what to do with our fears. We learn what to do with our despair. We learn what to do when we feel like God isn't present by joining alongside the saints throughout history in praying their prayers with them. That we see that over and over and over again, all of these Psalms, almost everyone, except for 88.
Speaker 1:Right? Finishes with a resting. That God is good, that he is trustworthy, and we learn to pray in the same way. And even if you come across something in the Psalms that you feel like you cannot presently pray, know that there is someone in God's creation who is currently needing that prayer. So pray it for them.
Speaker 1:Or trust that one day, you might need to pray that prayer too. And trust God that he is now preparing you to walk through that season later in your life. Lastly, and importantly, but very briefly, I'm taking this straight from Tim Keller's book, Prayer. So pick that up later. All true prayer begins with meditation.
Speaker 1:Or to put it another way, the key to life changing transformative prayer begins with meditation. So Psalm 90 was written by Moses. It's probably the first Psalm that was ever written. That means that Psalm 1 wasn't. The guy who was putting the Psalms together, probably Ezra, he decided that there is something so important in this Psalm, that if you're gonna understand all the rest of the Psalms that come after it, you have to get this one thing.
Speaker 1:So hear these words from Psalm 1. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord. And on his law, he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.
Speaker 1:The promise of this Psalm is that if you immerse yourself in God's word, if you meditate on it, if you drink from it like a tree drinks from water from a stream, then in seasons of plenty, you're gonna grow. But in seeds of drought, your leaf isn't gonna wither. When storms come, you're going to survive. So why does the prayer book of God begin with meditation? Tim Keller said that meditation warms up your heart like running a car in cold weather.
Speaker 1:Too many of us, we try to enter into prayer before our hearts are reminded that there is a God, that he loves us, that he made us, that I find my joy in living for his glory. That he loved me enough to die as a ransom for me. And if Eastern meditation is emptying my mind so I don't think about anything, Biblical meditation is filling my mind actively with the truths of scripture until they work their way down into my heart. And I'm carefully weighing what these words mean. What does this show me about God?
Speaker 1:What does this teach me about myself and what I do with my sin or my doubt? How can I praise God because of this? What do these images mean? Why a tree and not something else? Is there something I need to repent of?
Speaker 1:Is there something I need to do in light of this? And, lastly, how can I read this in light of Jesus? You know, as Jesus went from Gethsemane, as he went from court to court, knowing that he wasn't going to get justice, and as he went to the cross, it seems pretty clear that he was meditating and praying on the Psalms the whole time. As we said earlier in our service, the disciples and Jesus, they likely sang Psalm 113 through 118 on their way to Gethsemane. And it's really easy to imagine those words ringing in Jesus' ears.
Speaker 1:Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints. The stone that the builders rejected would become the cornerstone. And we can take great comfort and a great challenge knowing at the hour of Jesus' greatest trial, and the time of his greatest suffering, he was meditating upon the Psalms. Psalm 31:5. Into your hands, oh God, I commit my spirit.
Speaker 1:Psalm 22. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And yes, that is all that Jesus quotes. But it's not hard to imagine his mind working through the rest of this Psalm as he's up there. Listen to this.
Speaker 1:Verse 14. I am poured out like water. Verse 16. They have pierced my hands and feet. They divide my garments among them, for my clothing, they cast lots.
Speaker 1:Verse 24. He has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted and he has not hidden his face from him. But he, God, has heard when he cried to him. Verse 27. All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you.
Speaker 1:So as Jesus is on the cross crying out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He is at the same time knowing and remembering that he is fulfilling the scriptures, that God will not ultimately forsake him, and that what he is doing means that all of the nations are gonna come and worship God because of his Can you imagine if we had these books internalized, if they transformed our prayers, what that would mean for us. Let us be a people who are immersed in God's word and go and live by it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that you would teach us to read your Psalms, to sing your Psalms, the prayers and the songs of Jesus.
Speaker 1:Resting that he has, by the shedding of his blood, enabled us to boldly approach the throne of grace with all of our prayers. And even as we pray, we know that he is interceding for us, and we take great hope in that. Lord, we love you. Pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.
