The School of Prayer: Praying the Psalms

The Bible's prayer book invites us to bring raw honesty to our own prayers.

As I remarked in the opening sermon in this series, I’ve collected a lot of devotional books over the years, many of which still sit on my shelves and have bookmarks about a third to half the way through. I can actually go through them and tell you in what season of life I bought each one—usually a season where I was struggling with my prayer life and thought to myself, as most psychotic bibliophiles do, “Surely there is another book that will do the trick!”

I have Celtic devotionals from my mystical period, Wesleyan devotionals from my “get back to basics” period, devotionals from authors I was really into at the time, devotionals from ancient Christian writers that I picked up during my historical theology period. But these devotionals never really grabbed my attention for long—hence the many bookmarks and unturned pages in those volumes.

When I discovered The Daily Office, however, I curtailed my addiction to devotional books. It’s not that they're bad or inadequate; there are many to commend. It’s just that I felt like there was something missing. I began to realize that I was reading more about God than actually communing with God. I was getting invested in someone else’s relationship with God which, in a very weird and ironic way, seemed to actually keep God at an arm’s length from my own personal stuff.

When I discovered the ancient practice of using The Daily Office, however, I discovered that the prayer book I was seeking was actually right there in the Scriptures all along. It’s contained in the 150 Psalms in the heart of the Bible—prayers that were said by ancient Israel, prayed by Jesus, and recited by the early church. There’s a reason that Jesus quotes from the Psalms more than any other Old Testament book; they were his prayer book, giving voice to a direct encounter with the Father.

The cycle of morning and evening prayer in the Daily Office directs you pray through all 150 Psalms over the course of 30 days. Do that for a couple of months and you’ll begin to see that the Psalms are unlike any devotional book you’ve ever picked up (or at least the ones that I’ve read). Where many devotional books tug at the heart strings or engage in thought experiments in prayer, the Psalms are shocking in their raw honesty, unabashed praise, seething anger, deep lament, and desperate pleas. The Psalmists don’t hold anything back from God; nothing is kept at arm’s length either in their praise, their questioning, their disappointment, or their hopes and fears.

So raw are the Psalms that even as good a churchman and biblical scholar as our own John Wesley was uncomfortable with some of them. When he adapted the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer for the Methodists in America, Wesley omitted 34 of the Psalms from the collection and edited 58 others, saying that they were “highly improper for the mouths of a Christian congregation.” Most of these were “imprecatory” psalms of judgment on the psalmists’ enemies; like Psalm 137 which is a lament from an Israelite in exile in Babylon:

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!

Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!

Happy shall be they who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

Not exactly a “love your enemies” kind of text, is it? That was Wesley’s problem, that some of the Psalms didn’t seem to line up with the teachings of Jesus or the hope of the gospel.

But, then again, the Psalms are Scripture, too, and since all Scripture is “God-breathed” as the Apostle Paul teaches, then we have to take them seriously. While I am obviously a fan of John Wesley, I think he missed the point of these uncomfortable Psalms. They’re not about performance, but about prayer. The psalmists don’t pretend that they’re not angry at their enemies; they express that anger to God, putting it all on the table for God to deal with. They don’t hide their fears over a devastating illness or dangerous situation; they cry out to the Lord in anguish. They don’t set aside the feeling that God might be absent from them; they prod God for an answer. Jesus’ own words from the cross, for example, are directly from Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” No doubt he felt that sense of abandonment in that painful moment, just as the psalmist in Babylon felt a moment of raging anger over his peoples’ plight.

We’re not used to this level of honesty with ourselves, let alone with God! We often conceive of prayer as a performance for God and subconsciously believe that if we were “praying well” we wouldn’t have negative experiences or feelings of anger, guilt, shame, or doubt. We want to pretend that everything with us is good, and maybe even believe that God would not be pleased if we expose him to the raw truth of how we’re actually feeling. Over the years, I’ve asked a lot of people in counseling sessions if they were angry or frustrated with God about their situation, and most say, “No, of course not. That wouldn’t be right.” It may not feel right, I reply, but it’s not only good; it’s biblical!

The Psalms blow up the whole notion of pretending everything is ok because they demonstrate a boldness to give God everything in our prayers—the good, the bad, and the ugly. As John Coe and Kyle Strobel say in their marvelous book, Where Prayer Becomes Real: How Honest with God Transforms Your Soul (one that I am currently and definitely read all the way through!):

“Prayer is not a place to be good, it’s a place to be honest…The lie we are tempted to believe and perpetuate in our prayers is that God is interested in only well-kept sorts of things rather than the truth. But in reality, God loves the believer precisely in those sins and failures. It was in those sins that Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). God was not afraid of our sin and mess; we were. In our fear we did not talk about the deep pains and sins with God, so our zeal for prayer slowly died” (p. 25, 29)

Jesus himself didn’t hold back from expressing the depth of his feelings to God in the Garden of Gethsemane, the sweat pouring off him like drops of blood. Elijah didn’t pretend everything was ok when he sat exhausted under a broom tree and felt like dying. Jeremiah blamed God for putting him in the position of being a despised prophet. Page through the Scriptures and you’ll see people being brutally honest with God about their feelings, their struggles, their sins, and their hurts. The Psalms give us the language to express those feelings, but they also give us the ability to listen to God’s response after we’ve put it all out there to him; to hear his still, small voice speaking into our deepest need. It’s the most honest prayer book you can ever use!

I find that in my daily journey with the Psalms I am being shaped as a more honest person of prayer. From soaring praise and thanksgiving to deep lament and fear, it’s all in there and the psalter speaks to where my life might be on any given day. When I don’t have the words to pray, the Psalms often provide them. God is willing to hear it all as he has heard these psalms prayed for generations.

I encourage you to experiment with praying through the Psalms over the next month. There’s a schedule of readings in the back of The Field Guide to Daily Prayer, which is available for purchase at the Welcome Desk at Aldersgate Church or online from Seedbed. You can also access a printable bookmark version of the 30-day psalter here.

I still like to peruse the devotional books on my shelf, but the Psalms are my go-to book for daily prayer. It’s a way of meeting honestly and openly with God in prayer and in fellowship with millions of others who have prayed these prayers across the centuries. And, bonus, there’s only one bookmark required!