by Craig McKellar
Last week I looked at a practical way to pray through a Psalm daily (if you missed it, please click here to read the article). It takes approximately 5-10 minutes for most Psalms. By using a different set every day, we won’t end up turning only to our favourite Psalm, or randomly pick one, and thereby lose interest over the long haul. Of course, the psalms are not the only parts of God’s word we can/should pray but they prove an excellent starting point and provide a full range of emotions and experiences. Terran Williams has this to say about praying the Psalms:
Called “the prayer book of the church,” these Psalms still need to be read through the eyes of the gospel. As glorious as these prayers are, laced with artistically crafted, magnificent truths about God which we should graft into our prayers, and though they are written by people who were steeped in the joy of Israel’s past salvation from Egypt’s tyranny, and though they prophetically point to the future salvation of the coming Messiah, there is one limitation to using the Psalms as our own prayer book: we know more about the gospel than the writers of the Psalms did. If we compare Paul’s prayers with David’s prayers, for instance, we notice in Paul’s prayers rich references to God the Father, the Holy Spirit, and the Lord Jesus Christ-these ideas about God are barely present in the Psalms, for God’s fatherhood and triune nature had not yet been emphasized at the stage in the story of God when the Psalms were written. This also throws light on why Psalm-writers readily prayed for the destruction of their enemies [e.g. Psalm 139:19-22]-Jesus’ later teaching that we forgive our enemies, followed by his example of doing so on the cross, had not yet pierced the consciousness of God’s people.
(What’s so amazing about Scripture? Pages 111-12)
So, pray the approximately 70 other prayers in your Bible but better still prayerfully approach the Scriptures and pray all of them as you read them. Get into a habit of praying about what you read. I have found in praying the Psalms that it makes me slow down, contemplate more what God is saying and keeps pulling me back to the context when my mind becomes distracted. In praying them aloud back to God, I sense things I would have missed had I just read them. I have also prayed for others when a verse does not apply to my situation right now. Imagine how praying everything we read can enlarge our prayers.
The Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9-13 has proved hugely helpful to me over the years in providing a ‘track’ to pray along. Each line, and phrases within those lines, can be an igniting point to get our prayers going. Use “Our Father,” for example, to thank God for adopting you into His family, for a personal intimate relationship you now enjoy and what it means to be able to call on Him as your provider, for your church family and world-wide family, etc. It starts appropriately with bringing our focus onto God and His name being exalted, His kingdom finding expression through our lives before it moves onto our personal needs.
I want to encourage you to pray the Psalms daily along with your other prayers. After working through your psalm for the day, use the internet to search for ‘worship Psalms,’ as it can add to and reinforce what you have just prayed. A lot of the Psalms call for worship anyway and it only makes sense to do what they are saying as you read/pray them! For example, use these guys: “The Psalms Project is a band setting all 150 Psalms to music in their entirety, including the essential meaning of every verse, a marriage of King David’s vision with modern worship music” (Home - The Psalms Project). When the Psalm you are working through has a strong worship call, listen to some other songs as well, which are according to your preference, so you spend some time worshipping with them.
The New Testament encourages us in this way, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col.3:16) and “be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart” (Eph. 5:18-19). The “one another’s” is saying this is for all of us, not just the music team, and singing the words of God are ways our hearts are warmed and warm God’s heart. When we do worship corporately together again, we will be incorporating more psalms more regularly-and it will mean so much more as you remember praying through them during lockdown!
Remember to just do this, experiment with this way of praying, and let me know what it has done for your prayer-life.