Today I want to talk about the single greatest gift to help our prayer lives: the Psalms. A psalm is essentially a song. There are 150 psalms in the Old Testament Book of Psalms, mostly written by King David. They aren’t just songs as we might think of songs on the radio. The psalms were prayers poured out to the Lord in a variety of different contexts. They show us the language of prayer. As a new Christian, I don’t think there was any book of the Bible I loved more than the Psalms.
It’s very easy to make our prayers all about ourselves. We reduce prayer entirely to a request session. Or a cosmic complaint box. What the Psalms do is give us permission to pour our complaints and requests out to the Lord, but they teach us also to direct our hearts ultimately to the glory of God. In other words, the Psalms keep us looking upward. And we really need that.
Your focus needs more focus
Because I’ve talked to so many people through the years about prayer, I know that a common struggle is not being able to focus the mind to pray clearly. Here’s what happens.
We set aside an hour to pray, let’s say, in the morning. We have coffee, a Bible, a couple books and a notebook. We are in a secluded part of the house. So far so good!
But then our mind bounces from one thing to another like the flipping of a tv remote control changing the channel every few seconds. We are thinking about the kids. Or about the weird physical symptom we had yesterday. Oh man, I have to take out the trash! These windows sure are dirty. I wonder if we’ll get more snow? I’m still sore from shoveling. Lord, I come to You. I worship You! I should probably get a haircut this week. Jesus, I need you.
You get the point. Thoughts come into our minds the way groceries are carried on a conveyor belt. They just keep coming and sometimes everything just piles up. Or do you remember those old pinball machines? The ball is almost impossible to control. It pings and pangs all over the place randomly. Our thoughts can be a little like this. Now, we don’t mind this too much during the activities of the day. It’s actually kind of interesting to see what thoughts come down the conveyor. But in prayer, it’s not fun at all. In fact, it’s exhausting and makes us feel like we got nowhere in prayer.
Psalms can help
This is where the psalms can really help. I hesitate to tell you how to pray because I think it’s important for each of us to find what works best for us. But I’ll share what I do with the Psalms at times. Hopefully, you can be inspired to do something similar.
It’s good to pick a Psalm proportionate to the amount of time you have. Don’t pick Psalm 119 when you have to leave for work in 25 minutes.
Read it
Start by reading the Psalm. I find that—if I have enough privacy—it helps to read aloud. It’s not necessary but helps with focus. If you have some other versions of the Bible handy you can read the Psalm again and make note of the differences. The Message Bible, a paraphrase, is especially helpful to give sense to what the Psalmist is praying. Read it through several times just to get a feel. I recommend paper Bibles with wide margins. Don’t be afraid to highlight and underline things in your Bible. Write things in the margins. All this will help you to engage the text.
As you do that you’ll notice that certain things make sense and certain things don’t. This is normal. There are still a lot of things in Scripture that I don’t understand. Don’t be discouraged by this. People study the Bible for 80 years and don’t come to an understanding of everything. If you have a good block of time you can do a little research looking things up before moving on. Here’s what I mean.
Search it
In your Bible, you can maybe lightly circle with pencil words or phrases that don’t make sense. See what the dictionary says. Sometimes the word just isn’t a word you are familiar with and the good old fashioned dictionary gives a solid definition.
Another great tool is a Bible encyclopedia. I keep one very close by. It’s a very fat one volume book with lots of pictures and it has everything. Let’s say, for example, you come across a phrase like “Valley of Baca.” What is that, right? The Bible encyclopedia will give a short explanation that might take sixty seconds to read. So worth it!
Don’t forget about Google. You can search a word, or phrase or particular verse and a lot comes up. Be careful not to get sucked in too deep down the rabbit hole. This is your prayer time. You aren’t doing a research paper. The Gospel Coalition and Desiring God websites have so much content that you can find a lot there as well. Again, don’t get too sucked in unless you have all day.
Write it
After reading the Psalm a few times in various versions (maybe 15 minutes) and looking up some unfamiliar things (maybe another 15 minutes), now take some time to write out the Psalm in your notebook. This is an excellent discipline not just with the Psalms but with all Scripture. I recommend writing with a pen and paper. Don’t just bang it out on the laptop typing 120 words per minute. That defeats the point. Write by hand and write slowly. While you write, think about what you are writing.
Pray it
At this point, you’re about 60 minutes into your time with God. Now make the Psalm your own. What I mean by this is that you can now write your own Psalm. Read the first verse and then write a prayer about the verse. If you really hate writing you could read the verse and then just pray about it. If you can’t think of too much to pray it’s okay. Go to the next verse and do the same thing until you go through all the verses.
What you’ll find as you practice this over years is that you become well acquainted with each psalm and develop a deep relationship with certain psalms. Each time you do this exercise with a Psalm you pick up different things. The Psalm affects you in different ways because you are a different person in every season. Over time, the language of the Psalms begins to live within you and you find that, whether writing prayers or praying aloud or praying in your mind—you are praying your own psalms for your particular situations.
Get lost in prayer
Back to the problem of focusing the mind, you can see how this practice makes it possible to really lock into prayer for several hours. And guess what? When you go that deep with one Psalm, the Psalm stays on your mind all day. You’ll find it continues to work in you and you’ll get little insights at random times.
I’m not saying you should do this every day or that you have to do it exactly how I’m proposing. My hope is that, however you do it, you’ll find a way to get lost in prayer for several hours without being bothered by a flurry of random thoughts. You can do this. The Lord will be with you to help you.
Tim Keller
I was reading an article recently by author-pastor Tim Keller, and he was saying that he tries to read through the Psalms every month. That’s pretty ambitious. But it shows how powerful a tool the Psalms can be even for someone as seasoned as Keller.
Tim Keller is one of the most influential Christians alive today and any of his books are worth reading, especially his book titled Prayer. Tim also has a book called The Songs of Jesus which is a daily devotional he created with his wife, Kathy, walking through the Psalms. You can also find a lot of Tim’s teaching videos online. He’s a gentle soul and has been uniquely instrumental in leading people who are skeptics into a relationship with Christ. I found a website that has a handful of sermons on the psalms by Keller (see link below). Enjoy.