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A. Why use the Psalms in prayer and praise? a. The Psalms were the prayer and praise book of Israel. The Psalms were prayed, and the Psalms were sung. They were sung while prayed and prayed while sung. b. The Psalms were the primary avenue of expression, of response to YHWH, in the worship of the temple. The temple was where God chose to let his glory and presence dwell. Isn’t it worth considering that where God is, where God chooses to dwell, God’s people speak and sing to Him through the Psalms. Where God is, there are Psalms. c. The Psalms show us how to grapple with knowing and following a God with whom we are in covenant. God has bonded Himself to us. He has made us to be His. He has made promises to which upon which we are to base our very lives. He calls us to walk in faithfulness and obedience to Him. How do we begin to express ourselves to Him? How do we respond to Him given the reality of our lives and our experiences? The Psalms teach us how to do this. They teach us how to be in relationship with God as we live in this world he has made, which is now fallen from Him, in which we are buffeted and tossed about, and in which we are to know and love and be faithful to Him.. d. The Psalms are very humanly real and personal expressions of knowing God. They are both personal and public at the same time. The Psalms protect us from hypocrisy in our faith. They keep us from being phony and high minded and super-spiritual. The Psalms teach us to embrace the darkness, and to know and respond to God from within it. The Psalms help us to have faith through the dark times to the newness and light on the other side. e. The Psalms express the full range of human emotions. In the words of John Calvin: I have been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, “An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul;” for there is not an emotion of which any one 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 wont to be agitated.” (Look together at a few Psalms….Start with Psalm 33 and juts skip through looking at different emotions.) f. Not only do the Psalms express a range of human emotions, but as expressions of faith connect with us in all of our seasons of faith. Roughly paraphrasing Walter Brueggemann… Human life consists in seasons of well being, when all seems well with the world God has made. Human life consists in seasons of failure and anguish darkness, when we wonder where God went. Human life consists in great moments of surprise, when joy breaks through the darkness and we experience new gifts from God. The Psalms carry us through these periods. g. Jesus of course knew and used the Psalms. He would have learned many of them by heart what a young boy, which is the best way to know the Psalms. He quoted often from them. Even in His darkest hour, when He was most desperate, it is a Psalm that comes forth from his lips, as Jesus speaks the Psalms back to His Father in heaven, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” h. The Psalms speak about Jesus. Jesus refereed to the Psalms when teaching of his own life and ministry. (Luke 24:44) He said to them, "This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms." i. The Psalms are quoted more than any other OT book in the NT, usually to show to the Jews how Jesus was the fulfillment of their own Scriptures. j. Of course, the Psalms tell us a lot about God himself, about what he is like, about what it means to know Him as covenant God. The Psalms aren’t just a way to for us to express ourselves to God, but to hear Him express Himself to us. B. How to use the Psalms in private prayer and praise 1. Why have times of private prayer and praise? 2. Why use the Psalms in private prayer and praise? Apart from all the reasons cited above for using the psalms for prayer and praise, I would mention a few other advantages to using the Psalms in personal devotional times. a. They are relatively short. b. They don’t require continuity day to day. c. They are diverse and interesting. d. They are beautiful. 3. A method for using the psalms in private prayer and praise. a. One way to use the Psalms in private prayer and praise is to work through the Psalms in order over weeks and months. i. Why read them in order? Because the Psalms are not in any particular order, and thus we will not always be repeating our favorite types. ii. The Psalms were written to be listened to. The parallel structure of the Psalms comes through best when read aloud. It is easier to remember the Psalms when we hear them as well as see them. b. When we read the Psalms in private prayer and praise, we should read slowly, and try to enter personally into each Psalm. i. First, allow the prayer/praise of the Psalm to become your prayer/praise. Let David’s “I” become your “I.” ii. Second, allow the emotion of the Psalm to tap into that same emotion in you. We don’t read the psalms as prayers as we would read a novel. So, how do we connect the emotion of the Psalm with our own emotion? This is easy when the emotion of the Psalm of the day happens to be right with where we are anyway. But often this isn’t the case. Sometimes the psalm is victorious when we are feeling defeated. Sometimes the Psalm is all down and gloomy when all seems right with our world. Some days the mood of the Psalm will correspond more than other days to the exact mood of the moment for you. But whatever your momentary mood or emotion, a full range of emotions are lurking there under the surface. There is a valve that keeps food from going into your windpipe, but to breathe or sing or speak you have to open that valve to let the air come out of your lung. I think of emotions in the same way. There is a kind of internal valve that shuts emotions off. Although I may have a certain dominant emotion at any given moment, when a Psalm is dealing with, say, fear, I can open that emotional valve just enough to let my own latent fears flow out in the expression of the Psalm. But I don’t focus on the emotion but on the way God meets me in that reality of that emotion. iii. I give you one caution. Some of the emotions of the Psalms we do not want fully to enter into. These are the imprecations, the calling down in either righteous or unrighteous indignation the curses of God upon our enemies. c. Third, make your use of the Psalms Jesus-centered. It may help to read the psalm a second time with this in your mind. Be thinking of some of these questions: How is the Psalm fulfilled in Jesus? What does the Psalm say about Jesus? How might Jesus have prayed this same Psalm? At what time in his life might He have deeply prayed out this Psalm to His Father in heaven? C. How to use the Psalms in family prayer and praise. 1. I would like to call us to consider becoming people of the Word in our family life. We all could confess great failure here. Our shoulders droop and we feel angry at our inadequacy, and angry at someone who would rub salt into the wound of our inadequacy. I don’t mean to be rubbing salt. But our duty is there. Parents, it is not primarily the school’s job or the church’s job to train up our children. It’s our job. The temptation is to look for a gimmick, a cute little tool or resource which will seem relevant and cool for our kids, or emotionally or intellectually just right for our spouses. The Psalms will do. 2. Read the Psalms out loud in the morning before school or work, or after dinner in the evening, or before bed with those in your family. If children are included, let them ask you questions. Encourage them to relate to the feelings of the Psalm. Try to draw out of them what makes them feel the same way as the psalmist. 3. Try as a family to memorize a Psalm together. D. How to use the Psalms in corporate prayer and praise 1. The Psalms are prayers prayed in community, as the people of God gathered. Though private prayer worship and praise is good, it is not primary. The corporate is primary. God is in covenant with a people! The private serves the corporate. The more we have prayed the Psalms in private, the more we will be able to sing and pray them in public. 2. The Psalms were read, prayed, and sung in the worship of the temple. Remember I said that the temple was the place where God chose to let His glory dwell. And at the temple, the Psalms were the mode of prayer and praise. Psalms 62:1 For the director of music. For Jeduthun. A psalm of David. My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him. In the New Covenant period, God chooses to dwell with His people when they gather in corporate prayer and praise dwells in and with us through the Holy Spirit. Once again, where the presence of God is, His people speak and pray in sing through Psalms: Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 5:18-19). It is put a little different way in Colossians. Where the word of Christ dwells, we will speak to one another in Psalms. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God (Colossians 3:16). 3. How specifically do we speak the Psalms in corporate praise and prayer? i. We should read Psalms aloud in “formal” aspects of public worship – responsive readings, antiphonal readings, and in public pastoral prayers. Each person is invited to enter into the Psalm and let the Psalm express what is in his heart to the Lord. ii. We should read or speak Psalms aloud in “informal” times of prayer and praise. That is, when we have open prayer, it is always good for a person to pray by reading a Psalm. iii. We should speak Psalms to each other or to each other in Psalms. 4. How specifically do we sing the Psalms in corporate praise and prayer? i. The Hebrew title for the book of Psalms is “tehillim,” or “songs of praise.” The Psalms were sung by the Levites, by choirs, by the whole people as they approached the temple. They were usually sung to accompaniment, with persuasion – varied, creative, and loud accompaniment. The Psalms were meant to be sung. ii. Paul tells us to encourage one another as we sing Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs together with gratitude in our hearts to God. iii. We at Covenant Fellowship are committed to singing the Psalms. iv. We enter into the Psalms as we sing them together, and we speak together as God’s people in covenant with Him. Here we see how personal and family use of Psalms enhances our worship. Most of the Psalms are not generally like praise choruses, in which we sing the same lines over and over. The Psalms move along. As we sing a Psalm it is best if we have heard the lines before. It is best if we do not have to think specifically of the meaning of each line for the first time as we sing. It is best if we have somehow cut channels of praise and prayer, so that as we sing, we are expressing emotions, ideas, and intentions of heart that we have expressed before. E. Therefore, each of us needs to make the study and memorization of the Psalms a lifelong habit and goal. a. Greater familiarity with and knowledge of a Psalm enables us to enter into that Psalm, and thus enables God to have the Psalm enter into us. b. Our study of the Psalms will give us understanding of how the Psalms “work” as poetry, of what life situations lay behind individual Psalms of how the psalms were used in worship c. You will be grappling with knowing God in this fallen world for quite a while yet. You will, if you have not already, experience times of exultation and unspeakable joy, alienation, love, doubt, confidence, anger, fear, forsakenness in this life. You will walk through times of encouragement and discouragement, serenity and chaos, success and failure, faith and doubt, closeness to God and alienation from God. You should not assume that you know how to know and love your God in all of these times. So where better to go to learn what that is like to relate and speak to God in all that life brings your way? d. Not only that, but you will be loving and praising and worshipping God for all eternity, so where better to go to learn how to do that? e. Books to help you with the Psalms: Longman, Temper III. How to Read the Psalms. Downers Grove: IVP, 1988. Brueggemann, Walter. The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, 1984. Kidner, Derek. Psalms (2 volumes). Downers Grove: IVP, 1973-1975. Eugene Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer. San Francisco: Harpers, 1989. Calvin, John. “The Author’s preface, in Calvins Commentaries, Volume 36, Joshua, Psalms 1-36. Spurgeon, Charles. A Treasury of David. Allender, Dan and Longman, Temper III. Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1994. |
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