Why use the psalms? The psalms have been integral to Jewish worship for thousands of years: Jesus and his disciples were all Jews and their relationship to God was formed by the reciting of these words. The Jewish scriptures are used by Christians as the foundation on which they build, and the first Christians simply continued the existing Jewish practice of daily prayer with the psalms, tweaking it to suit their own purposes. As Christians seek to be formed in the likeness of Christ, it makes sense to be formed in prayer as he was formed.
How to use the Psalms in prayer
The Psalter (the collection of 150 Biblical psalms) contains the whole spread of human emotions: joy, reverence, anger, revenge, despair. Nothing has to be hidden away from God. Reciting them as part of daily prayer means that you appropriate them, let them sink into your heart, in a different way than if you just read them like any other Bible text. If the words of the psalm are close to your own experience that morning, then you can pray the words of the psalm as your own prayer. If you’re reading Psalm 137, for example, with the line ‘blessed is he who takes you little ones and dashes them against the rock’, and you yourself are very angry, then you can show your anger to God. It’s much better to be truthful about what you feel in your prayer than to hide it away from God because good Christians shouldn’t be angry. You can ask God to show you whether you are justified in your anger, or whether you are overreacting, but first of all you need to be truthful about what’s there. You can then pray to be able to forgive, or to be shown what action you need to take to right the injustice that you are angry about.
What about if the words of the psalm are nothing like how you are feeling today? Let’s say you are full of happiness, and you’re reading a psalm of lament like Ps 102: ‘hide not your face from me in the day of my distress’. You can offer God your happiness and pray for those people who are struggling today and crying out to God for help. It may make you think of specific people that you need to pray for later on. If you are sad, a psalm of rejoicing can encourage you to remember God’s faithfulness with hope.
Whether the psalm chimes in with your mood or grates against it, it can be a reminder that God’s faithfulness endures and is not dependent on our feelings of the moment; and neither should our faithfulness to prayer be dependent on our feelings of the moment. Also, the psalms are the prayers of a community, even when they are spoken from an individual point of view and even when you are praying them alone. By using the psalms, you are setting yourself consciously within the communion of the saints, the household of God.
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