Monday, June 29, 2009
Submit to the Lord with fear, and with trembling bow down in worship; lest the Lord be angry and you perish; for divine wrath is quickly kindled. Happy are they all who take refuge in the Lord. (Psalm 2: 11-13)
I am on a never ending quest to find the best way to spend time in daily prayer and devotion. I have several resources that I use, but I keep going back to the Psalms. The Psalms are not always easy to read or to understand. Some of the Psalms are worshipful, joyful and full of praise and thanksgiving. Some of them are full of anger and fear and wrath toward God. The Psalms contain the range of human emotion, and for that reason, they make some pretty good prayers.
Many years ago I discovered this directive for praying the Psalms in a little book called Prayer of the Faithful by Walter C. Huffman (Augsburg Fortress, Revised Edition, 1992, p. 9-10). I find it very helpful. Huffman writes,
“An ancient approach to praying the Psalms is to pray them in a given order, fitting oneself into a biblical or liturgical pattern rather than forcing the Psalms into our own. Instead of asking what they have to do with us, we must ask what we have to do with them and what we hear of God’s will through them. In Psalms: Prayerbook of the Bible, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:
It does not depend, therefore, whether the Psalms express adequately that which we feel at a given moment in our heart. If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. Not what we want to pray is important, but what God wants us to pray… The richness of the word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.”
Huffman continues,
“To be honest, to be valid, many feel that prayer must surge from the heart in a stream of original sentences or stammerings. While there will always be the prayer of the heart and one’s inarticulate reaching toward God, there must come again emphasis on the “givenness” of biblical praise-speech so characteristic of the Psalter. Daniel Stevick states:
No language, however eloquent or nuanced, could capture or define the specific quality of any moment. Even under intense emotion, I do not seek for some novel mode of expression. It would be like writing all new Christmas carols every year, or like searching for alternatives, having decided that the phrase “I love you” has grown hackneyed. I return gratefully to the simple, familiar, general allusive terms that I and thousands of others have used before.”
Try praying one Psalm each morning, in order. Find in them the richness of the word of God and then listen to how God is speaking to you. You might be surprised.
