Authentic Prayers: The Example of the Psalms
Is there anyone out there who feels their prayer life is full and satisfying? It’s easy to find an hour or so of private prayer each day and to continually live in an attitude of prayer? If you are, please call me. I’ll spend real money to learn from you! I think most of us struggle with prayer. We read quotes like Martin Luther’s “To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing”, and have to wonder what world he was living in. Oh, sure, we pray on a regular basis, but breathing is easy, unconscious, and constant. Our prayer life is often more like breathing when you have a cold. With a broken nose. Or maybe that’s just me?
One of the things I love most about our church is our weekly prayer meeting. As you might expect, the room isn’t very crowded on Wednesday evenings. But for an hour or so several from our church get together and take turns praying for the needs of the congregation, the city, the nation, and the world…but mostly the congregation. We have the one person who you can predict exactly what he’s going to say each time. We have the one who will pray for every single item on the list. We have one guy who incorporates a Bible verse often and tries to impress us with how spiritual he is (that may or may not be me). People ramble, get lost in a sentence, say “Father” or “Lord” about a million times in a five-minute prayer. It’s the most beautiful part of the week.
There’s really nothing I enjoy more than hearing other saints pray. There’s nothing more moving and comforting than not only knowing others are praying for me but actually hearing them bring my name before our Father. I love giving that gift to the others in the room as well. It’s a sacred and powerful moment, one that binds us together as a body. I love hearing not only what people pray about but how they pray. We all pray a little differently. I take weird comfort from knowing they struggle with this too. I can learn about prayer from listening to others. I learn about what really matters to them, and how they phrase their petitions. I learn how to be better at “breathing” myself.
Listening to the Prayers of a Man After God’s Own Heart
The Psalms is the most unique book in the whole Bible. Calvin said the Psalms were the Bible in miniature. Every doctrine in the Bible is contained in the Psalms. Every human emotion is represented there as well. Love, hatred, envy, despair, grief, anguish, hope, victory, and defeat. Maybe it’s just how I’m wired, but it’s those songs that wrestle with the darker emotions that really stand out to me. Don’t get me wrong, I love hymns, but I can think of few that express the depth of anguish of soul that many Psalms give voice to.
The Bible refers to David as a man after God’s own heart. We often think of the Psalms as being written by David as he wrote more than any other writer. In fact, he is credited with writing half the Psalms. The others come to us from prophets, kings, choir directors, or just anonymous people moved by the Spirit of God. But what is amazing about the Psalms is that they serve, not only as a songbook for God’s people but as a prayerbook as well. Many of the Psalms are specifically named as prayers or meditations. The end of “book two” of the Psalms concludes, “The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended”. Reading the Psalms is like listening in on a prayer meeting with David, Solomon, Moses, and others inspired by God.
Finding Authenticity in the Psalms
Now you might think that such august persons when writing music for the congregation would give us deep theological treatises on God. They would be full of high and formal language, reaching sublime levels of poetry and creativity. And some are. They are certainly all high examples of composition and poetry. But often these Psalms are the raw cries of men wrestling with God in the depths of loss. They are never merely formal and stilted.
Here what Moses says in Psalm 90:
“For we are brought to an end by your anger; by your wrath we are dismayed. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. For all our days pass away under your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sigh.” (Psalm 90:7–9 ESV)
Over and again Moses attributes his suffering and trouble to God himself. He does not blame God, he acknowledges the people’s iniquity, but he knows right where to look for the trouble that has come. In verse 13 he prays, “Return, O LORD, how long?” Return? Did God go somewhere? Of course not, as Moses well knows. But God seems so distant it feels as though he has left. Moses is not aiming for theological precision in his prayer. He is not specifying that we are of course the source of the sin that has brought this trouble and God certainly did not directly cause this evil but works through secondary causes. And of course, God hasn’t really left us so that he needs to return. Moses knows all this, but in his prayer, he cries out from the depth of his soul with all the hurt and abandoned feelings each of us feels in our day of trouble.
And before you think perhaps Moses made a mistake here, let’s not forget David’s cry in Psalm 22. There is the rawest of hurt on display for us. Yet, of course we know this cry better from the New Testament than the original Psalm. As Christ hangs on the cross suffering the wrath of God he cries out with intense grief, “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?” Again, this is not theologically precise language. But it’s true for all of that.
Over and over you see this in the Psalms. Psalm 88 says You laid me in the pit. Your wrath laid hard on me. You took away my friends and made even my acquaintances hate me. Psalm 10 asks God why he is standing so far off in times of trouble. Psalm 42 asks why God has forgotten him. Psalm 44 asks why God is sleeping through his trouble. In the Psalms we hear men praying in ways I think most of us would never dare pray.
Praying Like a Psalmist
What would happen if we truly embraced the sovereignty of God in our prayers? If we believed to the core of our being that God was ultimately responsible for all that comes into our lives. And what if we cried out to him with authentic desperation and pain. Not the tepid, dry prayers we often send God’s way, but the sort of prayers you pray when your child is dying of cancer. The sort of prayers that scream at God, that make demands and are full of emotion. As John Bunyan said, “When you pray, better let your heart be without words than your words be without heart”. I think those old Puritans knew a thing or two about prayer.
Deep, heartfelt prayers are informed by theological precision, but they aren’t always the place to express that precision. But they are the place to express your heart. We are often so governed by a sense of what is proper in prayers that we fail to really pray. There is definitely a place for formal prayer. There is a place for theological precision. But let’s not forget the place for heartfelt cries to God.
