The Go-to Prayer Book
By Ben Patterson
Why should the Psalms matter to us? Here’s possibly the best reason: because they mattered greatly to Jesus!
As a Jew, Jesus grew up with the Psalms. They were His prayer book. When His disciples asked Him to teach them to pray, He gave them what we know as the Lord’s Prayer, or the Our Father. Everything Jesus told them—and us—to pray for in this great prayer was already there in the Psalms; there was nothing original. The Lord’s Prayer simply distills and summarizes what was already recorded.
The Psalms were also important to Jesus personally. How did Jesus pray as He hung dying on the cross? Where did He look to find words to speak His anguish to His Father? He went to the Psalms. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46) is a quotation from Psalm 22:1. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46) came from Psalm 31:5. Though Jesus was the grand original thinker, the master of creativity, He saw no need to be original or extemporaneous, to “pray from the heart” as we say. He prayed the Psalms because for Him to do so was to pray from the heart.
God’s Word and Our Words
There are other reasons the Psalms should matter to us. The second is that they teach us to pray. They are the Bible’s prayer book.
Think about it. What’s a book of prayers doing in the Bible? The Bible is God’s Word, words God speaks to us. Prayers are words we speak to God. What are we to make of the fact that God has something to say to us about what we say to Him—so much so that He actually gives us words to say? In fact, it appears He has a lot to say to us about what we say to Him, since the Book of Psalms is the longest book in the Bible.
I used to think that in the Bible God speaks to me, and in prayer I speak to God. That is true, but the distinction is not that neat. A profound, organic relationship exists between what we say to God and what He says to us. It is embodied in Psalm 119, the longest psalm in the Book of Psalms and also an extended meditation on the Word of God. Psalm 119 is a 176-verse prayer to God using God’s words to pray to Him about His Word!
God’s Breath in Man Returning to Birth
This is a wonder perhaps best spoken of by poets. George Herbert (1593–1633) wrote that prayer is, “God’s breath in man returning to his birth.”1
In prayer, something happens like the miracle that happened when God first breathed into Adam the breath of life and he “became a living being” (Gen. 2:7). Adam could not have breathed out unless God had first breathed His Spirit in. The Apostle Paul was surely thinking of this when he wrote, “All Scripture is breathed out by God” (2 Tim. 3:16, ESV). The same Spirit that breathed life into the first human continues to breathe into us life of a higher kind through His Word—teaching, reproving, correcting, and training in righteousness. The Holy Spirit permeates the Bible.
So when we pray well, we exhale what we have inhaled. We breathe out what God has breathed in. The Bible is God’s oxygen. Spiritual growth comes by listening to the voice of God in Scripture and turning what we hear into attitudes, affections, and deeds. Prayer is a calling out to the Spirit of Scripture to transform our lives by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:1–2).
The 20th century martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer called this, “pure grace, that God tells us how we can speak with him and have fellowship with him.”2 Our Father wills that we learn to pray the way a child learns language—by listening. Deaf infants can learn to speak, but they learn with great difficulty. A hearing child listens and mimics and copies what that child hears—to the delight of parents, grandparents and friends—until words are woven into syntax, grammar, and meaning that become that child’s own unique style.
We Seek Because He Found
It is the same with prayer. We would never speak to God unless God had first spoken to us. “We seek only because He found,” wrote Peter Taylor Forsyth. “We beseech Him because He first besought us. . . . Our prayer is the answer to God’s.”3
God always takes the initiative with us. He makes the first move. We may ask God for something and wait for His answer. But the mere fact that we ask at all is an answer to His prayer that we ask! All our asking is really answering.
For example, what do you think Jesus is doing in heaven right now as He sits at the right hand of God the Father? The Bible says He’s praying for us. Jesus, our great High Priest, “always lives to intercede” for His people (Heb. 7:25). Always!
Imagine that. When we pray, we don’t pray to get His attention. We pray because He got ours. The praying didn’t begin when we started praying. We simply joined the praying that was already going on. We cry out for the Lord to come to our side, and He does, because He was already crying out for us to join Him at His side.
This is too much for human understanding to grasp. To pray is to enter into the glorious intercessory fellowship of the Godhead. The Son sits enthroned at the right hand of the Father, interceding for us (Rom. 8:34). And when words and understanding fail us, as they almost always do, when we don’t know what to pray, the Holy Spirit intercedes for us, “with groanings too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26–27, ESV).
More than Self-Expression
All this is to say that prayer, like language, is about much more than self-expression. Babies come into the world quite capable of self-expression, equipped with a variety of grunts, squeals, sobs, and gurgles. And because their parents love them, they listen attentively to discern the meanings in these utterances. That’s just fine with a mom or dad. But it would not be fine if these were all the child was capable of at age 18. And worse, it would be beyond tragic if the 18-year-old were still asking for the same things he or she was asking for at 18 months.
Learning a language is much more than learning to inform the world what we want. With language comes a culture. With language come other people and their desires. Language expands us. It makes us more than we were when all we could do is merely express ourselves.
It is the same with prayer and all the ways our listening to the Word of God can turn into attitudes, affections, and deeds. The Father is teaching His children a language. Abba gives us words to pray, and the words He gives change us. Prayer is not a means to get God to give us what we want but a means He gives us to ask for what He wants to give.4
That’s what Bonhoeffer meant when he wrote, “The richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.”5 The Psalms are the prayer book of God’s family, His household, where His children learn the values and meaning of His Kingdom.
Anatomy of the Soul
The third reason the Psalms should matter to us is that they mirror our humanity. As we read the Psalms we will discover that they read us too. Every human situation and emotion is depicted in these prayers frankly and vividly.
Rowland Prothero (1851–1937) said the Psalms are, “a mirror in which each man sees the motions of his own soul.” John Calvin (1509–1564) described them as, “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul.” St. Athanasius (c. 295–373) marveled at the way the Psalms shared and surpassed the qualities of so many of the other books of the Bible. In his “Letter to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms,” he wrote:
Elsewhere in the Bible you read only that the Law commands this or that to be done, you listen to the Prophets to learn about the Saviour’s coming or you turn to the historical books to learn the doings of the kings and holy men; but in the Psalter, besides all these things, you learn about yourself. You find depicted in it all the movements of your soul, all its changes, its ups and downs, its failures and recoveries [emphasis added].
As we study and pray the Psalms, we can say to ourselves, “These are written to me, for me, and about me!”
Every Page Whispers His Name
The fourth reason the Psalms matter is that they open a window to Jesus. Jesus said the Scriptures, which for Him were the books of the Old Testament, including the Psalms, “testify about me” (John 5:39).
Think of it—on the very day He put Death to death, on the day of His resurrection, Jesus went out of His way to explain to His followers that the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms were all about Him, and the way He fulfilled them (Luke 24:27, 44)! One of the greatest pleasures we can experience in our study of the Psalms is the discovery that every page whispers His name.6
Family Introductions
The fifth reason the Psalms matter is that they introduce us to our family. The Psalms have been the prayers of God’s people in all times and places—for nearly 3,000 years. Some of the psalms are easy to relate to. They say what we feel. Others, perhaps many, seem alien.
But they are the words of our brothers and sisters, and they invite us to enter into their lives in ways that stretch and expand us. We can learn compassion by praying their prayers. And even though various psalms may not describe what we have experienced, they may prepare us for a future time very similar to what others have experienced. Praying the Psalms can be “practice” for a time when we will need the insight and strength they give.
Positioning Ourselves to Hear and Pray
As we pray the Psalms, the following suggestions can help us position ourselves to better hear God’s voice.
- Read the individual psalms slowly and thoughtfully, agreeing to what they say with as much understanding as you have. Don’t just read them—pray them. Say them from the heart. Reading them aloud can be helpful.
- Chew on a psalm and digest it until you make it your own. Then paraphrase it by writing it out in your own words. Don’t worry about whether it’s a good paraphrase. No one need hear it but you and your Guide, who delights in the prayers of His children.
- Memorize the Psalms. But learn them by heart, not by rote. In my book, God’s Prayer Book, I made these points: Practice saying their words with the same intonation and emphasis you would use if you had written them yourself. I know of no better way to learn the Psalms. And I cannot tell you the number of times I have had just the prayer I needed in extreme situations in hospitals and grief, when I quite literally didn’t have a prayer of my own. Time and again the Psalms have brought tender comfort in sadness and pristine clarity in confusion.
Charles Spurgeon wrote, “How instructive is this great truth that the Incarnate Word lived on the Inspired Word! It was food to him, as it is to us; and . . . if Christ thus lived upon the Word of God, should not you and I do the same? . . . I think it well worthy of your constant remembrance that, even in death, our blessed Master showed the ruling passion of his spirit, so that his last words were a quotation from Scripture.”7
So, ultimately, why are the Psalms important to us and to our prayers? As Spurgeon indicated, if Jesus gave them such importance in His own life, shouldn’t we do the same?
1“Prayer”: George Herbert, Herbert: Poems, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 25.
2Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms, The Prayer Book of the Bible (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1970), 15.
3P. T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer (London: Independent Press, 1954), 3.
4Bingham Hunter, The God Who Hears (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1986), 12.
5Bonhoeffer, Ibid., 15.
6A phrase taken from The Jesus Storybook Bible, written by Sally Lloyd-Jones (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007).
7Charles Spurgeon, Spurgeon’s Expository Encyclopedia, vol. 4, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978), 329.
BEN PATTERSON is campus pastor at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA. He is a contributing editor to Christianity Today and Leadership Journal, and the author of several books. This article is adapted from God’s Prayer Book: The Power and Pleasure of Praying the Psalms.
(c) 2016 Prayer Connect magazine.
