Praying the Psalms

This summer, I visited one of my favorite places on earth: Cedar Point. It’s an amusement park with some of the best rollercoasters in the world. I’d give more reasons why people should like it, but then I’d sound like I’m trying to pitch Androids again. If you’re a thrill enthusiast, you’d love the place.

Life can feel like an emotional rollercoaster. And, unless you’re a masochist, you probably don’t like this! Maybe you’ve learned to understand the “blessing” behind the pains of life (Mt. 5:4, Jas. 1:2-4, etc.), something I wrote about recently, but even if you’re a veteran like the Apostle Paul (Phil. 4:11-12 ), it probably still isn’t very fun (2 Co. 1:8). What do you do when life is dropping you faster than you’d like?

If loving God means not just giving our minds to him, but also giving our hearts (emotions) to him in worship (Mk. 12:30), what do we do when we feel… done? Discouraged? Disappointed? Disheartened?

Psalms as a Guide

I often recommend using the Psalms to pray our emotions back to God. When we’re feeling thrown around by the world and perhaps even by God Himself, this is a simple tool to take our emotions to the Father. Instead of being ruled by them, we can begin to submit our emotions to God, using words that we know are Spirit-inspired. Sometimes when we don’t know what to pray, we allow the Scriptures to be the voice we don’t have.

The exercise is really simple: pick a Psalm. You can choose one at random or perhaps a favorite one if you want. I often go through the Psalms one at a time in different seasons, stopping for months at a time, and then picking them back up again when I feel like I need to where I last left off. Once you’ve chosen your Psalm, read it 2-3 times, and then in your own language, pray it back to God.

That’s it… it’s simple, but you’ll be surprised at the result. Rather than allowing the rollercoaster to take you wherever it wishes, you begin to grab a hold of your heart, surrender it to the truth of God’s Word, go to Him with your soul, and begin to wait expectantly for Him to move. And more times than not He does indeed move.

Psalm 5 Example

Take an example from Psalm 5. The beginning of this Psalm reads:

Now look, I’m a preacher at heart. When I see this my mind wants to get to work and exegete the passage. I want to see what parts will “preach,” I want to see the chiasms in this poetry, or the way David is playing with the Hebrew words to hyperlink different sections of Scripture… and yes and amen to this practice! But none of that helps your heart much when it feels like David did here.

Instead of studying the passage, try praying this as a prayer back to God. Here are two examples from my prayer journals -- one from 2017 and one from this year (I had to cut out the one from a few years ago… too much detail!).

2017

2024

Same sentiment as what David wrote. It’s really just the Scriptures in the TSV (Toriano Standard Version).

In Seasons of Pain and Emotionlessness

It is probably self-explanatory how this exercise helps through pain. Once again, you’ll be shocked at the beauty of how God meets you. If you’re going through a season of pain, try it.

However, I’ve also found it helps in seasons where my heart, for whatever reason, is just not really feeling God. The season may be mundane, or even good but I can tell my heart is just distant. This practice helps me re-engage my heart before my worthy Father. It helps me to love Jesus with my heart again.

So, I’d encourage you to try this as a practice. I believe that, if you don’t like rollercoasters (aka, emotional chaos!), you’ll grow to appreciate those seasons with practices like this.

Jesus as Example

We’re not creating anything new here. Jesus, at his toughest moment, as he journeyed to the cross, sang songs (Mk. 26:30), likely part of the Hallel (Psalm 113-118, sang during Passover).

Jesus, while dying on the cross for our sins, quoted the Psalms over his own soul as it was in anguish. Jesus’ first words on the cross were Psalm 22:1, as he cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and his last words were Psalm 31:5: “Into your hands I commit my spirit.”

Jesus prayed psalms on the cross, in emotional distress over our sin, so that we who should not be able to pray to God, who should be in eternal emotional pain, might never experience Psalm 22:1 in full so that Psalm 22:22-24 might one day be sung by us completely: 

 Praise Jesus our Savior!

 Let us therefore imitate our Savior, that we might find Him in times of need.