Where Prayer Becomes Real by Kyle Strobel

Author:Kyle Strobel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Prayer—Christianity;REL012080;REL012120
ISBN: 9781493428823
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2021-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

PRACTICE

Praying the Psalms

For your own practice, take ten minutes or so and do one of the suggestions below. Or take twenty to thirty minutes and practice each of these. We especially encourage you to make this a habit for 150 days or approximately five months. Take a psalm a day and pray it in the morning. This kind of practice has proven profoundly helpful for us both.

There are, broadly, two ways to enter into this practice of praying the Psalms. The first is to simply start praying the Psalter one psalm at a time. For many, praying a psalm a day is the beginning of a devoted time in Scripture or in prayer. Read through the psalm once to get a sense of its movements, and then pray back through it slowly, seeking to make the words your own. This initial reading can help orient your heart to the themes you will be confronted with as you enter into prayer.

Alternatively, instead of reading through the psalm first, you may want to just pray into the psalm without knowing where it is leading. This approach may help you enter more fully and experientially into the prayer, letting the psalmist take you on an unexpected journey through your soul by means of his words. In both cases, it can be helpful to pray aloud, always attending to how your heart is responding. Is this something true of my soul? Does my heart want to reject praying this to the Lord? The words of Psalm 139:23–24 are helpful to come back to here: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!”

Along the way, as you pray through the words of the psalmist, you may need to pause to translate the words into your own experience. Often, in praying the Psalms, I (John) pray something that strikes my heart and speaks into a specific circumstance I am wrestling with. When this happens, I pause and, in my own words, pray through the circumstance in the manner of the psalm. I no longer pray generically about my struggles but enter into the reality of this particular struggle as the words of the psalmist open my heart to this kind of prayer to God.

The second approach to praying the Psalms is to go directly to a psalm that fits your particular life circumstances. This can be a helpful practice to speak the truth of your experience and learn ways to express the truth of your soul to God, even when aspects of the psalm may not be true of your circumstance. For this purpose, we have a listing of several of these in appendix 1 and directions for making these words your own. Our hope is to help model how you can form your own experiences into prayers.

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