If we want to improve our prayer lives, a great place to go is Psalms. The prayers of these saints soar on heights we can hardly fathom. Over the last two weeks of our Spiritual Springboard we noticed 2 Reasons We Don’t Have to Pray Exactly Like the Psalmists and then 2 More Reasons.
You may also want to check out the index for this entire series of posts.
Now we want to turn our study to what we can learn from the psalmists about praying.
The foundation for praying as the psalmists did is believing in the God of the psalmists. This is so much more than just saying, “Yeah, I believe in Jehovah.” This means examining the psalms and what they said about God. Because of what the psalmists believed about God, they prayed. If we want to pray like they did, we’ll have to believe like they did. When we believe like they did, prayer will no longer be a checklist item of Christian homework to try to accomplish every day like that daily literature journal our college lit professors tried to get us to do. When we believe like they did, prayer will be our natural response. We won’t be able to help praying.
The first point we need to notice is the psalmists believed God Is.
God Is
You may think this should go without saying and we need to move on to more important topics. However, sometimes the very obvious needs to be stated. When we don’t state it, even the obvious is forgotten. Yet, even more than stating the obvious, we should get beneath the surface of this statement.
“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.'”–Psalm 14:1
“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.'”–Psalm 53:1
As if to make the point abundantly clear, the Psalms contain these two almost identical songs. Both begin with the same sentiment. Only fools declare there is no God. Of course, the atheists and agnostics believe the exact opposite. In this post, I don’t wish to argue that point, but simply show what the Psalmists believed.
The Springboard for Prayer
The reason this point is so phenomenal is not just about the psalmists’ faith but their faith despite all the other things they say in their prayers. Too many people today pray and when things don’t go their way, assume God must not exist. The psalmists prayed and prayed and prayed and things didn’t always go their way. What did they do? They prayed again. Why? Because they did not believe the evidence of God’s existence was wrapped up in whether or not God did what they asked.
They prayed because they believed God was there. They didn’t suddenly assume God was zapped out of existence simply because He didn’t respond on their timetable or in their way.
Consider Psalm 88. It is a benchmark psalm for me and will come up repeatedly in our study. In Psalm 88:1, Heman claimed he cried out to God day and night. The rest of the psalm chronicled Heman’s troubles. He had endured many of them. He laid them at God’s feet and claimed God was the author of them. He got mad at God. He accused God. He didn’t understand God. However, for all of those very troubling aspects of those psalms he never denied God. He didn’t question God’s existence. He assumed it. That was why Heman was so troubled. Why, since God does exist and does care, wouldn’t He do something about Heman’s troubles? It didn’t even enter his mind to say, “Since God is not doing something about all this, He must not be there.” Yet, that is exactly the response of so many today.
If we want to pray like the psalmists, our faith must be anchored in God’s existence. God will not respond to our prayers on our timetable. He is not bound by our whims and wishes. As the sovereign ruler of the universe who sees the beginning from the end and knows all sides of our lives and the entire world, we can trust Him to do what is right. He knows better than we do. He knows when to respond and how. We need to be like Heman. The very fact that he wrote Psalm 88 indicates his continued faith that God Is, even though God is not bound by Heman’s will.
From the psalmists perspective, wise and righteous people might get mad at God. They might accuse God of being the author of some of their troubles. They might feel like God is far away and is ignoring them. But only the fool looks at all that and says, “There is no God.”
As we grow in prayer, we will have all kinds of questions and struggles. However, we will always have a leg up as long as we maintain our faith. God is out there even if we feel like He is far away. God is still there. He is still the sovereign ruler of the universe. Only the fool, no matter how smart he thinks he is, says there is no God.
