Praying the Psalms Aloud When You Don't Know What to Pray

There are seasons when prayer dries up. Not from unbelief usually, but from having nothing left to say, or from a growing suspicion that your praying has narrowed to four sentences on rotation.

The Psalter exists partly for this. A hundred and fifty prayers, already written, covering very nearly every state a human being can occupy, composed to be said out loud.

The Church's Prayer Book

For most of Christian history the Psalms were not one book among sixty-six. They were the prayer book, prayed through on a cycle, sung by congregations who often could not read.

Monastic orders worked through all hundred and fifty every week. The Book of Common Prayer set a monthly cycle that shaped English-speaking devotion for centuries. Jewish worship had been doing something similar for a thousand years before that.

This is also the book the New Testament quotes most. Jesus prayed Psalm 22 from the cross and Psalm 31 as He died. Peter preached from the Psalms at Pentecost. Paul argued from them constantly. When the early church wanted language for what had happened, it reached here first.

They Were Never Meant to Be Read Silently

The Psalms are songs. The Hebrew title, Tehillim, means praises; the Greek psalmos refers to music played on strings. Many carry performance instructions in their superscriptions: to the chief Musician, on Neginoth, upon Sheminith.

Reading one silently is somewhat like reading sheet music instead of playing it. You receive the information and miss a good deal of the point.

Say one aloud and something shifts. The rhythm arrives. Repetitions you had skated over become audible. And hearing your own voice say my soul thirsteth for thee does something that your eyes passing across the words does not.

How Hebrew Poetry Works

Hebrew verse does not rhyme sound. It rhymes thought, and once you can see the device you cannot stop seeing it. This is also why the Psalms survive translation better than almost any poetry in the world: what is being repeated is the idea, and ideas cross languages.

Lines That Say the Same Thing Twice

Two lines, one claim, stated from two angles. This is the commonest form, and it has a practical consequence for praying: the second line is usually the more specific, so it is worth slowing down at the comma rather than reading straight through.

Lines That Set Two Things Against Each Other

The contrast carries the meaning. Psalm 1 is built entirely on this device, which is why it functions as a doorway to the whole book.

Lines That Build

The second line advances the first rather than echoing it. Psalm 121 works this way throughout: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the LORD. Each line takes the previous one further.

Acrostics

Several psalms run through the Hebrew alphabet, one letter per line or per section. Psalm 119 is the great example at 176 verses; Psalms 25, 34, 111, 112 and 145 do it more briefly. The device is invisible in English and it tells you something: these were built to be memorised.

Lamentations uses the same structure, which is worth pausing on. A poem about a destroyed city, written in strict alphabetical order. Grief given a form to hold it.

The Titles and the Word Nobody Can Translate

Most psalms carry a superscription, and English Bibles print them in small type that trains the eye to skip. They repay reading.

Some are musical directions: to the chief Musician, upon Neginoth, upon Sheminith. Some name an author or a collection. And some place the psalm in a specific moment of someone's life — Psalm 51 when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba; Psalm 3 when he fled from Absalom his son.

Those historical titles change how the psalm reads. Psalm 51 is not a general prayer about guilt. It is what a man said after arranging a murder to conceal an adultery, and it is in the songbook of the people of God.

Then there is Selah, which appears seventy-one times and which nobody can define with certainty. The likeliest readings are a musical interlude or an instruction to pause. Either way, treat it as a rest. When you reach one, stop for a breath before continuing. The psalm is telling you it has said something worth sitting with.

Which Psalm, When

• Psalm 23 — when you are afraid or exhausted.
• Psalm 51 — when you have done something you cannot undo.
• Psalm 13 — when God seems absent and you want to say so.
• Psalm 63 — when you are spiritually dry.
• Psalm 121 — before a journey, or when someone you love is far away.
• Psalm 103 — when you need to remember what He has already done.
• Psalm 139 — when you feel unseen.
• Psalm 91 — when you are in danger.
• Psalm 42 — when you are low and cannot explain why.
• Psalm 90 — when you are conscious of how short life is.
• Psalm 150 — when there is nothing to say but thank you.

Who Wrote Them, and Over How Long

The Psalter is not one man's diary. It is an anthology assembled across roughly a thousand years.

Seventy-three psalms carry David's name. Twelve are attributed to Asaph, a worship leader appointed in David's reign. Eleven belong to the sons of Korah — descendants, remarkably, of the man swallowed by the earth in Numbers 16, whose line survived and became temple singers. Psalm 90 is credited to Moses, which makes it likely the oldest in the collection. Solomon has two. Around fifty are anonymous.

The range of circumstance is equally wide. A shepherd boy, a fugitive, a king, a man in adultery's aftermath, temple professionals, exiles by the rivers of Babylon, and pilgrims walking up to a festival.

Which is precisely why the book works for everybody. It was not written from one vantage point. Someone in it has already been where you are, and wrote it down.

Say the Angry Ones Too

A considerable number of Psalms are furious. Some address God as a complaint. Some ask Him to deal with enemies in terms that make modern readers uncomfortable enough to skip them.

Do not skip them too quickly. Their presence in Scripture functions as a permission slip. They demonstrate that God would rather receive your rage directed at Him honestly than your politeness offered from a distance.

Nobody edited that out for being disrespectful. Four how longs in two verses, addressed to God, accusing Him of forgetting.

What to Do With the Hardest Ones

Some psalms ask for enemies to be destroyed, and one famously pronounces a blessing on whoever dashes Babylonian infants against the rocks. These are not comfortable, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

Two observations that have helped the church read them. First, they are prayers rather than instructions; the psalmist is handing his desire for vengeance to God instead of executing it himself, which is precisely what Romans 12 asks of us. Second, they are the honest speech of people who had watched their children killed and their city burned, and Scripture records what they actually said.

Praying them today generally means praying against the evil rather than against persons, and praying them at all means admitting that such feelings exist in us. Which is more honest than most of our praying.

Psalms 22, 23 and 24 Belong Together

Read in sequence, these three form one of the most striking passages in Scripture, and almost nobody reads them in sequence because Psalm 23 is famous enough to be extracted.

Psalm 22 is the psalm of the cross. It opens with my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me, and goes on to describe pierced hands and feet, bones out of joint, a tongue cleaving to the jaws, and onlookers parting garments and casting lots — written centuries before crucifixion existed as a practice.

Psalm 23 is the psalm of the shepherd. He leads, restores, prepares a table, and walks with His own through the valley.

Psalm 24 is the psalm of the king. Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and the King of glory shall come in.

Suffering, then care, then coming glory. Read together they are a compressed account of the whole gospel, and the order is not accidental. The Shepherd of Psalm 23 can say he will walk with you through the valley because of what happens in Psalm 22.

Praying Them With Other People

These were congregational texts before they were private ones, and something returns when they are said in company.

• Alternate verses between two people or two halves of a room. The parallel structure of Hebrew poetry makes this natural; it is how the psalms were sung for centuries.
• Read one aloud at a meal. Psalm 34, 100, 103 and 145 all work well and take under two minutes.
• Use one at a graveside or a hospital bedside. Psalm 23 is the obvious choice and it is obvious for a reason; it has carried more people through more of those rooms than any other passage.
• Teach a child one. Psalm 23 or Psalm 100 memorised at seven will still be there at seventy.

Something happens when a room says together what none of them could say alone. That is why the church has done it for two thousand years, and why a congregation reading a psalm in unison is doing something older and sturdier than it usually realises.

Memorising One

There is a strong case for having at least one psalm entirely by heart, and Psalm 23 is the obvious candidate because it is six verses and already in the first person.

The reason is practical. Psalms are what people reach for at the two moments when nothing else will do: a deathbed and a disaster. Chaplains, nurses and hospice workers will tell you that patients who remember almost nothing else will still say the Lord is my shepherd, and that people who have not been near a church in fifty years will join in.

Something is deposited by that memorisation that survives dementia, sedation and terror. It is worth putting there while you can.

Take one line a day for a week. Say it at the same point in the day. On the eighth day you will have a psalm, and you will have it for the rest of your life.

A Simple Way to Pray One

Read the psalm aloud once, straight through, without stopping to analyse anything.

Read it a second time and pause wherever a line meets something in your own life. Put your own detail into it: your name, your situation, the person you are worried about. Where the psalm says enemies and you have none, let it stand for whatever is actually against you.

Then sit quietly for a moment at the end without adding anything.

Ten minutes, no preparation required, and you have prayed something considerably more honest than most of us manage unaided.

God would rather have your rage addressed to Him than your politeness offered from a distance.

Declare Bible

The Shape of the Book

The Psalter is not a random anthology. It is arranged into five books, each closing with a doxology, in a deliberate echo of the five books of Moses. The rabbis noticed this early: Moses gave Israel the five books of the law, and David gave Israel the five books of the Psalms.

The arrangement has a direction. The early books are dominated by lament and by David under pressure. The later books turn increasingly towards praise, and the whole collection ends with five psalms that begin and end in hallelujah, closing on let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD.

So the book as a whole travels from complaint to praise across its length. That is not a promise that your week will do the same. It is a statement about where the whole story is going, offered to people who will spend a good deal of it in the earlier books.

Psalms of Ascent

Psalms 120 to 134 carry the heading a song of degrees, or ascents. They were sung by pilgrims walking up to Jerusalem for the feasts, and they have the character of travelling music: short, memorable, addressing the concerns of people on a road.

Psalm 121 begins by lifting the eyes to the hills, which for a traveller meant both the destination and the bandits. Psalm 130 is prayed out of the depths. Psalm 133 celebrates brothers dwelling together in unity, which is what a pilgrim festival actually produced.

They repay being prayed as a set, in order, over a fortnight. They were composed for people in motion, which most of us are.

Jesus Prayed This Book

It is easy to treat the Psalms as Old Testament devotional material that the New Testament improves upon. The Gospels make that impossible.

At the crucifixion Jesus quotes Psalm 22 in its opening line and Psalm 31 in His last. Both are laments. At the last supper the hymn sung before going out to the Mount of Olives was almost certainly the Hallel, Psalms 113 to 118, as Passover custom required. He went to Gethsemane having just sung I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the LORD.

Whatever else praying the Psalms is, it is praying words the Lord Himself used, in the hours when He needed them most.

Praying Psalms You Do Not Feel

A common objection: it seems dishonest to pray a psalm of exuberant praise on a flat day, or a lament when things are fine.

There is an old answer to this that repays consideration. When you pray a psalm that does not match your state, you are praying it in company. Somewhere in the body of Christ this morning, somebody is exactly where Psalm 88 is, and somebody else is exactly where Psalm 150 is. Praying the full range keeps you in solidarity with a church much larger than your own week.

It also stretches you. A believer who only ever prays what they currently feel will pray a narrower and narrower range as the years pass. The Psalter refuses to let that happen.

The Psalms Jesus Fulfilled

A number of psalms describe things that happened to David and describe them in terms that outrun his experience. The New Testament reads these as pointing forward, and Jesus said so directly on the road to Emmaus: all things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.

• Psalm 22 — forsakenness, pierced hands and feet, garments divided by lot, bones out of joint. Quoted from the cross and echoed by all four evangelists.
• Psalm 16 — thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Peter cites it at Pentecost and points out that David's tomb was still in Jerusalem.
• Psalm 110 — the LORD said unto my Lord, sit thou at my right hand. The most quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament, and Jesus used it Himself to silence a room.
• Psalm 118 — the stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner. Applied by Jesus to Himself and by Peter to the Sanhedrin.
• Psalm 69 — they gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.

This changes how the book reads. When you pray a psalm of suffering, you are using language the Lord Himself used, and He used it in circumstances that gave the words their fullest meaning.

Watch What Happens to the Ending

Most laments turn. Somewhere near the end the writer moves from complaint to some statement of trust.

Psalm 13 is the clearest example. It opens with four how longs and closes, nine verses later, with I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me. Nothing in the psalm suggests his circumstances changed between verse one and verse six.

The turn happens because he kept talking to God long enough for something to shift internally. That is worth knowing when you are stuck in the complaint half and cannot imagine the other one.

And Psalm 88 does not turn at all. Its final Hebrew word is darkness. God allowed one lament into the book with no upswing, which means the turn is a frequent mercy rather than a required performance.

Pour out your heart before him. Not tidy it first, not translate it into acceptable language. Pour it out, and discover that the God who received David's how long is not startled by yours.