Shared Practice of Prayer
Yesterday we invited you to pray the Lord’s Prayer and today we want to encourage you to use the Psalms as a guide for prayer. The Psalms were Jesus’ own prayerbook and he would have grown up praying, singing, chanting, and memorising these ancient prayers and in his very last words in Luke’s Gospel were a direct quotation from these Scriptures (Luke 23:46, see Psalm 31:5).
A teacher in the early church called Athanasius once said that whilst ‘most of the Bible speaks to us, the Psalms speak for us’ and what I think he was getting at is that one of the key reasons that the Psalms are in the Bible are to teach us how to worship and pray. They are a divinely inspired school of prayer that helps us to prayer and express pain, to worship and to wonder what’s going on, to lift our hands in praise and drop to our knees in lament.
‘The Psalms are an assurance that when we pray, we are not expected to deny the deepness of our own human pilgrimage‘ – W. Brueggeman
There are 150 Psalms in the Bible that cover all sorts of different situations and emotions that we face and below is a small selection of these. We would encourage you to take some time and choose one of these ancient prayers to use as a guide in your prayers today knowing that Jesus himself would have prayed it many times!
- Psalm 13 – A prayer in a time of difficulty
- Psalm 148 – A prayer of praise and worship
- Psalm 66 – A prayer of thanksgiving
- Psalm 23 – A famous prayer for guidance and protection
2 Comments on “Shared Practice of Prayer”
So so grateful for the psalms and for the opportunities they give us to journey through life and all it holds for us all.
Thank God for the …BUT…at the end of the struggles that is so often at the end of the psalms and helps anchor us to truth.
I will never forget my friend singing Psam 13 spontaneously and its been a very powerful expression for me at times thats helped me acknowledge and journey through when things have felt so long….
Thank God for the gift of the psalms and the opportunities they give us to help us express and acknowledge and not hide our feelings and longings. So gad that there is so often a …BUT… at the end of them that helps anchor us into truth.
I will never forget my friend spontaneously singing psalm 13 and I have made it my own a few times, a powerful expression that helped me articulate what was happening. The ‘BUT’ at the end of it always strengthened me.