We all sometimes struggle to find words to express our feelings. That’s why God gave us the Psalms.
An Anatomy of All the Parts of the Soul
The 16th century reformer, John Calvin, called Psalms “the Anatomy of all the parts of the Soul” and observed that
There is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror. Or rather, the Holy Spirit has here drawn . . . all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated.
Or, as someone else noted, while the rest of the Scripture speaks to us, the Psalms speak for us. The Psalms provide us with a rich vocabulary for speaking to God about our souls.
When we long to worship, we have psalms of thanksgiving and praise. When we are sad and discouraged, can pray the psalms of lament. The psalms give voice to our anxieties and fears, and show us how to cast our cares on the Lord and renew our trust in him. Even feelings of anger and bitterness find expression in the infamous imprecatory psalms, which function something like poetic screams of pain, lyrical outbursts of anger and rage. (The point being honesty with your anger before God, not venting your anger at others!)
The Drama of Redemption in the Theater of the Soul
Some of the Psalms are downright bleak. TakePsalms 88:1 which contends for one of the most hopeless passages in all of Holy Scripture. But even those psalms are helpful, for they show us that we are not alone. Saints and sinners from long ago also tread through the valley of death’s dark shadow. You’re not the first person to feel enveloped in the hopeless fog of despair.
But more than that, the psalms, when read as a whole, depict the drama of redemption in the theater of the soul. Some biblical scholars have observed three cycles in the psalms: the cycles of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation.
1. Orientation
Psalms of orientation point us to the kind of relationship with God we were created for, a relationship marked by confidence and trust; delight and obedience; worship, joy, and satisfaction.
2. Disorientation
The psalms of disorientation show us human beings in their fallen state. Anxiety, fear, shame, guilt, depression, anger, doubt, despair – the whole kaleidoscope of toxic human emotions find a place in the Psalms.
3. Reorientation
But the psalms of reorientation portray reconciliation and redemption in prayers of repentance (the famous penitential psalms), songs of thanksgiving, and hymns of praise that exalt God for his saving deeds, sometimes pointing forward to Jesus, the Messianic Lord and Davidic King who will fulfill God’s promises, establish God’s kingdom, and make all things new.
Most individual psalms fit into one of these categories, while the psalter as a whole largely moves from disorientation to reorientation, from lament and complaint to worship and praise.
These cycles mirror the basic story line of Scripture: creation, fall, and redemption. We were created to worship God. As the old catechism says, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” But the fall and personal sin leave us disoriented. Our lives, more often than not, are fraught with anxiety, shame, guilt, and fear. But when we encounter our redeeming God in the midst of those distressing situations and emotions, we respond with renewed penitence, worship, thanksgiving, hope, and praise.
Praying the Psalms
Just learning these basic cycles will help us understand how the various psalms can function in our lives. To echo Eugene Peterson, the psalms are tools for prayer.
Tools help us get a job done, whether it is repairing a broken faucet, building a new deck, changing an alternator in a vehicle, or hacking our way through a forest. If you don’t have the right tools, then you’ll have much more difficulty accomplishing the task.
Have you ever tried to use a Phillips screwdriver when you really needed a flathead? Frustrating experience. But that’s not because of a defect in the Phillips. You just chose the wrong tool for the task at hand.
One of most important things we can learn in walking with God is how to use Scripture as he intended. All Scripture is inspired by God, but not all Scripture is suited to every state of heart. There is a God-given variety in the Spirit-breathed word – a variety that befits the complexities of the human condition. Sometimes we need comfort, sometimes instruction, while at other times we need prayers of confession and the assurance of God’s grace and pardon.
Finding and praying the psalms that best fit your varied states of heart will, over time, transform your spiritual experience.
Don’t Wait Till You’re in Trouble – Start Now
I hope that people who are currently struggling and suffering will read this and immediately take refuge in the psalms. But for those who aren’t presently in dire straits, let me say this. Don’t wait till you’re in trouble to read and pray the psalms. Start now.
Build for yourself a vocabulary for prayer. Get well acquainted with the anatomy of your own soul. Immerse yourself deeply in the drama of redemption that plays out in the theater of the human heart – in the theater of your heart. Familiarize yourself with these divinely given tools. Learn to use them well.
Starting Easter Monday, April 13, I will be reading and teaching through the book of Psalms, one psalm each day, ending in September. You should join me!
In this post:
Why we should read the Psalms—now more than ever;
How to read along with me;
How to get a copy of the beautiful book I’ll be using.
THE PSALMS MAKE US STRONG
For 3,000 years, the people of God have read, sung, prayed, studied, and learned the Psalms, and these ancient Hebrew poems have made God’s people strong in times of trouble and joyful in times of praise.
The Psalms help us remain rooted so we won’t be swept away in the storm. Psalm 1, e.g., explicitly promises that people who spend time with God’s words become like trees, deeply rooted and always fruitful even in times of drought!
THE PLAN
There are 150 Psalms; a few are long, and a few are very short, but most are a couple of paragraphs—in other words, perfect for reading one a day. We begin on Easter Monday, April 13, and will conclude on September 9, 150 days later.
You can of course read through the Psalms in any Bible or Bible app, but that is the book we’ll be using at Munger. They are beautiful books, with the text on one page and an empty notes page facing. The photo below (from the Crossway website) is of Matthew’s Gospel, but you get the idea.
HOW TO PICK UP YOUR FREE COPY
We had ordered 4,000 books and were planning on distributing them on Easter Sunday. But, plans change and we set up a strict pick up system at church (sign-up online, drive-up, roll down passenger window, receive books into empty passenger seat, etc.) and in the last four days we gave out 2,038 books!
Let me repeat that: in the last four days we gave out 2,038 books!
The books have been in our storage unit since the end of January, and the only person who will touch them will be wearing gloves and a mask.
If you’d like to pick up a copy for you or a loved one, we have 2 more scheduled pick-up windows:
For 3,000 years, the people of God have read, sung, prayed, studied, and learned the Psalms, and these ancient Hebrew poems have made God’s people strong in times of trouble and joyful in times of praise.
“If you need a guide for your ongoing relationship with God, read Psalms.”
― Jim George
“The more deeply we grow into the psalms and the more often we pray them as our own, the more simple and rich will our prayers become.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Oh, how my heart keeps coming back to the Psalms. If you know my story, you know that at a very dark time in my life it was recommended to me that I read one Psalm per day. Reading those Psalms and hearing from the Lord, crying through the pages of those holy & human words…it was transformative for me. And I wanted to go back to the Psalms in 2019, too.
The Psalms have been my prayer book, my hymn book, my conversation with God book for so long. Any time I feel the nudge to slip away and spend time with the Lord, the Psalms is my go-to. If I feel a need to re-focus and get back to my first love, I head to the Psalms. We see the humanity of David. We see the battles fought, the confession and repentance, the worship, the HOPE. We see David crying out to God in the depths of his despair and we see him preaching the gospel to his heart as he reminds himself of where his true hope lies.
Spend a few moments each morning starting January 1st reading & praying through a Psalm. You can take this deeper and WRITE the Psalms. Pray them. Journal them. Speak them. Choose one verse to meditate on for the day. Make this reading plan your own.
I’m only sharing the idea…you can choose how much you want to do with it!
If you follow my blog page on Facebook, we will be posting daily verses there. I will periodically share on Instastories, but not daily. Join me on Instagram or Facebook. If you decide to share posts as we go along, I would love for you to use the hashtag #psalmaday
Although I’ve never seen it (and I know pictures don’t do it justice) it’s obvious that the Grand Canyon is…well…grand. There’s debate over how this masterpiece came to be. It may have been meticulously carved out by the Colorado River over a bajillion years. Or it may have been blasted into the Arizona landscape during a well-attested global flood by a bajillion gallons of water. Either way, the Grand Canyon is a parable of how stuff is formed. Most of us want an transformative moment (think flood) that so dramatically changes us for the better that we are never the same again. But the reality is that most change happens not through cataclysmic events but through persistence over a long period of time (think Colorado River). This is an important parable for spiritual formation.
Praying the Psalms is a spiritual formation practice. And it takes time, repetition, and perseverance to be formed by this practice. It is only when we pray the psalms with regularity that the Spirit uses them to form us into the mold of Jesus. In order to be tutored in this practice we’ll consult a master, a virtuoso of formation and prayer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Praying the Psalms with Regularity
In order to develop a healthy and robust life of prayer, we need a regular rhythm of praying through all 150 psalms, a steady psalm diet. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said of the psalms,
“Only with daily use does one appropriate this divine prayerbook.”
As we saw above, most formation happens through persistent practice. Breaking down our vices and maladaptive habits is a war of attrition. Developing a life of prayer and presence only comes through regular practice. Bonhoeffer encourages us:
“The more deeply we grow into the Psalms and the more often we pray them as our own, the more simple and rich will our prayer become.”
Three Ways to Pray the Psalms with Regularity
1 psalm per month: Meditate, memorize, and pray one psalm everyday for a few weeks. Steep in it until you are saturated with its poetry and profundity, until you can make its words your own. Then move onto the next psalm. You will feel as though that psalm belongs to you (or maybe that you belong to it). It will seem to be astoundingly relevant to many of the situations you find yourself in that month. You will become fluent in that psalm as it expands the vocabulary of your language of prayer.
1 psalm per day: Use your fancy Bible ribbon to mark your place. Start with Psalm 1 and pray that one psalm three times per day: morning, noon, and night (Ps 55:17). Get on your knees, as the bodily posture will signal to yourself that this is a time set apart for prayer. Then the next day, move onto the next psalm. Go all the way to Psalm 150 and start over. If you miss a day simply pick up where you left off.
5 psalms per day: Pray five psalms a day based on the day of the month. There are 150 psalms and 30 days in a month meaning you can pray through the entire Psalter at a rate of 5 psalms per day. So if it’s the 4th day of the month multiply that by 5 to tell you what psalm you will end on that day (e.g. 4x5=20 so you will pray psalms 16–20 on the 4th of every month). This is helpful because regardless of what’s been going in your life you can drop into the Psalter and begin praying. As I’ve prayed the Psalms like this, they’ve become woven into the fabric of my memory. I remember the dates of significant events based on the psalms I was praying that day. The Psalms begin to narrate our biography (see Augustine’sConfessions).
Psalm Story
Less than two years before his death, Bonhoeffer wrote a letter from prison to his parents. He described how time passes in prison. He remarked that a prisoner before him wrote above the cell door, “In 100 years it will all be over.” But how did Bonhoeffer pass the time? He wrote,
“I read the Psalms every day, as I have done for years; I know them and love them more than any other book.”
Praying the Psalms left an indelible mark on Bonhoeffer’s life. His fellow prisoners were deeply impressed by his calmness during bombing raids over Berlin. Even as he was going to be hanged, Bonhoeffer’s final recorded words were: “This is the end…for me the beginning of life.” Bonhoeffer, like his King Jesus, was a psalm-soaked man. This enabled him to face imprisonment and death with calm confidence. How do we form sturdy souls to be men and women like Bonhoeffer? Pray the Psalms with regularity.
Each year I preach a summer in the Psalms sermon series. In 2020, we took up practicing the Psalms. Below are links to the sermons and resources for each practice.
The Psalms are a pedagogy of prayer, a how-to for the heart, and a catechism for our longings. The Psalter is the prayerbook of the Bible. By praying through all 150 psalms, we are nourished as disciples of Jesus by a well-rounded diet of prayer.
The first psalm says that meditating men and women are blessed, fruitful, and prosperous like an ever-green tree. Meditation weaves together the seams of Scripture, situation, and soul. We are formed from the inside out as we meditate on the Psalms.
There is no better way to meditate on the Psalms than by memorizing them. In many ways, we are made up of our memories. Learning the Psalms by heart shapes our hearts to reimagine our life within God’s world.
The Psalter is the hymnal of God’s people. The Psalms are the womb out of which much Christian music, art, and symbolism is born. We are commanded to sing the Psalms (Eph 5:19, Col 3:16). To aid us in singing Psalms, I’ve curated a playlist of Psalms that bring together biblical eloquence with musical excellence.
The uber-fascinating book, Moonwalking with Einstein, quotes Ed Cooke, a Grand Master of Memory:
“My philosophy of life is that a heroic person should be able to withstand about ten years in solitary confinement without getting terribly annoyed.”
This reminds me of Paul and Silas (not necessarily solitary) singing hymns (probably psalms) while in prison (Acts 16:25). I want to be the kind of person that, whether confined in prison or in the back seat of a compact car on a long road trip, can endlessly muse in my memory. I want to be like Mary who “treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19).
How I Learn the Psalms by Heart
First, I want to lay some ground rules that I’ve found to be important specifically for learning the book of Psalms by heart:
Memorize the psalm by prayer, for prayer. Memorize the psalm by meditation, for meditation. Don’t get bogged down in the rote-ness of the memorization process. This requires a key mindset shift. Meditation is the means. Prayer is the process. As you’re rehearsing the words of the psalm for the dozenth time, let them roll through your lips as prayer. The process is the prize because prayer is the process.
Memorize the entire psalm (don’t skip the ugly stuff). For instance, don’t just memorize the lyrical goodness of Psalm 139:1–18 but stop before the gut-wrenching wrath of vv. 19–22. Eugene Peterson calls these “psalmectomies”. The psalm was written as a whole and should be remembered and revered as a whole. I think this Jeffersonian or Marcionite tactic (choose your heretic) has resulted in gagging the people of God during times of crisis. Where do you find words after 911? How do you sing after another race-based shooting? The Psalms give us words.
Memorize different psalms for different seasons. You may not feel like it now but there will come a time when you’re boiling mad and you may just need an imprecatory psalm (Just be sure you know how to use that thing). Or when you’re walking through the dark night of the soul, you may need a lament psalm to fall back on (Ps. 13 & 77). Don’t just memorize the trust psalms (Ps. 23 & 27) as wonderful as they are. Store away a psalm for every extremity of human experience because one day you’ll be there.
My Method
I print out the entire psalm on a slip of paper that I can mark up and keep in my pocket.
I read the psalm aloud 20–30 times with gusto and verve. I usually read it aloud 3–5 times per day depending on my deadline.
I mark the text with insights and inquiries, connections between ideas, and repetition of words or themes. I jot some thoughts on the back of the paper as I meditate on the text.
Once I’ve read it aloud about 10 times I read my first commentary (usually Kidner). This is a huge aid to memorization because it draws my attention to things that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. It also helps me see the structure of the psalm, a huge aid to memory.
Finally, I use the Bible Memory app to make sure I have it word for word and for regular, repeated review. I review the psalm daily until it is thoroughly impressed into my memory but I review every psalm at least once every month.
This method is tried and true…for me. It may not work for you. Many people like to learn the first verse and work through the whole psalm verse by verse. This is really helpful but I don’t like how atomizing it is. The psalm was meant to be read, prayed, and memorized as a whole. So I like to have it wash over my mind and heart 20–30 times as a whole.
Press On
If you get bogged down or haven’t even started yet because you have a “bad memory”. Just remember one, simple, little, hexasyllabic word: neuroplasticity. Okay, so it’s not simple or little, but it is good news. Neuroplasticity is a term that means your brain works more like a muscle than a hard drive. In other words, the more you use it (say by memorizing all 150 psalms!) the better you’ll be at memorizing. You will not reach max capacity at 256 gigs. Your mind and memory will grow stronger in capacity and retention as you memorize. (Read “Moonwalking With Einstein” if you want some stories about the astounding capacity of the human memory).
Don’t we all want guidance in our lives? Don’t we all long to be consoled by knowing that, despite the difficulties, we are on the right path? Don’t we all want to derive wisdom from our solitude? Hear this encouragement from the Proverbs on how God’s words stored in your heart and mind will benefit you the rest of your life:
Bind them on your heart always; tie them around your neck. When you walk, they will lead you; when you lie down, they will watch over you; and when you awake, they will talk with you.
Is the Faith and Work Message an Attempt to Earn Our Own Salvation? Hugh Whelchel February 9, 2015 TWITTER FACEBOOK LINKEDIN EMAIL SUBSCRIBE PRINT Recently I was speaking on faith and work at a conference and someone asked, “Aren’t you just talking about works righteousness?” I assured them I wasn’t, but I can see how it could’ve sounded that way. I’m not the only one running into this problem. Several years ago Mark Roberts at The High Calling interviewed N. T. Wright, and Wright talked about this works righteousness misunderstanding that is often voiced about the importance of our work: What you do in the present matters. It’s hard for Protestants to hear that without thinking, “Oh, dear, this is good works again.” That’s a scare tactic. Sometimes, it’s a political scare tactic – to stop Christians from actively working to change the way the world is, confronting justice, and building communities of peace a...
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