Praying the Psalms - July, 2008

I decided recently in preparing a pastoral prayer for Morning Worship to pray through the psalm for the day with its text spread out in front of me while praying. It was a moving experience to merge the psalm with the theme chosen from all the texts for the day, and to do so spontaneously in light of what the people and I were bringing that week or facing the next.
In light of that experience, and the many comments from others on how helpful it had been to them, I have decided to adopt this practice as a weekly discipline for my own benefit—both to let the Psalms shape my praying and to offer up, in that context, what I and those to whom I am ministering are facing and feeling week by week.
In doing so, I am fully aware that I am only entering in on a historic practice, followed by God’s people in every age. My hope is simply to learn myself from the discipline how to better enter into God’s sovereign presence and be filled with his Spirit.

Week of July 6 (Eighth after Pentecost) Psalm 45:10-17

Thank you, Lord, for a psalm that addresses human love—the bond between male and female that begets life and offers pleasure. Thank you, too, for putting it in perspective, for tying it to your ultimate purposes in and for life. We confess that social and cultural pressures tend in our time to make sex an end in itself, often thoughtlessly and selfishly entered into, as if all that matters is the sensation of it and momentary satisfaction.

Here with both warnings and encouragements you join pleasure to obedience and responsibility, promising that from right attitudes will flow great blessings. You lift the physical above its physicality and thus render it what it was meant to be—a profoundly spiritual thing.

Forgive us, Lord, for so often taking this gift into our own hands and thus diminishing its true purpose. Make us sensitive to the stewardship of our lives in this respect, and grant us the deeper joy of knowing in our hearts that year after year we are loving those you have given us to love in keeping with your will. Amen.

Week of July 13 (Ninth after Pentecost) Psalm 119:105-112

Dear Father, we know over years now in our studies that this psalm is unique in its focus, verse by verse, on your word. What a wonderful reminder it is of our need to keep focusing on that word day by day, even moment by moment. Only help us to grasp that the blessing lies not in our disciplined remembering but in the life supplied to us by our remembering you and your word.

With the psalmist we hold our lives in our hands continually—perhaps too much. Help us to release them more to you and your word. As for me, Lord, make “your decrees … my heritage forever,” and “the joy of my heart.” Make them also “a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

Week of July 20 (Tenth after Pentecost) Psalm 139:1-12, 23,24

How good it is, Lord, to be reminded that you search us and know us. “You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you [even] discern my thoughts from far away…. Even before a word is on my tongue, you know it completely.”
It would be much harder to be thus hemmed in behind and before if you had not revealed yourself to us as you are—a God of grace. Left to ourselves we would be lost indeed and filled with dismay over all the darkness surrounding. Yet “even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.”

Even in our mother’s womb you knew us, when we were being made in secret. Our frame has never been hidden from you.”How weighty are such thoughts, O God.” We cannot plumb their depths, no matter how hard we try, but we do know that nevertheless you are with us and we are with you.

Search deeply into all your people this week. See if there be any wicked way in us, and lead us in the way everlasting.

Week of July 27 (Eleventh after Pentecost) Psalm 105: 1-11, 45b

How wonderful, O Lord, are all the deep storehouses of memory you have supplied your people in biblical narrative. Forgive us for not dipping more deeply into them to refresh our souls and bolster our spirits. One is reminded of the of the hymnist's query: “What more can he say than to you he hath said..?” (The Covenant Hymnal: A Worshipbook, No 437).

“Remember the wonderful works he has done,” the psalmist says, “his miracles, and the judgments he uttered.” Remember too that “he is mindful of his covenant, of the word that he commanded, for a thousand generations.” He will not step away from all he has done. Nor will he be untrue to his promises.

Therein lies reason for praise. We are held in the hands of a faithful and loving God. And we live under his eternal promise to his own that nothing will ever be able to separate us from his love and concern. “Praise the Lord!”

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