A Prayer of Honest Relationship (Psalm 77)

As we look forward to spending some time with Psalm 77 this coming Sunday, I'd like for us to dwell on three quick reasons as to why we desperately need Psalms as a whole. 

Reason #1 – The psalms are food that will help us mature and grow. We all live in a culture that is immature and has incredible technological advances. We can gather, process, and communicate huge amounts of data with ease yet, like a child, we don't have the emotional maturity as a whole to sort through what some might consider normal hardship or tragedy. But the apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13 that when he was a child, he spoke like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child; but when he became a man, he put childish things behind him. If we are going to follow Jesus' marching orders to be in the world but not of the world, then the church needs to grow up and be more mature than the culture God has placed us in. 

Reason #2 – The psalms give us good food. You may find that in many places the psalms leave an acquired or bitter-taste yet we neglect this to the danger of our own souls. A man once told me of his conversation with a retired pastor from the denomination he grew up in, and one of this pastor's regrets was that his denomination never got past John 3.16. He said, "We could get people down the aisle, but once they got there, we didn't know what to do with them. So when hardship came, their lives just fell apart." 

How do the psalms help us avoid this? The psalms put flesh on the bones of our salvation and give us staying power for life's storms. John Calvin, a protestant reformer, called the Psalms "an anatomy of all parts of the soul" and that "there is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror." We all have emotions, and we want to follow Christ faithfully even in our emotions. Psalms aren't merely the words of men, they are the very words of God as well. If the words we find in the psalms upset us, we need to take our complaint to God, not to some distant, ancient writer. We must learn to love all of the psalms, even the ones with the jagged edges, because only then will we send our roots of faith deep enough to weather the storms when they come. 

Reason #3 – The psalms give us words to pray when we don't have any. All of God's people know what it means to stumble and be stymied in our prayers. There are various reasons as to why we may have no words to pray, whether we are stressed out, physically exhausted, suffering or in anguish, or angry. Sometimes it's because our job takes all the words we have available in a day. But a steady diet of the psalms will give us words. I have personally used the psalms of ascent, Psalm 131 in particular, when I am overwhelmed and my brain seems to have shorted out. 

"O LORD, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time forth and forevermore." 

If we find ourselves out of words and unable to pray, we can turn to the psalms and simply say,"LORD, let your words be my words.”