The Gift Of Words
The Gift of Words
A more fulfilling prayer life is possible for every one of us - all we have to do is accept the gift.
In my last post I wrote about the problem of wordlessness, the frustrating place in prayer where spontaneity (overrated) has failed us and we find ourselves with nothing to say. Joel Miller speaks directly to this:
I wonder how often we come up dry and dumb with no words, no thoughts, no way of formulating the feelings, frustrations, and various shades of grief that we bear. Burdened and distracted, we can hardly remember to pray, and when we do we have nothing to say.
What if someone could guide you to God in those moments, could take you before the throne, lean over and whisper, “Just say it like this,” and then unfurl a stream of words that meant everything your heart was feeling but cannot communicate?
That someone is Christ, and he whispers in the Psalms.*
In his excellent book “Working the Angles” Eugene Petersen offers a simple remedy for the believer looking to get his prayer life off the ground: let God speak first, then respond.** For Petersen - and countless believers through the ages - the way we hear God speak is through the scriptures and the Psalms in particular.
Christians have always prayed spontaneously and we always will; it is a valuable part of our communication with God. But spontaneous prayer is not the only weapon we have available in our spiritual arsenal. God has given us the gift of words – His words – to shape and inspire our discourse with Him. And for as long as there have been Christians on the earth, the Psalms have always been known as the prayer book par excellence for the people of God. In fact, this tradition pre-dates the church; the Psalms are a legacy of our Hebrew heritage in the faith and our Messiah modeled this manner of praying for us throughout his life. As Scot McKnight writes:
“Jesus was a master of the Psalms…the Psalms spilled constantly from his lips… His entire life was bathed with Psalms… Jesus prayed the Psalms and Christians have always followed his example.”***
What does it mean to pray the Psalms? It is simply a matter of listening and responding. We listen by carefully reading the text with the mind and heart as fully engaged and attentive as possible. Response can be simply “praying back” your feelings and impressions of the Psalm to God in your own words, using the Psalm to ignite your own petitions. The traditional method is to “pray the Psalm” as written i.e., making the words of the Psalm your own. As Joel Miller said, letting the Lord give you the gift of words, “Just say it like this”. Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, believed that this approach was best:
“Whoever has begun to pray the Psalter earnestly and regularly will soon take leave of those other, easy, little prayers of their own and say: ‘Ah, there is not the sweetness, the strength, the passion, the fire which I find in the Psalter.”
It can be quite a discovery for someone schooled in spontaneity (like me) to learn that using someone else’s words in prayer can be equal to and greater than our own but if we allow ourselves to experience this grace in faith we will find that this is indeed the case. One of the early church Fathers, Athanasius of Alexandria (3rd C), said,
Under all the circumstances of life, we shall find that these divine songs suit ourselves and meet our own souls’ need at every turn.
Indeed. What’s more, the Christian who learns to pray the Psalms will find all of his or her prayer improved by the practice because the Psalms are a virtual school of prayer. As Petersen says,
“Left to ourselves, we will pray to some god who speaks what we like hearing, or to the part of God we manage to understand. But what is critical is that we speak to the God who speaks to us, and to everything He speaks to us...the Psalms train us in that conversation."****
The Psalms train us in conversation with God – what a wonderful thought! God’s gift to the wordless is the gift of words, a perfect picture of grace from the God who supplies our every need.
References
* Joel Miller’s Blog, Praying the Psalms, http://joeljmiller.com/praying-the-psalms/
**Eugene Petersen, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987
***Scot McKnight, Praying with the Church: Following Jesus Daily, Hourly, Today, Paraclete Press, 2006
****Eugene Petersen, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer, HarperOne, 1991
