The Psalms Help Our Own Prayers Become Broader and Deeper

Pray Scripture

I love to read and memorize the psalms, but my favorite way to engage the psalms is to pray them. I love to pray the psalms, whether that’s taking the actual verses as the psalmist wrote them out and making them my prayer, or using them as a springboard where I take the ideas that the psalmist is praying and use those to make my own prayers.

I love that because it helps my prayers in at least two ways. One, it helps me pray more broadly, but also more deeply. Broadly, the psalms remind me to pray for many more things than I would tend to think of on my own. If I’m just praying from my mind and the particular things that come to mind each day or from a list that I’ve put together, I tend not to pray for as many things as I find when I look at the psalms and see all the different topics and people that they include.

The psalmists pray for their physical and spiritual needs, they pray for their friends and their enemies, they pray for God’s people and evil-doers, they pray for their current struggles and also for future generations. It covers so many different areas of life, and so it prompts me to pray much more broadly and comprehensively than I would tend to do on my own.

They help me pray more deeply because whereas I might just say, Lord, help me to have a good day at work today (and there’s nothing wrong with that prayer), in the psalms I would find the psalmist saying, Lord, if you don’t build the house, then I’m laboring in vain. And so would you establish the work of my hands? Would you give me favor in my work?

Whereas I might say, Lord, would you help me to be content in my circumstances? I find the psalmist saying, Lord, whom have I in heaven but you, and earth has nothing that I desire besides you. It’s not bad to pray for contentment in circumstances. Paul encourages us toward that. But there’s even something deeper in the psalms, which is that I would be so satisfied in the Lord that that would sustain me and fill me beyond my circumstances. Ultimately, I would be looking to him for that satisfaction instead of just wanting the day-to-day to change.

So, as I pray through the psalms, I’m not just reading them but really meditating on them and thinking about what the psalmists were asking of the Lord. That can be a model for me as I approach the Lord, and my prayers are broader, deeper, and richer.

Winfree Brisley is the coauthor with Sharonda Cooper of Turn Your Eyes: A Bible Study on the Psalms.

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