Many Christians long to pray better but do not know where to begin. Their prayers feel thin, repetitive, quickly exhausted. To all such — which is to say, to nearly all of us — God has given a remarkable gift: a prayer book bound into the very middle of the Bible. The Psalms are one hundred and fifty inspired prayers and songs, given not only to be read but to be prayed. For thousands of years God’s people have found in them the words they could not find for themselves. Learning to pray the Psalms is one of the surest ways to grow a rich and honest life of prayer. Here is how to begin.
Why the Psalms are made for praying
Most of Scripture is God’s word to us; the Psalms are unique in that they are largely our words back to God — yet still inspired, still his word, so that in them God actually teaches us how to speak to him. Every note of the human heart is here. There are psalms of soaring praise: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name” (Psalm 103:1). There are psalms of raw lament: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1). There are psalms of confession (Psalm 51), of trust (Psalm 23), of thanksgiving, of longing, of confusion, of settled joy. Whatever state your soul is in, there is a psalm that has been there first — which means you never have to face God with nothing to say. Even Jesus prayed the Psalms; on the cross he cried the opening words of Psalm 22, and with his last breath prayed Psalm 31:5, “Into your hand I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). If the Son of God prayed the Psalms, we may be sure they are a fit school for us.
Make the psalm’s words your own
The simplest way to pray a psalm is to read it slowly and turn its words into your own prayer, line by line. This is the old practice that Madame Guyon, in A Short and Easy Method of Prayer, called praying the Scripture — not racing through a chapter, but pausing over a verse, letting it sink in, and speaking it back to God as your own. Take Psalm 23. Do not merely read “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1); pray it: Lord, be my shepherd today; teach me to want nothing but you. When you reach “he restores my soul,” stop and ask him to restore yours. When a line describes a need you feel, linger there; when it voices a praise, offer it. In this way the psalm becomes a channel, carrying your own heart’s cry in words God himself has provided. You will find that the Psalms give language to feelings you could not otherwise express, and lift your prayers above the narrow circle of your own concerns.
Let the Psalms stretch your prayers
Left to ourselves, our prayers tend to shrink to a short list of personal requests. The Psalms stretch them. They teach us to praise God for who he is, not only to ask him for what we need: “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised” (Psalm 145:3). They teach us honest lament — to bring our grief and even our confusion to God rather than hiding it, for the psalmists pour out complaints we might think too raw for prayer, and God saw fit to inspire them. They teach us to confess sin deeply: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:10). They teach us to trust in the dark: “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you” (Psalm 56:3). Praying through the Psalms over time gives our souls a fuller diet than we would ever choose on our own — the whole range of a healthy life with God, praise and sorrow and repentance and hope together.
The Psalms for every season of the soul
One of the great gifts of praying the Psalms is that they meet us in every condition, and teach us how to bring even the hardest of them honestly to God. When your heart is full of praise, the Psalms give you words larger than your own: “Praise the Lord! For it is good to sing praises to our God” (Psalm 147:1). When you are crushed by sorrow, they refuse to let you pretend before God, but hand you the language of honest grief — “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!” (Psalm 130:1) — and then, verse by verse, walk you back up toward hope. When you have sinned and feel unclean, Psalm 51 leads you step by step into repentance and restored joy. When you are anxious, Psalm 46 steadies you: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” When you are weary and worn, Psalm 121 lifts your eyes: “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come?” This is the pastoral genius of the Psalter: it does not offer one mood but the whole range of the believing heart, so that no season of life finds you without a prayer. Even the darkest psalms, the ones that end still in shadow, are a gift, for they assure us that faith is allowed to bring its confusion and pain to God rather than hide them — and that he is big enough to receive them.
Praying the Psalms this way also quietly cures a common problem in prayer: self-absorption. Left alone, we tend to pray about the same few worries in the same few words. The Psalms pull us out of that narrow circle. They set us praying for God’s honor in the whole earth, for justice for the oppressed, for the coming of his kingdom — concerns far larger than our own, which nonetheless become ours as we pray them. In this way the Bible’s prayer book slowly enlarges the heart, teaching us to care about what God cares about.
A simple pattern to begin
You need no special method, only a Bible and a little unhurried time. Choose one psalm — perhaps a short one to start, like Psalm 23, Psalm 100, or Psalm 121. Read it through once to hear it. Then read it again slowly, stopping at each verse to pray it back to God in your own words: praising where it praises, asking where it asks, confessing where it confesses, trusting where it trusts. Do not hurry to finish; it is better to pray three verses deeply than to skim thirty. Some find it helpful to pray one psalm each morning, or to work slowly through the whole book over months. Others keep a few favorites for particular seasons — a psalm of lament for grief, a psalm of praise for joy, Psalm 51 for repentance. Charles Spurgeon, who loved the Psalms above almost all Scripture and spent years writing on them, urged Christians to make them the daily companion of their prayers, certain that a heart soaked in the Psalms would never lack for words before God.
The fruit of praying the Psalms
Something happens to us when we pray the Psalms over time. Our prayers grow deeper and more honest, because the Psalms will not let us pretend before God. They grow richer in praise, because the Psalms are saturated with the greatness of God. They grow steadier in trial, because we have rehearsed, in the psalmists’ words, how to trust God in the dark. And slowly our hearts are shaped to love what the Psalms love — God himself, above every gift. This is the quiet genius of praying Scripture back to God: his word does not merely inform our prayers, it forms our hearts, teaching us to desire rightly and to feel rightly as we pray. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Colossians 3:16); there is no richer way to let it dwell in you than to pray it.
So if your prayers have grown dry or thin, do not strain to manufacture better feelings. Simply open the Psalms and begin to pray. Let David’s repentance become yours, and Asaph’s honesty, and the sons of Korah’s longing, and the whole choir’s praise. You will discover that God has already given you the words — that the Bible’s own prayer book is waiting to teach you to pray. “Oh come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!” (Psalm 95:1). Begin there, and let the Psalms lead you home to God. Generations of believers, from the earliest church to the present day, have learned to pray in exactly this school, and you can too — one psalm, one verse, one honest prayer at a time. The words are already given; you have only to make them your own.