The Psalms Teach Us How to Pray

At the end of Psalm 72 there is a brief editorial note: “This concludes the prayers of David son of Jesse.” It is an interesting description of what we call the Psalms. The Psalms are prayers. They are words spoken and sung to God. This simple observation is important because the Psalms do not merely give us things to believe about God. They give us words with which to address him.

Lord, Teach Us to Pray

Human beings have a natural capacity to pray. We cry out to God when we are afraid. We ask him for things we need. We give thanks when something good happens. We express our thoughts, desires, fears, and hopes to God. Yet having the ability to pray is not the same thing as knowing how to pray.

The disciples apparently understood this. They had certainly prayed before. As Jewish men, they had grown up in a world filled with Scripture and prayer. Yet after watching Jesus pray, one of them made a simple request: “Lord, teach us to pray.”

Prayer, then, is something that can be learned. We should not assume that because we can speak to God, we already know what to say. There are things about God that we have not learned to praise. There are sins that we do not recognize. There are things we should desire that we do not yet desire. There are ways of responding to suffering, joy, fear, injustice, and even death that we would probably never discover on our own. We need to learn how to pray.

Learning by Imitation

Most of us first learn to pray in much the same way that we learn to speak: through imitation. As children, someone gives us words to say. Perhaps it is a simple prayer at the dinner table: “God is great, God is good, and we thank him for our food.” Perhaps it is a prayer before bed: “Now I lay me down to sleep.” We repeat words that someone else has given us, and gradually we learn the language of prayer.

As we grow older, the process continues. We listen to our parents pray, and then to pastors, teachers, and other trusted Christians. We begin to imitate their words and patterns, often without realizing it.

My dad, for example, frequently began his prayers by saying, “We come to you at this evening hour.” In the morning it became, “We come to you this morning,” and at noon, “We come to you at this noon hour.” He would let God know what time it was! Having heard my dad pray this way again and again, the same expressions naturally found their way into my prayers.

There is something good about this. Parents should teach their children to pray, and mature Christians should provide models for those who are learning. However, our first models should not be our final models. “God is great, God is good” is an excellent prayer for a child, but our prayer life would be terribly poor if this remained the extent of our prayer vocabulary as adults. In the same way, the prayers we learn from parents and pastors may provide a good beginning, but eventually we need a more substantial model.

God Gives Us a Prayer Book

Remarkably, God has given us this more substantial model in the Psalms.

At the center of the Bible is an entire book of inspired prayers. Think about how unusual this is. We rightly understand the Bible to be the Word of God. In Scripture, God speaks to us. Yet in the Psalms, the Word of God gives us the words of human beings speaking back to God. God has not simply told us to pray. He has given us words to pray.

The prayers of parents and pastors can teach us, but the Psalms are different. They are prayers that God himself has given to his people. If prayer is something we learn through imitation, then the Psalms give us an inspired model to imitate.

The Psalms also take our prayers beyond the limits of our own experience. If prayer only expresses what is already in our hearts, our prayers will always be limited by what is already there. We will only pray about the things we already care about. We will confess only the sins that we already recognize. We will praise God only for what we already understand about him. We will ask only for the things we already know we need.

The Psalms enlarge our prayers. They teach us how to speak to God in suffering and joy, confidence and confusion, repentance and praise. They teach us to remember God’s mighty acts, to lament injustice, to wait when God seems silent, and to rejoice in his salvation. Sometimes they give words to experiences that we have never known how to express. At other times they put words into our mouths that we would never have thought to say.

The Psalter, then, becomes a school of prayer. It teaches us about God, but it also teaches us about ourselves. It teaches us about suffering, joy, hope, fear, sin, forgiveness, redemption, justice, history, creation, life, and death. The Psalms do more than give us additional things to say. They form the person who is praying.

Learning to Pray with Jesus

There is one more reason the Psalms should have a central place in learning to pray, and it may be the most important one. The Psalms are the prayers of Jesus.

Jesus lived in the Psalms. He sang them with God’s people. He quoted them throughout his ministry. He understood his own life and mission through them. Even as he was dying on the cross, the words of the Psalms were on his lips. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” comes from Psalm 22. “Into your hands I commit my spirit” comes from Psalm 31. The prayer book of Israel was the prayer book of Jesus.

When Christians pray the Psalms, therefore, we are not simply imitating David or borrowing prayers from ancient Israel. We are learning to pray with Jesus. We listen to the Son speak to the Father, and we learn to imitate Him.

This helps explain why the Psalms teach us so much more than a technique for prayer. In the prayers of Jesus, we learn what it means to live a truly human life before God. Jesus teaches us how to suffer and rejoice, how to hope and wait, how to confront evil and desire justice, how to trust the Father, and how to face death. As his prayers become our prayers, his words begin to shape our understanding of God, ourselves, and the world in which we live.

There is, however, a difficulty. For Christians who have learned to think of prayer mainly as the spontaneous expression of our own thoughts and desires, praying the Psalms can initially feel unnatural. We may come across a Psalm and think, “I don’t feel this way,” or “These aren’t my words.” We may even wonder how reading words written by someone else can really be prayer.

That reaction raises an important question. Is prayer simply a way to express what is already inside us, or is prayer also one of the ways God changes what is inside us?

We will take up that question in the next article. For now, the disciples’ request remains a good place to begin: “Lord, teach us to pray.” We should not assume that because we can speak to God, we already know how to pray. We need to be taught, and God has given us an inspired model. In the Psalms, we learn the prayers of Jesus and, in praying them, we learn to pray with Him.

The Psalms teach us how to pray.