When Someone Else’s Words Don’t Feel Like Prayer

In the previous article, we considered the disciples’ request to Jesus: “Lord, teach us to pray.” Prayer is something that must be learned, and we normally learn through imitation. God has given us an inspired model in the Psalms. Even more importantly, the Psalms are the prayers of Jesus. When we pray them, we learn to pray with Him.

There is, however, a problem. When we actually begin praying the Psalms, it may not feel much like prayer. For many Christians, prayer means closing our eyes and telling God what is on our hearts. We tell Him what we are worried about, ask Him for what we need, and thank Him for what He has given us. Prayer is personal, spontaneous, and comes from within us.

Then someone suggests that we pray Psalm 27, Psalm 42, or Psalm 88. We open our Bible and begin reading words that someone else wrote thousands of years ago. Some of those words may describe exactly what we are feeling, but many of them will not. We may find ourselves praying about enemies when we cannot think of any enemies. We may be praising God when we feel miserable, or lamenting when we are having a wonderful day. It is natural to wonder, “How can these really be my prayers?”

Is Prayer About Expressing Ourselves?

Our modern culture places a high value on self-expression. We are encouraged to look within ourselves, discover what we think and feel, and then express it honestly. It is not surprising that we often bring this same idea into prayer. Authentic prayer, we assume, should begin with what is already inside us.

There is certainly something right about this. God does not want us to pretend. The Psalms themselves are remarkably honest. The writers tell God when they are frightened, angry, confused, joyful, lonely, or disappointed. They ask difficult questions and sometimes wonder why God seems absent. The Psalms certainly do not teach us to hide what is in our hearts.

Yet prayer cannot simply be the expression of what is already there, because our hearts are not yet everything they should be. We do not always love what we should love or hate what we should hate. We do not always recognize our sins or care about the things that matter to God. If prayer only gives expression to what is already inside us, our prayers will always be limited by what is already there.

Prayer Also Forms Us

This is where praying the Psalms begins to make sense. The Psalms do not simply give us a way to express our hearts to God; they also allow God to shape our hearts.

Sometimes we come to a Psalm of praise when we do not feel like praising. The Psalm reminds us who God is and what He has done. At other times, we encounter a lament when life is going well. Why should we pray words of sorrow when we are not suffering? One answer is that we are part of the people of God, and someone is suffering. The Psalms teach us to pray beyond the boundaries of our own immediate experience and to mourn with those who mourn.

The same thing happens when the Psalms speak about injustice, enemies, repentance, creation, the nations, death, or hope. They continually take us into places we would not naturally go. They teach us to notice things we might otherwise miss and to care about things that God cares about. Prayer, then, is not merely self-expression. It is also one of the ways God forms us.

Someone Else’s Words Become Our Words

Perhaps we can return to the way children learn to speak. A child does not invent a language. The words come from outside the child. Parents give their children words, and children listen and repeat them. At first they are someone else’s words, but eventually they become their own.

Something similar happens when we pray the Psalms. At first, some of the language may feel foreign. We may not understand why a Psalm says what it says or feel what the Psalmist feels. Yet as we continue praying through the Psalter, its vocabulary gradually becomes our vocabulary. We learn how to lament, praise, confess sin, remember God’s mighty works, long for justice, wait for God, rejoice in creation, face death, and hope for redemption because we have repeatedly prayed these things.

The words that first came to us from outside gradually become our words. This is not less authentic prayer. It is one of the ways we learn to pray.

There is still a practical question. What should we do when the Psalm we are praying does not seem to fit our circumstances? We should probably begin by resisting the assumption that every Psalm must describe our present feelings before we can pray it. Perhaps the Psalm gives us words that another Christian desperately needs today. Perhaps it reminds us of something about God that we have forgotten, exposes something in our hearts that needs to change, or prepares us for suffering that we have not yet experienced. Perhaps it gives us words for Jesus and His suffering, resurrection, and kingdom.

This is one of the reasons there is value in praying through the Psalms sequentially rather than always choosing the Psalm that seems most appropriate for the day. When we choose, we naturally gravitate toward what is already familiar and comfortable. When we pray the Psalms in order, we allow Scripture to set the agenda. Tomorrow’s prayer may take us somewhere we would never have chosen to go, and that may be exactly where we need to go.

Learning the Language of Jesus

There is one final reason we should be willing to pray words that do not initially feel like our own. As we saw in the previous article, these are the prayers of Jesus. When the words of a Psalm seem foreign to us, our first response should not necessarily be to reject them. We might instead ask why these words belong in the prayer life of Jesus and what He intends to teach us through them.

We are His disciples, and disciples learn by listening to their teacher and imitating Him. This brings us back to the request that started our discussion: “Lord, teach us to pray.” Perhaps one of the reasons the Psalms can initially feel unlike prayer is that we have already learned another way of praying. We have learned that prayer begins with us: our thoughts, feelings, needs, and words. The Psalms invite us into something larger. We still bring our hearts honestly before God, but we also allow God to give us words, enlarge our concerns, reshape our desires, and teach us what a human life before Him should look like.

At first, the Psalms may feel like someone else’s words. As we pray them, they become our words, and as the prayers of Jesus become our prayers, we learn not only how to pray but how to become like Him.