Most of us were taught, somewhere along the way, that real prayer comes from the heart and so has to be improvised. You close your eyes, you reach inside for the right words, and if nothing comes you assume the fault is yours. On a good day the words arrive. On a hard day they do not, and the silence feels like failure.
The Psalms quietly undo that assumption. Here is a whole book of the Bible, a hundred and fifty prayers and songs, given to God’s people precisely so that they would not have to start from nothing. For three thousand years they have been the prayer book of believers who were too tired, too frightened, too furious, or too glad to compose anything themselves. You do not have to manufacture the words. They have been written for you, and they are better than the ones you would have found.
Words for when you have none
What strikes most new readers of the Psalms is the range. We tend to think prayer should be reverent and tidy, and some psalms are. But a great many are not. Roughly a third of them are laments — raw, unvarnished complaints to God about how wrong things have gone. They do not pretend. They argue. They ask how long.
How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? (Ps. 13:1, NIV)
That is in the Bible. God put it there. He is not embarrassed by the question, and he does not require you to dress up your distress before you bring it to him. The remarkable thing about Psalm 13 is where it goes. The same prayer that opens with how long closes six verses later with my heart rejoices in your salvation. Nothing in the psalmist’s circumstances has obviously changed. What has changed is that he has said the worst of it out loud, to God, and found God still there.
And then there is the other end of the range. When things are well, the Psalms hand you words large enough for the gladness:
Praise the Lord, my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits — who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases. (Ps. 103:1–3, NIV)
Left to ourselves, our praise stays small and vague. Thanks for everything. The psalmist will not let us off so lightly. He names the benefits one by one — forgiveness, healing, redemption, love, satisfaction — and in naming them he teaches the soul to actually feel them. To pray Psalm 103 is to be tutored in gratitude by someone who knew how.
Jesus prayed them too
There is a reason a Christian can pray these ancient Hebrew songs as his own, and the reason is Jesus. The Psalms were his prayer book. He sang them at festivals, quoted them in argument, and breathed them at the very end. On the cross, in the darkest moment any human being has endured, the words he reached for were not new. They were the opening line of Psalm 22:
About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). (Matt. 27:46, NIV)
That is Psalm 22:1, prayed by the Son of God in his agony. He had no need to compose something for the occasion. The Psalm was already waiting, written centuries before by David, and it fit the moment exactly — because it had, all along, been pointing forward to him. Read the rest of Psalm 22 and you will find pierced hands, mocking onlookers, and divided garments, all set down long before a Roman cross existed.
This is the deepest comfort the Psalms offer. When you pray them, you are not praying alone, and you are not the first. You are praying words your Lord himself prayed, in the company of everyone who has ever leaned on them. The lament psalms are no longer only David’s cry. They are the cry of the one who was truly forsaken so that you never finally will be.
A way in
Start small and start honestly. Pick a psalm that matches the day you are actually having rather than the day you think you ought to be having. If you are weary or grieving, pray Psalm 13 or Psalm 42. If you are glad, pray Psalm 103. If you are anxious, pray Psalm 23 slowly, one line at a time.
Read it aloud if you can. Pause where a line catches you and let it become your own. When a psalmist says something you do not yet feel, pray it anyway and let the words go ahead of your heart; that is part of how they do their work. Praying the Psalms is not a way of avoiding honest prayer. It is the school in which honest prayer is learned.