Praying and Learning the Psalter

 

Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD! 

O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!

If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?

But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.

I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning. 

O Israel, hope in the LORD! For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption.

And he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.

Psalm 130

When Luther wrote his commentary on the Psalms, he made a humble and earnest request, a request I think we could all learn from. He asked that his words would never be placed alongside or together with the text of the Psalter, but rather in a separate volume - lest his words be given more attention that the words of the Triune God.

Countless Psalm commentaries have ignored this request, appealing to the usefulness and helpful nature of such comments. But despite the truth of their claims, Luther understood the treasure of the Psalms on a much deeper level, a level that allowed him to see that such was the value of this little book, that even the value of its explanation would not be worth the risk of drawing attention away from the Psalter's precious words.

The Psalter has been the primary prayerbook and hymnbook of God's people for millennia, since the last Psalm was written, likely a few hundred years before Jesus' birth. And since the death and resurrection of Christ, and the fulfillment of so many words of the Psalms, the book has taken on a more profound meaning, as the fullness of what God had been waiting to reveal finally took place. 

Throughout early church history and even (less frequently) in the present day, we see myriad examples of faithful Christians, particularly monks and church leaders learning the entire Psalter by heart. They found inestimable value in having these precious words with them always, in song and in prayer making their requests known to God.

Today, we are impressed with ourselves if we manage to remember a single weekly memory, or the occasional favorite passage. The memorization of God's word, learning the sacred pages by heart, has fallen by the wayside in proportion to the loss of our appreciation of its sacred and eternal value. Our time is increasingly filled with voices from glowing screens - neutral, harmless, pleasant entertainment. One of Satan's best tricks is that he often doesn't care to deceive and destroy us with powerful shows of evil and darkness. Rather, he overloads and distracts us quietly with the world, with things that aren't evil on their own. He tempts us to care for them and not for our Lord, to turn from our God and his word. Like the doomed seedling in the parable, so many are slowly destroyed while hardly noticing the process, choked by thorns as innocent as Sunday Night Football, a favorite YouTuber, a paycheck, or an image of a beautiful woman.

Against this relentless tide of false gods and worse-than-wasted time stands the Psalter. The Word of God and prayer all in one, a "little Bible" as Luther called it, calling us back to repentance, back to God's holy and beautiful Law, back to our Savior and his precious blood. Truly, we must begin to make the best use of the time, for the days are evil. To take back the time lost in the wide road of entertainment, and to replace it with praying and learning the Psalter, is to deprive the Deceiver of one of his greatest deceptions. Instead of chasing after the next dopamine hit, God in his Word offers us bread from heaven, and food that endures unto eternal life. 

God comes to us in the water and the word. He comes to us in his holy body and blood. Whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood has eternal life.

But stay awake, and don't forget: the road is long and dangerous from Sunday morning to Sunday morning. Will you go unarmed into the fray, fully aware that the lion prowls around you, that the thorns are always growing, reaching, thirsting to destroy your soul?

Or will you take up the Word of God with prayer? 

To take up the Psalter in prayer and song is to arm yourself for battle along the narrow way. To store it in your heart is to always be armed for war.

It should also be noted that the Psalter is by no means above the rest of sacred Scripture. We are called to hear the words of Christ, Paul's epistles, and the Law and the prophets - indeed we cannot and should not ignore a single word of God's counsel. And to ignore the New Testament is to ignore the fulfillment and culmination of all God's promises and Good News.

We simply focus on the Psalter here because our topic is the regular exercise of memory, song, and prayer, and the Psalms are the primary book that God has given us for this purpose. Perhaps uniquely among the books of the Bible, it functions, as Luther said, as an enchiridion, a little handbook, of all Scripture. Reading the book with the New Testament in mind, we can now see and take refuge in the  words of comfort and peace that reach across the centuries to sound in our longing ears, the words of hope, the words of the cross. 

Baptism (Psalm 51:7), The Lord's Supper (Psalm 78:24), Holy Absolution (Psalm 32:5), the cross (Psalm 22:1), eternal life (23:6), and a thousand other comforts and sorrows, all find a home in these ancient songs of prayer.

Replace the thorny white noise of 21st-century media with the Words of the Living God. Pick a book you like, whether it be the Psalms or something else that resonates with you. Then begin to learn that book - you can only ever begin to learn. Keep those words with you, and let them be a lamp to your feet, a light to your path, and a sword in your hand. Speak of them when you walk by the way, and let those words be heard often in your home. Sing them in the morning and in the evening, and cling to them in distress and in thanksgiving. 

The Deceiver has a thousand arts - and is even so bold as to use this article as a distraction from the living Word of God. He would have you spend hours reading blogs, watching videos, and making plans, rather than ever letting your shadow darken the threshold of God's sanctuary, or seeing your hands open the pages of God's Holy Word.

Don't give him that satisfaction - his road is wide and pleasant, but its end is like chaff that the wind drives away. Plant yourself by streams of water. Start a little habit in the Psalms. And don't stop until you arrive at home to dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

The words of the LORD are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times.

Psalm 12:6