Personal Liturgies

"When I find myself in times of trouble..." it's not Mother Mary that I need: I need Jesus! I've found that I have the most access to his power and enabling presence when I structure my life more around disciplined habits of prayer and scripture reading.

Check out The Spiritual Discipline You Need In Time of Trouble by Reuban Posthuma via Relevant

On occasional dark days, I’m tempted to view my life as a losing, lonely battle.

“Existence is suffering,” my foolish heart cries, and with Sartre, “hell is other people.” When pain and darkness crush our hearts, we find it difficult to cry out to God. In the midst of suffering, we cry, but our cries often ignore the living God. This is not a new problem.

Author David Powlison points out that this is God’s charge in Hosea 7:14: Instead of crying to Him, God’s people cry with their faces against the wall.

Pain, like unexpected road-kill, can splatter the entire windscreen of our hearts’ vision. It demands a response. Either we will cry out “my pain, my pain, my pain”, or we’ll cry with Jesus “my God, my God” (Psalm 22:1, Matthew 27:46).

As the Spirit works in us, we expect to grow in our reliance on God. But how?

One way we can do this is by taking in God’s Word and crafting liturgies for our hearts.

You may be familiar with liturgies within a church service. Personal liturgies are the same idea: Regular patterns or disciplines that can guide our spiritual growth.

For example, in the midst of severe depression a couple years ago, Psalm 23 formed the basis of my own personal liturgy. My heart screamed of things it wanted. I was tempted to believe that God didn’t care. I was terrified of the darkness.

As I learned to pray Psalm 23 multiple times during the day, I began to connect it to John 10:

Lord, you are my shepherd. In fact, you are my good shepherd in Christ, and He laid down His life for me. In this, you’ve proved that you will graciously give me all things: I lack nothing. You are leading me beside still waters, even though today feels stormy. I fear the evil I feel dogging me: please, restore my soul.

It seems that our pain often ebbs and flows, which gives us a chance to collect our thoughts and tune our liturgies for the next round of struggle. As the pain changes, our requests can morph. As we see more of the darkness in our hearts, we can add facets of repentance.

As God reveals more of His grace in other scriptures, we can tweak our liturgies.  

Personal liturgies make theology practical.

Preparing liturgies puts legs on our theology. We know that our hearts are prone to cry out on our beds, rather than to God. “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it.” We understand the threat, and we take away the excuse of “I don’t know what to pray”.

We know that God delights to hear us, and that we have access to His throne of grace as beloved children (Romans 5:2, Hebrews 5).

We know that we need God’s help desperately. Tomorrow, when I can’t rouse myself from bed, I’m going to need assistance to be able to call for God’s help. We write liturgies to help our desperate hearts call to the Savior.

Finally, we prepare liturgies because Jesus used scripture to guide His prayers in the midst of His suffering.

How to Start Practicing Personal Liturgies

With all this in mind, pick a passage which maps onto a particular hurt in your life right now. The Psalms of ascent are a brilliant place to start. Beginning often with a severe hardship, they move towards an agitated confidence in God.

This is the goal of our liturgies: to take your sorrowful hearts and shift it to praise, even when you don’t feel like it.

Once you have a passage, begin praying it. Write it down. Over time, add particular cries to God, add scriptures which draw you toward Christ more explicitly, and keep praying it. Ask that the Spirit would make you really feel the praise and the cries you offer.

Psalm 131 is a great psalm to pray with a troubled heart. Consider praying it repeatedly, with different emphases each time:

1. Confession: “Lord, my heart is proud: it is not calmed.”
2. Looking to Jesus: “Jesus, thank you that your heart was not proud, that you stilled your soul before God perfectly.”
3. I am weak: “Spirit, humble my heart and calm my soul.”
4. Commitment: “Lord, my heart is not proud.”

Grab a notebook, and begin a liturgy before the God who hears. If that feels impossible, ask a trusted friend for a passage, and discuss how you can pray it together.

Our hearts hurt, and the pain threatens to sink us. We have a Savior who is familiar with our weakness, we have a God who hears our cries, and we have the Spirit who stirs our heart to prayer.

Let scripture guide your hurting heart to cry out.

Psalm Immersion

Time for a good Psalm soak!  Reasons To Soak Yourself In The Psalms by Chris Bruno at TGC

Just before Thanksgiving in 2015, I was having lunch with a friend, and we were discussing how we teach our kids the gospel. He mentioned he was focusing on the Psalms since he realized the current generation of Christians might be the least “Psalms-literate” generation ever.

As I reflected later, his point hit home. For centuries faithful Israelites read, sung, and memorized the entire Psalter. Jesus likely knew all 150 Psalms by heart. For generations stretching back thousands of years, the Psalms have been the hymnbook of God’s people. Indeed, until recently, being part of the church for any length of time meant regular and systematic exposure to the Psalms.

So I decided to read through the Psalms once per month for a year. As I did, my eyes were opened to fresh depth and richness. Here are four reflections.

1. The Psalms are messianic.

From the blessed man who delights in God’s law (Ps. 1) to the Anointed One cast off and rejected (Ps. 89) now sitting at God’s right hand (Ps. 110), the Psalms tell the story of God’s people in the first person singular.

And this story finds its true meaning and ultimate fulfillment in the person and work of Jesus the Messiah. As we read the Psalms, Jesus’s sorrows, victories, and saving reign ring clear. If we are united to him, we share in all those experiences. The Psalms becomes our hymnbook and our prayers because they were first his hymnbook and his prayers.

2. The Psalms teach us God’s people have always suffered.

One of the central threads running through the Psalms is that Israel and her king must continue trusting their God in the face of suffering. Psalm 88 is the only one without a turn toward hope; it reminds us that some days will be bleak, and relief may not come quickly.

Psalm 2 teaches us that throughout history the earth’s kings will take their stand against the Lord and his anointed. He who sits in heaven laughs at everyone who opposes him, and his people will ultimately experience deliverance. This is why Jesus’s lament on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1), is an expression of hope that God has not hidden his face, but has heard his anointed’s cry and answered him (Ps. 22:24).

3. God’s promise of redemption is not far from the surface in the Psalms.

The Messiah suffered in hope because he knew his suffering was the way God would redeem his people from slavery to sin and death.

As you read through the Psalms you’ll see repeated pictures, symbols, and reminders of God’s salvation for his people and judgment on his enemies. For example, Psalm 78 tells the story of God’s unrelenting faithfulness to rescue the Israelites from Egypt and bring them into the land he promised. Although they continued to rebel, God chose David to shepherd his people—and through the greater David, the Lord would one day redeem them.

Again and again, the Psalms point Israel back to God’s mighty works in the exodus (Pss. 18:20; 80:8; 105:37; 136:11). And these reminders anticipate the second exodus, when God would deliver his people from slavery to sin and death through the death and resurrection of the Messiah.

4. The Psalms remind us of God’s sovereign glory and call us to praise him.

The Lord is the sovereign ruler over everything: “Our God is in the heavens, he does all that he pleases” (Ps. 115:3). Because of this, he is worthy of all praise and glory.

God will redeem his people through the Messiah, and this should drive us toward worship. I think this is why the Psalms close with a crescendo that is an increasingly loud call to praise (Pss. 146–50). We encounter an almost deafening cry to praise the Lord with trumpets, tambourines, dancing, shouting, and crashing cymbals. The book ends with the summons for everything that has breath to praise the Lord (Ps. 150:6). When we see God’s sovereign glory and salvation through the suffering of his Messiah, there is no other fitting response. 

Enrich Your Life

After spending a year getting to know the Psalms better, I couldn’t agree more with N. T. Wright’s conclusion that, while we should compose new hymns and songs, “to neglect the church’s original hymnbook is, to put it bluntly, crazy.”

If you don’t know the Psalter well, try spending a month or two or 12 in the Psalms. To read the Psalms in a month you’ll need to read about five per day. Most are pretty short, which should leave time for prayer, reflection, and reading elsewhere in the Scriptures.

Even on the day you read the 176 verses of Psalm 119, it won’t kill you.

Let’s join with God’s people through the millennia and again learn to sing the songs of the Messiah.

Praying the Psalms

Loved this post at Crossway Books called How To Pray Through The Psalms by Matt Tully. It was adapted from Praying the Bible by Donald S. Whitney. 

The Book of Praises

As a whole, the psalms comprise the best place in Scripture from which to pray Scripture. I base that on the original purpose for which God inspired the psalms. The book of Psalms—which means “book of praises” in Hebrew—was the songbook of Israel. The psalms were inspired by God for the purpose of being sung to God.

It is as though God said to his people, “I want you to praise me, but you don’t know how to praise me. I want you to praise me not because I’m an egomaniac but because you will praise that which you prize the most, and there is nothing of greater worth to you than I. There is nothing more praiseworthy than I, and it is a blessing for you to know that. It will lead to your eternal joy if you praise me above all others and above all else and to your eternal misery if you do not. But there’s a problem. You don’t know how to praise me, at least not in a way that’s fully true and pleasing to me. In fact, you know nothing about me unless I reveal it to you, for I am invisible to you. Therefore, since I want you to praise me, and it is good for you to praise me, but since you don’t know how to praise me, here are the words I want you to use.”

In other words, God gave the Psalms to us so that we would give the Psalms back to God. No other book of the Bible was inspired for that expressed purpose.

The “Psalms of the Day”

In light of this, I want to commend to you a systematic approach for praying a psalm each day. The approach did not originate with me, but I can’t recall where I first encountered the concept decades ago. It’s called “Psalms of the Day.” If you intend to pray through a psalm, using the Psalms of the Day approach helps you avoid thumbing through the middle of your Bible, randomly searching for a psalm that looks interesting. Too often, such an inconsistent process results in omitting many of the psalms. It also can slow your devotional momentum as you find yourself aimlessly meandering through chapters instead of praying.

With the Psalms of the Day you take thirty seconds or so to quickly scan five specific psalms and pick the one that best leads you to prayer on that occasion. It’s based on taking the 150 psalms and dividing them by thirty days (because most months have at least thirty days). That results in five psalms per day.

Or to put it another way, if you were to read five psalms a day for an entire month, at the end of the month you would have read through the entire book of Psalms. While reading five psalms a day is a great practice that many enjoy, that’s not what I’m advocating here. What I’m suggesting is that you take half a minute to quickly scan five psalms and pick one of those five to pray through.

If bringing math into prayer is making you skeptical, stay with me; I’ve created a simple, printable prayer guide that visually conveys all you’ll need to understand what I’m trying to describe.

Download my free Psalms of the Day Prayer Guide and start praying the Bible today!

Praying The Psalms

How to Pray through the Psalms adapted from Praying the Bible by Donald S. Whitney.

The Book of Praises

As a whole, the psalms comprise the best place in Scripture from which to pray Scripture. I base that on the original purpose for which God inspired the psalms. The book of Psalms—which means “book of praises” in Hebrew—was the songbook of Israel. The psalms were inspired by God for the purpose of being sung to God.

It is as though God said to his people, “I want you to praise me, but you don’t know how to praise me. I want you to praise me not because I’m an egomaniac but because you will praise that which you prize the most, and there is nothing of greater worth to you than I. There is nothing more praiseworthy than I, and it is a blessing for you to know that. It will lead to your eternal joy if you praise me above all others and above all else and to your eternal misery if you do not. But there’s a problem. You don’t know how to praise me, at least not in a way that’s fully true and pleasing to me. In fact, you know nothing about me unless I reveal it to you, for I am invisible to you. Therefore, since I want you to praise me, and it is good for you to praise me, but since you don’t know how to praise me, here are the words I want you to use.”

In other words, God gave the Psalms to us so that we would give the Psalms back to God. No other book of the Bible was inspired for that expressed purpose.

The “Psalms of the Day”

In light of this, I want to commend to you a systematic approach for praying a psalm each day. The approach did not originate with me, but I can’t recall where I first encountered the concept decades ago. It’s called “Psalms of the Day.” If you intend to pray through a psalm, using the Psalms of the Day approach helps you avoid thumbing through the middle of your Bible, randomly searching for a psalm that looks interesting. Too often, such an inconsistent process results in omitting many of the psalms. It also can slow your devotional momentum as you find yourself aimlessly meandering through chapters instead of praying.

With the Psalms of the Day you take thirty seconds or so to quickly scan five specific psalms and pick the one that best leads you to prayer on that occasion. It’s based on taking the 150 psalms and dividing them by thirty days (because most months have at least thirty days). That results in five psalms per day.

Or to put it another way, if you were to read five psalms a day for an entire month, at the end of the month you would have read through the entire book of Psalms. While reading five psalms a day is a great practice that many enjoy, that’s not what I’m advocating here. What I’m suggesting is that you take half a minute to quickly scan five psalms and pick one of those five to pray through.

If bringing math into prayer is making you skeptical, stay with me; I’ve created a simple, printable prayer guide that visually conveys all you’ll need to understand what I’m trying to describe.

Download my free Psalms of the Day Prayer Guide and start praying the Bible today!

HT: Crossway