Class Outline:

Sunday October 23,2022

 

Title: God’s prayer book for us - The Psalms.

 

'I love your commands.' Psalm 119:47 CEV

George Müller was a man of great faith. He rescued thousands of homeless children in England. Sometimes when they gathered at the table for supper there was nothing to eat, so he would pray and thank God for supernatural provision. No sooner had he said, 'Amen', than a baker would show up at his door with bread, or a greengrocer with vegetables, or a farmer with milk.

Here is an entry from his journal, dated May 9, 1841: 'I saw more clearly than ever that the first great primary business to which I ought to attend every day was...not how much I might serve the Lord...but...how my inner man might be nourished. For I might seek to set the truth before the unconverted, I might seek to benefit believers...and yet, not being happy in the Lord, and not being nourished and strengthened in my inner man day by day, all this might not be attended to in a right spirit. Before this time my practice had been...to give myself to prayer after having dressed myself in the morning. Now, I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the word of God, and to meditation on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed; and that this, by means of the word of God, whilst meditating on it, my heart might be brought into experimental communion with the Lord.'

For over forty years, Müller walked in the power of God and saw miracles. What was his secret? Taking time each day to meditate in God's word.

 

 

“Lord, teach us to pray.” The disciples want to pray, but they do not know how to do it. This is an issue for many of us. We feel that our words are absurd, that we use a language that God doesn’t want to hear. Jesus is the one who can help us.

 

Jesus takes us with Him in prayer. We pray in His name. We are privileged to pray along with Him. He lets us accompany Him on His way to God and teaches us how to pray, and this frees us from the agony of prayer.

 

“Teach us to pray” was met by instruction.

 

LUK 11:1-2

“Lord, teach us to pray just as John also taught his disciples.” 2 And He said to them, “When you pray, say:”

 

Prayer is something we have to learn, LUK 11:1-2.

 

It is not some overflow of the heart that sometimes swells up like the tide and we find ourselves praying by pouring out our suddenly pressured hearts. Prayer is seeking to talk to God and hearing from Him. The Lord makes it clear that we have to learn how.

 

The Bible has its own prayer book, the Psalms. But prayers are the words of humans. This something that we can too easily overlook. The Psalter is different from all other literature types in the Bible in one dramatic way.

 

The Psalms are human prayers that God has claimed for His word.

 

Unlike all other literature in the Bible, The Psalms are the art of man claimed by God as His own.

 

All the prayers of the Psalms have a divine stamp of approval, and as we will find, they also apply to everything we could legitimately pray for.

 

I hope that we realize the implication. If I pray a psalm, I’m praying something that God took directly into His holy Scripture, which is in fact Him claiming the prayer for Himself. If I know the meaning of the words, and put my own will behind them, I have a prayer that is divinely fitting. Then I realize, there are 150 of them. Everything I could ever pray for is going to be found in them, and so that we won’t have to search and search them all the time, the important themes of life, that God would consider important, are repeated many times throughout them. We will see this.

 

We should not ask what our prayers or the prayers of the Psalms have to do with us, but what they have to do with Christ.

 

All of life and history are centered on Christ, and so must our lives be.

 

If prayer is all about me and not the manifestation of Christ in me, then it will be ineffective.

 

What do the words have to do with the will and program of God for all history and for me and whomever I’m praying for? This consideration is a surefire way of praying for the proper things, which will give the added confidence from the words of our Lord:

 

JOH 16:23

“Truly, truly, I say to you, if you shall ask the Father for anything, He will give it to you in My name.”

 

Remember, “in My name,” means in His will.

 

This is why the statement is true that whatever you ask “in His name,” you will receive (in His timing).

 

Our prayers are not going to be entered into the word of God, but when we pray in the name of Christ, we speak with Him and in fellowship with Him. In His name, we may pray the psalms. It doesn’t depend on how we feel at any given moment, meaning that we may (should) pray a psalm that doesn’t fit our current mood, and that perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. Should we always pray what we think is important? Because of our weakness in prayer (ROM 8:26), what we think is currently the issue with something, may not be accurate. When we pray the psalms, God the Holy Spirit can open our eyes to the real issue, and then we are praying what God wants us to pray.

 

We have to be discerning. There is no formula. Pray for what you think is important and also pray from something in the psalms, or do one or the other. Remember, prayer is a life-long conversation with God that God started. As we keep asking, seeking, and knocking, we will explore personal prayer, praying psalms and other passages, and if we long for our divine conversation, we will find the way that maximizes our personal relationship with the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit.

 

We may respond that if we are praying the psalms, how are we praying ourselves? There are 150 psalms, and I cannot imagine that what you are praying is not found in one of them. Likely, what you are praying, whatever is burdensome on your heart, whatever you are anxious to know, is found in several psalms, and remember, the psalms all have God’s stamp of approval.

 

In response to the requests of the disciples, Jesus gave them the Lord’s prayer. Every prayer is contained in it. Whatever is included in the petitions of the Lord’s prayer or is clearly related to them is prayed right, according to the will of God. If a prayer is clearly outside the parameters of the Lord’s prayer, we should examine it closely. There is a good chance that it is not proper and so will not be effective. Test this out for yourself.

 

All the prayers of Holy Scripture are summarized in the Lord’s Prayer and are contained in its immeasurable breadth. They are not made superfluous by the Lord’s Prayer but constitute the inexhaustible richness of the Lord’s Prayer as the Lord’s Prayer is their summation. Thus the Lord’s Prayer becomes the touchstone for whether we pray in the name of Jesus Christ or in our own name.

 

“It [Psalter] penetrates the Lord’s prayer and the Lord’s Prayer penetrates it, so that it is possible to understand one on the basis of the other and to bring them into joyful harmony.” [Martin Luther]

 

PSA 23:1-3

The Lord is my shepherd,

I shall not want.

2 He makes me lie down in green pastures;

He leads me beside quiet waters.

3 He restores my soul;

He guides me in the paths of righteousness

For His name's sake.

 

MAT 6:11

'Give us this day our daily bread.

 

Then we find that the apostles prayed the psalms, as did the early church, and as did the Lord Jesus Himself.

 

PSA 22:1

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?

 

Jesus cried this from the cross.

 

HEB 2:11-12

For both He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one Father; for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren, 12 saying,

 

"I will proclaim Your name to My brethren,

In the midst of the congregation I will sing Your praise."

 

PSA 22:22

I will tell of Your name to my brethren;

In the midst of the assembly I will praise You.

 

Christ gave Psa 22 its full meaning. The first part is the crucifixion and the second part, beginning at vs. 22, is the resurrection and His victory.

 

If we found ourselves using this psalm in our prayer, we would not have failed to think about the death and resurrection of Christ and the victory that He gave to the church, His brethren, as we were praying about our own situation. All things look differently in light of the cross and the empty tomb.

 

We will look at several themes in the psalms that would impact our own prayers for good. To discover all the themes contained in this treasure of prayer, we each have to explore the Book of Psalms consistently.

 

“I thought the Psalms were songs.”

 

They are songs, which in verse without the music, are prayers as well. Some of them look much more prayer-like and some more praise or song-like. But then again, praising or adoring God is one of the types of prayer that is so easily overlooked in our busy life schedules.

 

PSA 72:20

The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended.

 

Used 77 times in the OT, this is the general Hebrew word for prayer.

 

ISA 56:7

For My house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples.

 

Though the word is in the plural (“prayers”) in PSA 72:20, only one psalm describes itself as a prayer, PSA 17:1. We conclude that the end of Psa 72 is describing at least the first 72 as prayers.

 

My recommendation is that you read one or two of them a day, praying directly after or during.

 

And we will then see what all those “selahs” are doing there (71 of them in the Psalms). Selah

 

There are three of them in the first Psalm after the introduction to the book (Psa 1-2).

 

Selah - meditate on the meaning of the words just recited or sung.