I Want to Live These Days with You: A Year of Daily Devotions

by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Psalter is the great school of prayer. We learn here, first, what it means to pray: to pray on the basis of the word of God, to pray on the basis of promises. Christian prayer stands on the solid ground of the revealed word and has nothing to do with vague, self-seeking wishes. We pray on the ground of the prayer of the true human being Jesus Christ. That is what the Scripture means when it says that the Holy Spirit prays in us and for us, that Christ prays for us, and that we can rightly pray to God only in the name of Jesus Christ. Second, we learn from the prayer of Psalms what we are supposed to pray. As surely as the scope of the prayer of Psalms extends far beyond the individual’s total experience, so surely the individual prays in faith the whole prayer of Christ, the prayer of the One who was true human being and who alone had the full measure of the experiences of this prayer…. Third, the prayer of Psalms teaches us to pray as a community. The body of Christ prays, and as an individual I know that my prayer is only a very small fraction of the whole prayer of the church. I learn to join in the prayer of the body of Christ. That lifts me above my personal concerns and lets me pray selflessly…. The deeper we grow into the Psalter and the more often we ourselves have prayed, the simpler and richer our prayer will become.