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It is at the same time a book about reading the Old Testament as a source of Good News and guidance for our life with God.
Rather, the Psalms teach us that profound change happens always in the presence of God.
when we open our minds and hearts fully to the God who made them, then we open ourselves, whether we know it or not, to the possibility of being transformed beyond our imagining.
Psalter is the one book of the Bible to which, it seems, prayerful Christians require immediate daily access.
That is what the Psalms are about: speaking our mind honestly and fully before God. The Psalms are a kind of First
Psalms are the Spirit of God speaking through us, helping us to pray when we do not know how to pray as we ought, which is most of the time.
We must also speak wisely, at least some of the time. And if we attend to the Psalms patiently and deeply, they will teach us wisdom in prayer. It
We thank you also for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.”1
The Psalms give us words for all the moods in which we come before God: adoration, exultation, gratitude;
When you lament in good faith, opening yourself to God honestly and fully—no matter
what you have to say—then you are beginning to clear the way for praise. You are straining toward the time when God will turn your tears into laughter. When you lament, you are asking God to create the conditions in which it will become possible for you to offer praise—conditions, it turns out, that are mainly within your own heart.
The thing to look for in a lament psalm is how it moves. For almost invariably, the psalmist comes out in a different place than she first entered into prayer; her view of the situation and of God shifts in the course of praying.
The first word in this psalm is the most important: “LORD” (YHWH).2 It is the most frequently repeated word in the poem: eight times the psalmist names God as the focus of hope and the source of help. This
Prayer is not always answered in the terms we expect and long for; the answer may be given in a way that is not even perceptible to someone looking at the situation from the outside.
The cursing psalms are in fact a crucial resource for our spiritual growth, indispensable if we are to come before God with rigorous honesty. They are necessary not only for our individual spiritual health but also for maintaining or restoring the health of the church. For these psalms reckon directly with a feature of church life which is almost never acknowledged: the phenomenon of betrayal within the faith community. Once,
The cursing psalms help us to hold our anger in good faith. Sadly, most of us feel about our enemies more like the psalmist does than like Jesus did.
the cursing psalms confront us with one of our most persistent idolatries, to which neither Israel nor the church has ever been immune: the belief that God has as little use for our enemies as we do, the desire to reduce God to an extension of our own embattled and wounded egos.
Second, because these psalms come to us as divinely given “counselors,” we can trust their teaching that vengeful anger is one mode of access to God. “O God of my praise” (109:1),
The lament psalms are prayers of anguish yearning to be transformed into praise.
we praise God in order to see the world as God does. So, setting aside our own groundless fantasies, the alternative viewing lens that this psalm offers is “the word of the LORD.” God’s word is itself “straightforward” (33:4), just as we may hope to be. In our parlance,
So, like the laments, this psalm of praise ends with anticipation. God’s praise is sung in the middle of history, by those who are still looking for God’s covenant love to be fully manifest in every aspect of their lives
For people who pray are people living in hope. Biblical tradition associates prayer with hope more consistently than with satisfaction. Standing firmly in this tradition, the apostle Paul instructs the gentile Christians in Rome: “Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer”
