The easiest way to pray the psalms is to read them meditatively and allow them to shape our prayers, rather than trying to fit our prayers into the psalms. Traditionally, the psalms have been read daily; in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, it is possible to read through the whole book in a month by reading a selection of psalms each morning and evening. Other Bible reading schemes include a psalm, or portion of a psalm, each day so that in the course of a year, the whole book is covered. This allows for a more leisurely meditation of the Psalms. Reading them in different versions can help us to retain freshness so that familiarity doesn’t breed contempt.

The Psalms force us to look at different situations and emotions and show us how people bring these to God and cry out to Him. The most basic prayers are ‘Thank You!’ and ‘Help!’, but in the Psalms, we also discover laments, complaints, thanksgiving, despair, hope, confidence and trust. We discover, in effect, that there is nothing too small and nothing too big for God. They are often read individually, but also form the basis of our collective prayer, helping us to see God as He reveals Himself rather than as we may imagine Him to be.

Take a psalm a day and let it shape your prayers!

As we move on from considering the Psalms as poetry and song to thinking about them as tools for prayer, we spent the evening praying using the Psalms and the Lord’s Prayer (Matt 6:9-13) as the model for our prayers.

Timothy Keller calls the Psalms ‘uncensored prayer’ and Eugene Peterson says they are prayers which deal with ‘raw honesty and detailed thoroughness.’ Perhaps the most liberating thing we can discover in the Psalms are that they are prayers which are not ‘refined’. They haven’t been through some purification process which takes the emotion out of them and renders them ‘fit for human consumption.’ They are vibrant, pulsating with emotion, prayers which encourage us to come before God honestly and which remind us that we can bring absolutely every aspect of our lives to God in prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer gives us a framework for prayer, which always starts with honouring God. So many psalms also do this (see, for example, Ps 57:5, 7-11). To ponder, reflect on and meditate on God’s character and nature is always a good basis for prayer.

In prayer, we align our wills with God’s. Ps 119 gives us much to chew considering the role of God’s Word in helping us to do this. Ps 121 is an example of relying on God’s guidance, protection and provision for us as we seek God to provide our daily bread and realise we need spiritual food as well as natural bread. Prayer also has much to do with forgiveness – the forgiveness we receive from God and the forgiveness He expects us to show to others (see also Ps 32, Ps 51).

Prayer is a spiritual weapon and many psalms teach us how to trust God when we are going through temptations and trials (see Ps 13, Ps 88). Ultimately, the Psalms teach us how to rejoice in God (see Ps 100). In prayer, we may list our laments, bring our requests, sing joyfully or complain miserably in between, but we need to have a focus on the greatness and majesty of God as we pray, and the Psalms are one of the greatest ways of bringing our attention to the right place!

One of the most important things we need to embrace in our walk with Jesus is obedience. Samuel told the king Saul, after his foray into doing his own thing, that ‘to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.’ (1 Sam 15:22) These are strong words. Samuel went on to tell Saul that ‘rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry’ (1 Sam 15:23) and that the kingship would be taken from him as a result of this.

We need to ask God to search us and know us and reveal to us the areas of our lives where we are not being fully obedient. We so often can be like Jonah, running in the opposite direction from God, but perhaps more worryingly than this flagrant disobedience are the times when we compromise and rationalise what we do. We partially obey, thinking some obedience is better than none, when actually God searches our hearts and knows all our deception and half-truths and longs for us to obey whole-heartedly everything He tells us to do.

Jesus’s mother told the servants at Cana, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ (Jn 2:5) That simple text, when pondered and assimilated into our lives, becomes our springboard to obedience. God only needs our willingness. He even supplies the power to do that which He asks, once we yield ourselves to Him. Give up the excuses and step out in faith today. Obey God.

The song says ‘the best things in life are free’, and as the picture shows, so much of what makes life truly wonderful can’t be bought by money. We can easily lose our focus in life and become obsessed by earning more, owning more and striving for more. As we approach Easter, we need to learn to embrace the ‘little things’ in life which can make all the difference.

A smile, a hug, a word of encouragement can make a huge difference to us and to others. Learning to savour the springtime, pausing to smell the flowers, savouring the cup of coffee or tea made for us by a friend will never amount to ‘big things’, but they can change our perspective and ultimately change how we perceive the world. We need to slow down and appreciate the many ordinary, everyday gifts God gives us.

The Korean artist Puuung has produced some drawings of what love looks like (see here) and it’s true that it’s in the ordinary that we can often express love most effectively. Jesus said that ‘if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward.’ (Matt 12:42) The little things mean a lot. Try it and see.

Simplicity in life is all about weeding out the non-essentials and focussing on the things that are truly important. Just as our houses easily get cluttered without regular clear-outs, our lives can become full of clutter and rubbish: things we do which aren’t really essential to our health or happiness (and in fact are often detrimental to both), but which have become so much a part of our everyday routines that we can’t imagine life without them.

To embrace simplicity means to be still long enough to look at things objectively and ruthless enough to do something about the non-essential things which God, by His Spirit, highlights to us. Michael Card sings,

‘In stillness and simplicity
In the silence of the heart I see
The mystery of eternity
Who lives inside of me.’ (‘In Stillness and Simplicity’, Michael Card)

Rend Collective remind us that Jesus is the only true essential in our lives: ‘Lord, strip it all away, ‘til only You remain.’ (‘Simplicity’)

This is a dangerous prayer to pray, for God has a habit of doing this forcibly if we are not willing to take the time to be still before Him and freely yield ourselves to Him. Nonetheless, there is enormous freedom to be found ‘in the things we leave behind’ (Michael Card), enormous freedom in understanding the absolute basics of our faith. In this Lenten period, let’s embrace simplicity and be strong enough to give up some of the non-essentials to focus on Jesus, the absolute centre of our faith.

At restaurants we sometimes can’t finish all the food that is given us, and sometimes ask for a ‘doggy bag’ to be made up from our leftovers so that no food is wasted. Ostensibly, the bag is taken home to feed the dog; sometimes, we may well eat the leftovers ourselves!

Obviously it’s a good idea not to waste food, and it’s surprising what tasty meals can be made from leftovers (bubble and squeak, for example, is a dish made up of the leftover potato and cabbage from a Sunday dinner.) Even Jesus commanded the leftovers to be collected in after feeding the five thousand so that nothing was wasted! (see Jn 6:12-13)

What is perhaps one of the most encouraging verses in the whole Bible is tucked away in James 4:6: ‘But He gives us more grace.’ Grace is not just needed to open our eyes to God’s salvation (Eph 2:8-9), it is an ongoing part of our everyday lives. We need grace on a daily basis, just as the Israelites had to collect manna on a daily basis, collecting twice the amount on the day preceding the Sabbath so that they could obey God’s commandment to rest on the Sabbath. There are days when we feel we cannot carry on a step further, but then we find, unexpectedly, like hikers discovering capacious pockets containing nutrition bars, that He gives us more grace. We don’t just have ‘enough’ grace to survive; we have ‘more than enough’, a super-abundance of grace, grace that sustains us through the difficult times. (2 Cor 12:8-9)

Dig deep, for there will be a doggy bag of grace waiting for you somewhere today!