How to Pray the Psalms

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | - This week on the Ask Pastor John podcast,

00:00:06.840 | we're joined by pastor and author Tim Keller.

00:00:09.480 | He has a really excellent book coming out soon

00:00:11.600 | titled Prayer, Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God.

00:00:15.560 | And he joins us today from his office in New York City

00:00:17.760 | to talk about prayer.

00:00:18.600 | This week, I plan to ask 10 rapid fire questions,

00:00:22.000 | two questions per episode this week.

00:00:23.680 | So here we go, Dr. Keller, here's question number one.

00:00:26.640 | I wanna begin with a broad question.

00:00:29.560 | Among Christians today, how widespread is prayerlessness

00:00:33.680 | and what does it reveal about our spiritual health?

00:00:36.360 | - Well, I think that's actually, it's a broad question,

00:00:42.440 | but it's also not that hard a question to answer.

00:00:45.320 | I know that from a secular,

00:00:48.280 | just from empirical secular studies,

00:00:51.120 | everyone in our Western society today has less solitude.

00:00:57.720 | Everybody says that.

00:00:59.560 | All of us have, there's less and less of our day

00:01:04.080 | or our month or our week in which we are unplugged.

00:01:09.080 | We're not listening to something

00:01:11.320 | or talking to somebody or texting.

00:01:14.920 | It's because of the, you know,

00:01:16.880 | how pervasive social media is and the internet is

00:01:20.660 | and various sorts of electronic devices.

00:01:22.840 | And therefore, most people in the past

00:01:25.620 | couldn't avoid solitude to some degree,

00:01:28.080 | but now there isn't any.

00:01:29.680 | And so everybody I talk to, this is anecdotal,

00:01:33.960 | everybody I talk to seems so busy

00:01:36.400 | and is communicating so incessantly and around the clock

00:01:41.400 | that I do think that there's more and more prayerlessness.

00:01:44.960 | There's less and less time where people go

00:01:47.960 | into a solitary time or place to pray, that's all.

00:01:52.880 | I'm virtually sure that we are more prayerless

00:01:56.660 | than we've been in the past,

00:01:57.900 | and that does say that our spiritual health is in freefall.

00:02:02.440 | - Sobering.

00:02:04.940 | All right, on to question number two.

00:02:06.980 | Your book is very clear.

00:02:08.380 | A profitable prayer life is impossible without God's word.

00:02:12.620 | You explain a time in your life

00:02:13.940 | when you were driven by desperation to pray,

00:02:16.500 | and so you opened up the Psalms and you prayed through them.

00:02:19.260 | Explain how you did this, what it did to you,

00:02:22.340 | what did you learn during the season

00:02:23.940 | of going through the Psalms?

00:02:26.220 | - Well, that's a, I'm glad to talk about that.

00:02:29.160 | I came to see that the Psalms were extremely important,

00:02:33.940 | perhaps for prayer.

00:02:36.220 | Perhaps that's because I read a book some years ago

00:02:39.140 | by Eugene Peterson called "Answering God."

00:02:42.060 | He makes a very strong case that we only pray well

00:02:46.660 | if we are immersed in the scripture

00:02:49.920 | so that we learn our prayer vocabulary

00:02:52.880 | the way children learn their vocabulary,

00:02:55.360 | that is, they're immersed in language

00:02:56.560 | and then they speak it back.

00:02:58.360 | And he said that the prayer book of the Bible

00:03:01.120 | is the Psalms and we should be immersed in the Psalms

00:03:03.080 | and our prayer life would be immeasurably enriched

00:03:05.980 | if we were immersed in the Psalms.

00:03:07.320 | So that was, I guess, the first step

00:03:09.240 | that I realized I needed to do that, but I didn't know how.

00:03:12.960 | Then I spent a couple of years studying the Psalms.

00:03:16.680 | At one point, I realized that there were a fair number

00:03:19.440 | of the Psalms that seemed repetitious

00:03:20.920 | or difficult to understand,

00:03:23.200 | so I couldn't use them in prayer.

00:03:25.120 | So I decided to work through all 150 of them

00:03:27.680 | and I used Derek Kidner's little Tyndale commentary,

00:03:31.160 | Alec Mateer's commentary in the New Bible commentary,

00:03:34.360 | "21st Century," Mateer on the Psalms,

00:03:37.400 | and Michael Wilcock, his commentary on the Psalms

00:03:40.180 | in "The Bible Speaks Today."

00:03:41.960 | And what I did was I worked through all 150 Psalms

00:03:45.200 | and wrote a small outline and a small description

00:03:49.760 | of what I thought the Psalm was basically about

00:03:52.240 | and key verses that I thought were useful for prayer.

00:03:56.160 | Every one of these Psalms was a very small paragraph.

00:03:59.240 | Now, admittedly, I'm using nine-point font,

00:04:01.640 | but basically it's about, I got all 150 Psalms

00:04:06.640 | on about 20 pages, which I use now in the morning

00:04:11.800 | whenever I'm praying.

00:04:14.680 | And by the way, I use the Book of Common Prayers schedule,

00:04:17.560 | which is I read Psalms in the morning and the evening

00:04:19.600 | and then I pray.

00:04:20.480 | Sometimes I actually pray the Psalm,

00:04:21.940 | but many times I just read the Psalm and then pray.

00:04:25.180 | And I do it morning and evening,

00:04:27.320 | get through all 150 Psalms every month.

00:04:29.960 | So that's what I learned and that's what I do now.

00:04:34.960 | - I love this intentional and disciplined approach.

00:04:38.920 | And I presume over time you found Peterson's point

00:04:40.920 | to be true, that this practice

00:04:42.080 | really shaped your prayer language.

00:04:44.060 | - Yes, that's the reason why you don't just have to,

00:04:46.960 | you don't have to literally take the Psalm

00:04:48.960 | and turn it into a prayer,

00:04:49.880 | though that can often be very powerful.

00:04:51.640 | Just reading the Psalms every month all the way through

00:04:55.120 | and then praying after reading a Psalm

00:04:57.200 | absolutely changes your vocabulary, your language,

00:05:00.320 | your attitude.

00:05:02.520 | Tony, on the one hand, the Psalms actually show you

00:05:06.160 | that you can be very unhappy in God's presence.

00:05:12.800 | The Psalms in a sense give you the permission

00:05:15.700 | to really pour out your complaints in a way that probably,

00:05:20.700 | if it wasn't for the Psalms, we might think inappropriate.

00:05:23.660 | But on the other hand, the Psalms demand

00:05:26.940 | that you bow in the end to the sovereignty of God

00:05:30.300 | in a way that modern culture wouldn't lead you to believe.

00:05:34.920 | So Alec Matier said, "The Psalms are written by people

00:05:38.540 | "who knew a lot less about God than we do

00:05:40.340 | "and love God a lot more than we do."

00:05:42.780 | And by that he meant because they didn't know

00:05:45.380 | about the cross, there's a number of places

00:05:47.860 | where you could say, "Hey, I don't know as much

00:05:50.100 | "about God's saving purposes as I do now

00:05:52.900 | "on this side of the cross."

00:05:54.220 | But he says, "Even though many of the Psalmists

00:05:55.860 | "don't know God as well as we do,

00:05:57.940 | "they love God more than we do."

00:06:00.060 | So that insight, by the way, also helped me

00:06:03.180 | through some of the Psalms

00:06:04.580 | where there's calls for vengeance and things.

00:06:06.820 | - Yeah, so true.

00:06:09.500 | Thank you, Dr. Keller, for this model.

00:06:10.900 | I do wanna ask you how a good Calvinist complains to God

00:06:13.540 | and I'll ask that later in the week.

00:06:15.380 | But I have two questions queued up for you tomorrow,

00:06:17.300 | including how do we discipline ourselves

00:06:19.100 | to avoid the digital distractions of our phones

00:06:22.060 | when we should be praying?

00:06:23.420 | I'm your host Tony Reinke, we'll see you tomorrow.

00:06:25.540 | (upbeat music)

00:06:28.140 | (upbeat music)

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How to Pray the Psalms

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