The Psalms

I have memorized the majority of the Psalms and have a practice of praying them for many years. I have learned through personal experience that the psalms are given to us so that we might keep our hearts on matters that are important and eternal.
The psalms are a relief in times of trouble, not just in experiencing the promises. We are reminded of God’s faithfulness. At the same time, there are all of these workings in our souls that we do not see, that create a working power to persevere in the promises with a longing to return for more. In this sense you will never be bored in prayer.

One of the purposes of praying and meditating on the psalms is that we are not always aware of what is really going on inside of us as the point of our anxieties, fears, or doubts. What the cries and the promises and the praises do is that they are determined to work in us by His power of will to bring out of us the reality of believing by receiving. We are always in need of these different realities of faith, in which we begin to enter His presence through the process of longing graces. Longing graces are longings that are natural to our experiencing regeneration and on to renewal. These spiritual longings are never satisfied on this earth, but rather increase. We long to see Him. We long to know Him. We long to have all of the things that come into our lives, be made straight and whole. God has given us these spiritual desires so that we might increase them. So we will not fall into sin and be tempted above that we are able.

The psalms are a place where we can take our anger, our problems, and all of our inner trials, and place them in the care of God. The psalms keep us from thinking that we can take care of these things in our own power. Since He says, when we are in trouble, we should pray. Then there is a perfect convergence of our burden to His care in the experiencing of His power by being reminded of His faithfulness by many different avenues of the accumulation of the experience of His power to longings in our past and present. By having a certain application of His assurance, our present longing is being satisfied. Praying the psalms is an experience as if I went in with a burden and came out feeling relieved.

My last explanation is very mysterious. I don’t think we can take credit as if we were fighting a personal devil by them, but we do not fight against flesh and blood. So these Psalms are given to us for our own spiritual protection and our family’s salvation and protection. And in this sense there are some very impersonal things that come as a result of these powerful cries. Since we do not know who the enemy’s minions are, or where the enemy is present, we are offered a fight that is only ours to resist and His to destroy. When we think of the attack as being in a given situation or a particular person, we have not been ridden of our personal anger in the battle. The psalms are the place where we fight by resistance and yet our heads are protected by knowing that He is taking care of all of our troubles in our defensive manner. Here is the experience of having a very strong resistance or being able to pin the enemy on a regular basis. It depends upon what the test is. And so the test becomes more and more resistant the more we are moved forward by His work. The Psalms are not an answer to our getting a victory by our own understanding. We are resisting knowing that He has a greater vision of what needs to be done and what is going to be best to protect us. He works through the means of prayer.