First, the Psalms teach us to pray through
imitation and response. Real prayer is always
an answer to God's revelation. The Psalms are
BOTH prayer and revelations about God—the perfect soil for learning prayer.
Secondly, the Psalms take us deep into our own hearts – one thousand times faster than
we would ever go if left to ourselves. Religious
people tend to want to deny the rawness and
reality of their own feelings, especially the
darkness of them. The secular world has
almost made an idol of emotional selfexpression.
But the Psalmists neither ‘stuff’
their feelings nor ‘ventilate’ them. They pray them. They take them into the presence of God until they change or understand them.
Finally, and most importantly, the Psalms force us to deal with God as He is, not as we
wish he was. “Left to ourselves, we will pray
to some god who speaks what we like hearing,
or to the part of God we manage to
understand. But what is critical is that we
speak to the God who speaks to us, and to
everything He speaks to us...the Psalms train
us in that conversation.” (from Eugene Peterson's Answering God)
