Psalter Prayer

One of my favorite moments in The Wizard of Oz was when Dorothy opened the door of her house, freshly deposited by a tornado in the land of Oz. What greeted her was a world brilliant in color, a display of beauty, wonder and richness.

That serves as a picture for our prayer lives. We are often satisfied (or resigned) to black and white prayer, prayer that’s important but lacking. Our God and Father, however, bids us to prayer rich in fellowship with Him, broad as the range of life itself, with depth that looks beyond fixing the circumstance to the purpose of God in it.

God provides for that prayer in the psalms. The psalms allow us to pray: 1) pleasing to God, 2) comprehensively, 3) honestly, 4) reflectively, 5) redemptively, 6) beyond the limits of our own imagination and resources, 6) enlarging our vision of God, 7) addressing subjects we might otherwise neglect, 8) with sustained and deep satisfaction. Praying the psalms will fill our eyes with the variegated glory of our God and the sufficiency of His grace in whatever we face, changing us, changing our world.

Dorothy did not really live in a black and white world, any more than did our great-great grandparents (despite photographic evidence to the contrary). That’s just the way the movie watcher would see it. So with us in our prayer lives, God has something more for us He wants us to see. He beckons us from our stunted monochromatic prayer to full-spectrum prayer in relationship with Him. To lead us in that sort of prayer, our God has given us the psalms, not only as songs for all seasons but prayers for all reasons, stretching our communion and communication with God to fit the irregular contours of real life.

Look for a new feature on the CHOP website coming in 2010 called “Psalter DPG.” Right now the CHOP Ministry Manual leads participants through 72 days of prayer as part of the Daily Prayer Guide (DPG). The plan is to build two 72-day DPGs based on the psalms, eventually employing all 150 psalms as templates to direct CHOP participants in prayer toward growing in the knowledge of God, reaching those around them for Christ, praying in light of spiritual opposition, and interceding for those laboring with them in prayer.