The Secret of the Psalter

“The New Testament laid emphasis upon ‘speaking to yourselves in Psalms” (Eph. 5:19) and “teaching and admonishing one another in psalms” (Col. 3:16). From ancient times in the Church a special significance has been attached to the common use of psalms. In many churches to this day constitutes the beginning of every service of common worship. The custom has been largely lost and we must find our way back to its prayers.”

"The Psalter is God’s Word and, with a few exceptions, the prayer of men as well.”

"A Psalm that we cannot utter as a prayer, that makes us falter and horrifies us, is a hint to us that here Someone else is praying, not we; that the One who is here protesting his innocence, who is invoking God’s judgment, who has come to such infinite depths of suffering is none other than Jesus Christ himself.”

“Jesus Christ prays through the Psalter in his congregation.”

Lessons from this school of prayer:

1. We should pray according to the Word of God, on the basis of promises.

2. We learn what we should pray.

Imprecatory Psalms (Wishing defeat upon our enemies). “In so far as Christ is in us, the Christ who took all the vengeance of God upon himself, who met God’s vengeance in our stead, who thus-stricken by the wrath of God-and in no other way, could forgive his enemies, who himself suffered the wrath that his enemies might go free-we, too, as members of this Jesus Christ, can prayer these psalms, through Jesus Christ, from the heart of Jesus Christ.”

Innocence Psalms “We declare our innocence not as our own, but as a ‘prayer out of the heart of Jesus Christ that was sinless and clean, out of the innocence of Christ in which he has given us a share by faith."

Lament Psalms “Not to make our own laments, but because all this suffering was real and actual in Jesus Christ because the Man Jesus Christ suffered sickness, pain, shame, and death.

3. The Psalms teach us to pray as a fellowship.

For those who are concerned the The Lord’s Prayer in the New Testament is primary, “Oetinger, in his exposition of the Psalms, brought our a profound truth when he arranged the whole Psalter according to the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. What he had discerned was that the whole sweep of the Book of Psalms was concerned with nothing more nor less than the brief petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. . . The more deeply we grow into the psalms and the more often we pray them as our own, the simple and rich will our prayer become.

(From Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, p. 44-50)