"The Psalms are the single best guide to the spiritual life currently in impress." – Ellen Davis, Getting Involved with God

"The Psalms are inexhaustible, and deserve to exist read, said, sung, chanted, whispered, learned past centre, and even shouted from the rooftops. They express all the emotions we are always likely to feel (including some we hope we may non), and they lay them, raw and open up, in the presence of God." – Due north. T. Wright, Simply Christian

For many of united states of america, the Psalms tin can be an intimidating book. As the largest book in the Bible, the Psalms include a great variety of material, some of which feels familiar, like the beloved words of Psalm 23, just much of which feels baffling or disconcerting, similar the tediously repetitive Psalm 119 or the seeming cruelty of Psalm 137. So much of the Psalter feels incomprehensible to us, with its foreign language and its foreign concerns, that many of u.s. end upwards reading only our favorite bits and ignore the rest.

But if God has given u.s.a. the psalms in order to teach us how to pray, how to worship, and how to live faithfully in the world, and then a piffling guidance may help us to get the most out of the psalms, what Martin Luther called the "Lilliputian Bible." Here and so are 7 ways to help yous read the psalms for all they're worth. My promise is that they might encourage you to try again and find afresh these aboriginal words of life.

ane. Pay attention to the whole of a psalm, not merely the parts of a psalm.

While many of us may be tempted to read and pray only parts of a psalm, it is of import to remember that God has given us whole psalms in order to teach us specific things about the character of God and almost what it means to be truly human.

Psalm 139 is an example of this. Many of us are naturally drawn to the beautiful language of the first eighteen verses, with its linguistic communication of God searching our hearts (verse 1), hemming us in (verse eight), and knitting us in our mother'southward womb (poetry 13). But once we go to verse 19, things seem to get all of a sudden dark, and plenty of u.s.a. refuse to keep reading, permit solitary to keep praying these words.

But to do then is to misunderstand the betoken of the psalm. The indicate of the psalm is not chiefly to provide usa with a lovely devotion on God's intimate knowledge of us. The point is to bring us face up to face with the God who confronts "wickedness" in the earth, ours (v. 24) and others' (five. nineteen), which is always destructive and dehumanizing.

The invitation of Psalm 139, then, is not just to ruminate on God's honey for united states of america; the invitation is to reckon with the God who sees all that takes place in the hearts of broken people and whose searching gaze has social and public implications, non just personal and private ones. God'south love is far more comprehensive and exacting than we may perhaps imagine, and that'due south the truly good news of Psalm 139.

2. Read the Psalms consistently, rather than occasionally and sporadically.

This was Eugene Peterson'southward advice to me as a seminary student at Regent Higher in 1995: to read a psalm a day every bit a life'south habit. It'south also advice that Christians throughout the centuries have taken to heart. Consider then how you might read a psalm a day yourself. Brainstorm with Psalm 1 and march your manner to the finish, to Psalm 150, and then start over.

Don't become too anxious if you miss a day or two, still, or if you get bogged down with the longer psalms. The point isn't to read the psalms perfectly. There's no scorecard, thank God. The betoken is simply to read the psalms over and over again, and then that they'll have a chance to saturate our hearts and minds with the skilful words of God.

3. Pay attention to the patterns in the Psalms.

One of the fun things that you find in the psalms if you read them often enough is a serial of patterns. For example, Psalm iv and 5 are in dialogue with each other: the ane is an "evening" psalm, the other is a "morning" psalm, and together they echo the language of Genesis ane, with its rhythm of "evening and morning." They remind united states of america in this fashion of a fundamental blueprint of God's work in the world: God works while we sleep during the night, and when nosotros wake up in the morning, we go in on God's practiced work.

Other interesting patterns worth noting include the pairing of Psalm i and 2, which function like a formal introduction to the whole Book of Psalms. Psalm 1 also echoes Psalm 150, while Psalm two echoes Psalm 149. The agony of Psalm 88 is relieved in some measure by the resolutely hopeful tone of Psalm 89. And the Psalms of Ascension (120-134) serve as a wonderful set of "road trip" psalms, providing to Israelites journeying to Jerusalem a soundtrack for their travels.

In addition to this, the "Hallelujah" psalms (Psalms 146-150) assistance u.s. apprehend the end of the Psalter in both senses of the discussion "end": as the completion of the book itself and as the goal of all cosmos, namely the improvident and true-blue praise of God. Finally, the acrostic nature of Psalm 119 is like an "A to Z" of God'southward teaching for united states. Each fix of eight verses in the psalm begins with a alphabetic character of the Hebrew alphabet and thereby moves the reader through a "grammar" of obedient and joyful life under God's police force.

4. Read the Psalms out loud, non just silently.

Because the psalms originate in an oral culture, we can only fully capeesh their ability when we read them out loud, rather than but to ourselves in the quiet of our own thoughts. If nosotros wish to know what a psalm means, then, we demand to say or to sing it out loud, which thankfully many of united states of america get to practice when nosotros worship together.

The point is this: the deepest meaning of the psalms occurs through its orality, not despite information technology, which is of grade what all good poets might tell the states. And then don't be afraid to try speaking out loud the psalms as you read them. It may feel funny or awkward at commencement, but in time y'all'll discover the pleasure of hearing the sounds of good news resound in your ears and centre.

5. Read and sing and pray the Psalms together, not just solitary.

Points #4 and #5 get together hither. The psalms are meant to be shared together, not just read by ourselves. In this way, the psalms protect us from an impersonal collectivism and a self-absorbed individualism: that is, from thinking that they're only about other people or just well-nigh ourselves. Said otherwise, far from denying the importance of first-person prayer, the psalms set up such prayers within a communal context. How do the psalms do this?

The psalmist does this by avoiding many of the idiosyncratic details of an individual'south experience, even if he works with very concrete imagery, such as nosotros find in Psalms 32 and 51. In doing this, the psalmist shows us what a "hospitable" first-person prayer looks like: a starting time-person prayer that always keeps the community in mind. And the converse is true: the psalms model for us communal prayers that make ample infinite for individuals to observe themselves represented.

6. Immerse yourself in the metaphors and images of the Psalms.

A metaphor, as y'all might remember from your high school English class, is a figure of oral communication whereby we speak of i thing in terms of another, usually in surprising means. For case: "Juliet is the dominicus," "the church is a temple," or "God is our stone." In the psalms, the truth about God does non exist on the other side of a metaphor; information technology exists through the metaphor. Take "the Lord is my Shepherd," for instance.

The Lord is not, of course, an actual shepherd by profession, like an Australian sheepherder. Nor is the indicate simply to say that the Lord generically cares for his people. The metaphor of shepherd involves much more than that. In the context of State of israel'southward life, the paradigm of a shepherd was not a gentle one. Shepherds were rough characters who at times became ruthless killers.

The metaphor of shepherd too evoked a host of associations: memories of Moses and of Israel's exodus; images of wildernesses where h2o was deficient and wild animals endangered the rubber of sheep; and non-cozy pictures of great kings, every bit sovereign lords, who treated the people equally vassals. Evoking all these images, the metaphor of the Lord equally Shepherd involves a surplus of meaning.

Information technology's not, then, that metaphors tell us things that we already know, simply in a spruced-upward manner. Information technology's that metaphors disembalm things virtually God that could non be known in any other way. To encounter the Lord equally shepherd, therefore, is to encounter him in a richly meaningful way. No other prototype will do the job quite the same—not "God is my flagman," not "God is my protector," but "the Lord is my shepherd."

The same indicate is true with all the metaphors and images in the psalms. So requite yourself permission to fully savour them and to know and dear God more deeply through them.

vii. The feature marker of poetry in the Psalms is parallelism.

1 of the general features of biblical poesy is that it says things in the tersest mode possible; information technology is not a flowery style. You'll also observe that biblical poesy involves a great deal of repetition—or what biblical scholars call "parallelism." You might think of information technology like a kind of call-and-response device: one line calls out to another, expecting information technology to answer, positively, negatively or otherwise. Examples of typical parallelism in the psalms include these passages:

I volition telephone call to heed the deeds of the Lord;
I will remember your wonders of one-time. (Ps. 77:11)

Weeping may linger for the night,
But joy comes with the morning time. (Ps. 30:5b)

Let all the earth fright the Lord;
Allow all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. (Ps. 33:8)

When the waters saw y'all, O God,
When the waters saw yous, they were afraid;
The very deep trembled. (Ps. 77:16)

What'southward the point of this poetic parallelism? The signal is not merely to repeat things. The point is to make it possible for us to enter into a richly meaningful dialogue with God and with one some other—from the heart of the psalmist to God and from the psalmist to the community. Equally it relates to prayer, what parallelism makes possible is for the eye to sink itself deeply into the psalmist's words and to savor the words themselves equally a way to attune our hearts to the vocalisation of God.

Anyone who spends time with children will know that it is merely through constant repetition that things stick in the encephalon and brand their way into the heart, whether it is the alphabet or the names of presidents. So besides with the psalms. They invite us to repeat things not for the sake of repetition itself, merely in order to soak our hearts with what is true about God and ourselves and the world around united states.

This is a wonderful gift that we can accept advantage of as a style to notice afresh the joy of reading, praying and singing the psalms. More, of class, is offered to us in the psalms, much of which I explore in my book, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life, just hopefully this will get you lot started on the path of reading the psalms for all they're worth—a path, I pray, that will lead you closer to God.