Reading and Praying Psalms

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Community Invitation
• 0:40 Groups And Ways To Plug In
• 2:10 A Controversial Sermon On Honest Prayer
• 4:55 The Psalms As Raw Spiritual Language
• 6:58 Series Setup: Honest To God
• 8:25 What The Psalms Are And Why They Matter
• 11:59 How Hebrew Poetry Works
• 15:10 Metaphor, Imagination, And Formation
• 18:35 Holding Reverence And Raw Honesty In Tension
• 22:00 Psalm 73: When The Wicked Prosper
• 26:28 Turning Point: Entering God’s Sanctuary
• 29:00 Nothing Changes Outside, Everything Inside
• 31:05 How To Pray A Psalm Practically
• 34:00 Action Steps And Weekly Practice
• 36:35 Closing Prayer And Sendoff

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Good morning. My name is Cameron. I'm one of the pastors here at Cross Point. It's good to be here with you guys. Before we jump into the sermon, and I want to talk real quick about community. So Mac mentioned, you know, that's one of our values here is to have some community as a church. And it's because we know following Jesus isn't something that was meant to be done alone. We need other people as we follow Jesus, and other people need us too, and what we bring to the table. And so we need other people. So I want to encourage you, if you're not plugged into community anywhere, to make this the year that you do find a place to plug in. There's kind of some very natural points that things start up, like groups start in the life of our church. And one of those is this season, like here at the beginning of the new year. There's lots of groups, there's women's groups. The third Tuesday of every month in the morning, we have something called gather, where there's like a speaker that comes in, there's some hot breakfast, and then a chance to connect with other women about whatever was talked about that day. There's uh regular women's groups, so a bunch of them, a couple of them on Tuesday mornings, but there's also one Sunday night for those that work and can't make the daytime work. We have men's groups, there's a Tuesday evening one, um, kind of going through some of the practicing the way uh spiritual practice courses. There's one Thursday morning, kind of a fore-work time where you can come and study the Bible with other men. We have sermon discussion groups on Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays that kind of talk about the sermon, and it's just so it's great. You don't have to do any extra homework. You just have to like listen to the sermon and then talk about it with other people and talk about where it's connecting with your life and where God might be inviting you to respond and lean in. Um, you know, we have a young adult group, a group for boomers, we have kingdom communities that are all about joining God's work in the world with other people in specific ways. So go check out the website. There's a whole groups page. You can kind of filter things. And if you need help finding a group, if you're wanting to get connected or you're wanting to start a group, please talk to me. I would love to help you get connected or start something if that's what you want to do. Um, all right, let's jump into our message for today. So before uh working at Cross Point, um, you know, about nine years ago, I moved here. I worked at a church in Oregon, which is where I'm from. It was my home church, which was, you know, uh had some real blessings and some challenges. You know, the church that I was in youth group at and did a lot of stupid things. And then it's like, oh, I wonder why people don't respect me very much. It took a little while to earn that. Um I remember my last sermon there, uh, it was about a year before I left. Um I was a part of the preaching team, not like super regularly. I was interning, but you know, I was there um as a part of it. And the last sermon series, it was in like August or July, um, and we had called it something like one thing. And so everyone on the teaching team got a chance to share. Like, hey, if I could share one thing with you, it's like a last sermon. Now, at the time I didn't know it was gonna be my last sermon, a little foreshadowing here. Um, I, you know, I felt like, oh man, one thing that I would love to share with people is how important it is to come to God honestly and raw and open, right? Um, there's a couple things. One, I saw a lot of people struggle with this, right? This is like a challenge. We feel like we need to clean ourselves up for God. Um, but also something I was personally wrestling with at the time. Uh, my mom had cancer. We didn't know, I don't think at the time that she only had about a month left to live, but it was like a, you know, she had kind of been going through cancer for a couple years. So I'd been wrestling with uh God a lot. It was honest prayer and with frustration and with struggle and with pain and all of that. Um and so, you know, I taught, and I'm sure, looking back, I'm sure I could have done a better job, right? I was even more of an idiot then than I am now. And so I'm sure I didn't always pitch things well like I should have, but I spent some time talking about how it's we need to come to God with honesty, rawness. God wants to know what's happening inside of us. And I used a little example. My church back in Oregon was a little more like religiously conservative. So I used an example that I knew would be like a little bit like, ooh, that might kind of ruffle some feathers. I didn't know how much I would ruffle feathers. I said, hey, I think God would rather hear us cuss in prayer, like use bad language in prayer, than he would watch us just stuff our feelings or like flower them up and make them really pretty. Like God would rather hear the raw, honest, vulnerable us, even if it's not church appropriate in prayer than not. Now, as soon as I said that, uh two or three people got up and walked out. And even me, I'm pretty positive, and I was like, oh, I don't think this is quite going how I thought it was gonna go. And then um I got invited to a conversation with our elder team that week. Um, and it was one of those moments where you're just like, oh, they said they're inviting me to a conversation, but it wasn't really a conversation. I don't know if you've had those moments before. Um, my primary defense in the moment, like when when I was talking to them, was like, have you guys ever read the Psalms? The Psalms, if you've never read them, there is a lot of crazy stuff in the Psalms. I personally think the F word is a little tame compared to saying, hey God, I want you to take my enemy's babies and smash their heads against the rocks, right? Like, that's pretty raw and pretty gross and edgy. Um, and so the Psalms is kind of a weird book because it's like God's word to us, but because of how they were written and what they are, there's a lot of really ungodly, horrific stuff in the Psalms. Talking about getting vengeance on our enemies and violence and praying that other people would experience violence. And so sometimes when we read the Psalms, it's tempt like sometimes I think like, man, how is this the word of God? Right? We think of God's word as it's like, you know, this perfect, beautiful thing, but the psalms are edgy and they're rough and they're raw. But I think as we think about the Psalms, it's important to think uh it's kind of like God said, not this is what I want you to feel, or the things I want you to pray, this is how I want you to pray. Not saying we we should want to kill our enemies' children or we should want our enemies to die a bloody death, right? But that if we're feeling those things, it is okay and even encouraged to bring them out into the light so that God can speak to them. Because our temptation, if you're a follower of Jesus, is probably to hide those things. And to be like, ooh, that's not very godly. That's ooh, that's I don't like the way that sounds when I say that loud. So I'm just gonna pretend like it's not there. I'll flower it up, I'll hide it, I'll push it down, right? And so we are uh starting a series uh called Honest to God, where we are going to explore how to be more honest with God in prayer by looking at the Psalms and exploring the Psalms together. Now, for those of you who've been a part of CrossPoint for a while, my wife had a little reaction this week. She said, We're not gonna spend 150 weeks in the Psalms, are we? Right? I was like, no, no, no, don't worry, that's not gonna happen. Um we but what we are going to do is look at some of the different themes that emerge in the Psalms. So, like, you know, there's a lot of Psalms about anger, or about feeling guilt, or about feeling attacked, or about feeling joy and rejoicing with God. So we're gonna look at some of those themes, see how the psalms encourage us to pray more honestly and bring our whole self to God and explore some individual psalms. Now, for me, uh, this is not something I had a lot of experience with uh growing up. When I became a Christian, no one said, hey, and you should start like reading the Psalms or anything like that. And so, you know, I had read through them, you know, periodically, I guess. Uh, but on my sabbatical this summer, it was one of the spiritual practices I felt like I wanted to commit to was reading and praying through like a psalm a day. I was like, that's something I can attain, that's like achievable, like I can do this. And it was really good. Um, and it was, I was also struck by how much was in the Psalms. There's a huge variety of human experience and all sorts of emotions and all sorts of things in there. So, like I said, in future weeks we're gonna talk about things like joy, anger, despair, fear, guilt, and how do we bring our honest self to God with those emotions. But today we're gonna spend some time kind of setting up how do we actually read the Psalms and how do we like interpret them and understand them, um, and and what do we do with the Psalms? And we're gonna also look at Psalm 73. So, first I want to do a little intro on what the Psalms are. Maybe you're like, What is this word you keep saying? I don't know what you're talking about, right? It's kind of like a word that if you've been around church, I'm sure you've heard, but if you haven't, you might be like, What is this? The book of Psalms is a book. If you were to open your Bible like right in the middle, chances are you'd hit the Psalms. It's kind of like right in the middle there. It is a book of a hundred and fifty Hebrew poems. Uh, it is uh collected and it's actually kind of divided up into five separate books within the book. Um, it is written by the people to God over the course of like a thousand plus years over a long period of time. There's a lot of different people who wrote different psalms. So the psalms are often associated with a guy named David. So he wrote 73 of them. There's a bunch that are anonymous, and then a few other people too that contributed some psalms. So written by the God by the people of God over a long period of time, by lots of different people in different circumstances. Um, and then there's lots of different types of psalms. So there's like lamenting, there's praise psalms, thanksgiving, wisdom, royal and messianic psalms, like looking forward to the Messiah, right? Who Jesus ended up being. Uh, the imprecatory psalms are where you wish like evil upon your enemies and for bad things to happen to them. Um, but all of these are inspired by the Holy Spirit as scripture for us to read today. They were probably compiled around the time of the exile in Babylon, so like all the Jewish people got kicked out of their land and they're in exile. So the scholars think that's around when they were compiled and brought together. Um, and then they formed the prayer book for the second temple Judaism. So like Jesus in his time, him, his disciples, everyone around him, everyone who was in synagogues probably used the Psalms was like their primary prayer book. So when we read the Psalms today, we're like reading the prayer book that Jesus used in his time. And uh one of the things that surprised me because the psalms were never something like, you know, I always hear like little random snippets or like on a social media post, like one verse of a psalm or something like that. Because of that, I didn't realize how essential they were to the church throughout like the last 2,000 years of church history, up until fairly recently. Like until fairly recently, the Psalms were like what like reading the Psalms and praying through the Psalms was one of the core practices of anyone who followed Jesus. Right? And now, at least in a lot of evangelical churches, we've kind of forgotten about them, or there's kind of like something we reference every once in a while. And I think part of the reason is it can be a hard book to know like how to read and kind of what to do with it, because it's less a book just about theology and truths about God, although there are things like that in there, and it's more a book of how do we connect with God and how do we do that. And so here's a few tips that as we start our little journey into the Psalms that I want to, if you've don't have no idea how to read the Psalms, here's like some tips to know how to do that. One, we have to understand that the Psalms are the genre of poetry. Okay, there's lots of different genres in the Bible. You know, a genre is like a type of a work, right? So there's like rock music and pop music and rap music, all different genres. So similarly, in the Bible, there are different genres of literature. A lot of what we read is narrative, right? That's like what the gospels are, the stories of Jesus, that's what a lot of the Old Testament is. There's also a lot of, you know, reading discourse, so like the letters of Paul, where he's like making an argument and a point. There's laws in the Old Testament. The Psalms, though, are poetry. And poetry uh is meant to be read differently than you would read a story, or than you would read like a letter, an argument that Paul is writing in a letter. And so we need to meet the Psalms on their own terms. And I think there's two helpful kind of tools for understanding Hebrew poetry. Uh the second is true of all poetry, but the first one is something kind of more unique to Hebrew poetry, and that is uh the Psalms use something called parallelism. So that's like where you know parallel is like, if you remember geometry, like two lines kind of in parallel there. Um and so what parallelism is, kind of a way to sum it up, is it's like rhyming, but with ideas instead of word sounds. So here's an example from Psalm 73, the Psalm we'll look at a little bit later, verse two. But as for me, my feet had almost slipped. I had nearly lost my foothold. So you see, it's like almost the same thing, just said in a different way between the two lines. And if you read the Psalms, you'll see there is a ton of this all throughout. And the reason is because it kind of slows us down, it prompts meditation on different thoughts, like to kind of explore one idea from a couple different points of view. It forces us just to not like move on really fast to the next thing, but really sit with an idea. And I think it's really cool that this like uh unique part of Hebrew poetry is something that comes across really well in translation. Right? Translators don't have to worry about how do they rhyme the word sounds or the vowel sounds or anything like that, but the idea rhyming comes across, like that parallelism. And then the second thing for understanding um you know how to read uh the Psalms as poetry, this might be like a no-duh, but I think it's worth exploring a little bit, is Psalms use metaphor to communicate truth. So again, if you remember like your English class, a metaphor is like comparing something to something else, or like a simile is saying it's like something else. And the psalms do a ton of this. They use word pictures, kind of like ideas like that are pictured as something, right? Think of in Psalm 1, like a tree planted by streams of water. Um, you know, they they show us things, they don't just tell us a list of truths about things, they kind of show us a picture of a whatever the psalmist is exploring. And I think there's a lots of reasons for this. One, metaphors and word pictures help us remember things better than just like a list of facts, right? Think back to Psalm 1, like I said, a tree planted by streams of water. Right? That is an image that sticks with you, or that when you're driving on the road and you see like a stream and a big tree planted, I always think of that psalm. It comes to mind. Now, because of this, the psalms are not always super precise in their language, right? Because they're using like pictures to explain something. Uh, and so they leave a lot of ambiguity and mystery, and okay, well, what exactly does that metaphor mean? Like you have to explore it a little bit and sit with it. As we'd say in 2026, the psalms are more of a vibe than like a list of facts, right? And in doing so, they actually like paint a fuller picture and they say more than they could with just using precise, exact language, listing truths out one by one. And but because of that, they can be a little tricky to understand because we can't take them too literally, right? We need to, and I don't mean like we don't take the Bible seriously. I mean we have to be careful not to take every little thing too literally because it's meant to evoke something in us. It reminds us, this like metaphorical pictures remind us that God is actually bigger than any box we try to put him in. Right? The Psalms, if you were to read them, they use a lot of evocative, really dramatic language, like I feel like I'm gonna die, like all these really dramatic things. And at least in like the American church, we tend to correct ourselves. Like, we don't, we wanna like, especially in like, you know, the German Wisconsin area, we want to like pull it together, not show too much emotion, right? All that kind of stuff. Um the Psalms do not care about that at all. They this we try to censor ourselves and limit. The psalms just go for it. Kind of reminds me of Ron Burgundy here from the classic Anchorman, right? This is the Psalms, just in a glass case of emotion, screaming out everything inside. The Psalms are imaginative and give us images that we can hold on to in our head and explore in different ways. And I think metaphor, these like word pictures, also open us up to truth in a different way. Um, than, David, you have to take that down. I'm getting distracted. Uh, they open us up in a different way uh than just a list of facts do for us. So like I was reading in the song, like they help us maybe see something in ourselves that we wouldn't normally see unless it kind of like got around the truth a little bit. So, for example, I was if you asked me, hey Cameron, do you trust God? I would say, yes, of course I trust God. Um, but I was reading in the Psalms, and there was one that talked about God being our refuge this weekend. And I was like, Man, God, how often do I see you as my refuge? How often do I really come to you as a refuge in my life? Right? And so that exposed some maybe lack of trust in God that if you just asked me point blank, I don't know if I would have been able to name, but that picture evoked something for me. So the psalms and metaphor and poetry deal with our imagination more than just our logical brain. I like the way Eugene Peterson kind of says this. He says, The Psalms showed me that imagination was a way to get inside the truth. Right? Not just understand it in a logical way, but actually get inside of it a little bit. Like, for example, the Lord is our shepherd, right? A very famous psalm helps us understand something about God in a different way than if you just listed out a bunch of facts about how God provides for us. Uh, Eugene Peterson goes on to say this as metaphor users, poets poets tell us what our eyes and our ears often miss around and within us. Poets use words to drag us into the depth of reality itself. So the psalms use metaphor to help communicate truth and show us truth and drag us into the truth. The psalms can also shape our worldview. When you read a psalm, you it's very clear that it is very different than the world we live in right now, the world that David or whoever was writing lives in. Uh, I noticed this last summer as I was reading through the Psalms and this last fall, like more consistently, that um uh I was starting to see God in a different way and see myself as a part of God's world in a different way. N. T. Wright, uh, the New Testament scholar, says it gives us imagination for entering into God's world and kingdom. It kind of helps evoke our imagination and get us excited about living in life with God. Uh, the Psalms help us relate to God more honestly, they give language to things that are happening. In our soul that we might not be able to communicate otherwise. Because the psalms are brutally honest. They don't try to, you know, sometimes when you walk into church or somewhere else and something, how are you doing? Oh, I'm doing fine. Like, right, the psalms refuse to do that. Reminds me of an episode of The Office where Michael Scott is depressed. Um, and he says, uh, I'm okay. No, I'm not. Right? Like, uh, this is the type of uh what we see in the Psalms. It's like we're not gonna pretend to be okay, we're not gonna pretend that everything is great, we're not gonna pretend that we trust God fully or we're happy with all this the decisions God has made in life. No, we're gonna be honest with God about what's going on. We can drop the pretending. Uh sometimes we might be tempted, again, to kind of censor or or cover up the truth of what's happening inside of us, but the psalms say, no, we don't have to do that. We can come to God in our rawness. And they actually show us how to do that, which I think is really important. Um, there's a scholar, Walter Brugeman, I really like the way he talked about this in the Psalms. We must not make these Psalms too religious or pious, right? Too like flowery and nice. They are not religious in the sense that they are courteous or polite or differential, right? They're not like uh polite to God, the people writing the Psalms. They are religious only in the sense that they are willing to articulate this chaos to the very face of the Holy One. And here's what he means by that. Uh there's so if you imagine two extremes when it comes to how we usually tend to relate to God. So, on the one hand, there are people who maybe are more like kind of God-focused, like moralistic, rigid religiosity, right? Like, think of some of the people at my old church, who I still love by the way. Um, but we're like, hey, that is not appropriate to talk to God that way. Like, God demands more of our respect than that, right? Which is true. God does demand our reverence and our respect and all of that. But kind of can default too far to that side, where it's like, so I don't bring anything that is not, that is messy or that isn't like cleaned up or like with a nice fresh coat of paint on it. But on the other side, I think in our culture, there's a temptation to almost be like way too me focused, like with this narcissistic individualized spirituality where prayer is just all about me unloading all my stuff to God. Then I say, all right, thanks, God, I'll talk to you next week when I have more junk to unload in your general direction, right? And I think, you know, both of these are, there's some good in both of these, there's good reasons why we would kind of default to one or the other. But what I love about reading the Psalms is they manage to hold these in tension. They manage to hold the tension of like, I respect God and I see God for who he is, and I'm really angry at God right now. Right? They the Psalms don't make it just all about whoever's right, they don't make it all about me, but they also don't make it all about God in the sense that we just ignore what's happening to me. Right? There's praising and lamenting. And in all of the laments, when it's like complaining at God, it's still like, but God, I'm gonna choose to trust you, even though I don't see any evidence like that I should trust you. I'm gonna choose to trust you. Right? It holds the tension of trusting God and being angry at God and expressing frustration. In fact, Psalm 44 accuses God of being unfaithful, which is something God could never be. But God wants to hear that if that's where we're at. God wants to hear when you're mad at him, but he also wants a chance to speak back. And that's where I think the Psalms navigate and hold this tension really well. That we can be raw and brutally honest, but we also need to be open to what God wants to say back to us in that place. Not just kind of swim in that place and be like, well, this is true for me, so this is where I'm going to live now. So the Psalms, one of the great things, if you were to read through them, is they encourage us to trust God and follow God no matter what is happening in our life. Even the complaint psalms orient to God with like this wild hope that God is going to do something big. And so we're gonna end by exploring a psalm that I think illustrates this really well and has some good takeaways for us as we as we start this journey, looking at how do we pray more honestly and connect with God in this way. So it's Psalm 73. We're gonna read the whole thing, so it'll be a little bit longer, but we'll take some breaks in between to talk about. The first verse uh he says, Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. So the Psalm starts kind of like asserting the right answer. Like, hey, I know God is good, and he's gonna be good to me, right? Like that's who God is. But then he quickly confesses that he has a problem with this answer, with this correct theology. He says, But as for me, my feet had almost slipped, I had nearly lost my foothold. For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked, right? So if God is really good to his people, if he's really in charge, how come when I look around, all the people that seem to be doing wicked things are actually succeeding and maybe even doing better than God's people are, right? Which, of course, there's no connections with our current world with that, uh, with this verse here. Um, why does it seem like those who don't give a rip about who God is seem to be profiting and doing well and succeeding in life? And he goes on in verse 4 to say they have no struggles, their bodies are healthy and strong, they are free from common human burdens, they are not plagued by human ills. Therefore, pride is their necklace, they clothe themselves with violence. From their callous hearts comes iniquity, their evil imaginations have no limits. They scoff and speak with malice, with arrogance they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore, their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance. They say, How would God know? Does the Most High know anything? This is what the wicked are like. Always free of care, they go on amassing wealth. Right? It's not fair. It doesn't seem right. Like, why are they succeeding and profiting? Then we get to verse 13 here, and he says, Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure and have washed my hands in innocence. Like, what was the point of following you, God, if nothing in my life was gonna work out anyway? All day long I have been afflicted, and every morning brings new punishments. All right, so looking at the world, it created this crisis of faith for the psalmist. Like, what's the point? Why is God allowing this to happen? Why is God allowing me to suffer and to struggle while other people are amassing billions of dollars and succeeding, and everything seems to be going well for him? Um, but there's a turn coming here in verse 15. If I had spoken out like that, I would have betrayed your children. When I tried to understand all this, it troubled me deeply till I entered the sanctuary of God, then I understood their final uh destiny. So he's saying, I would have betrayed my faith. Uh, I think what's important about this, he says, I if I tried to understand all of this on my own, like it didn't make any sense. I couldn't make the math work, none of it worked. Um, the key thing that changes everything, and we'll see the rest of the psalm changes the trajectory. The thing that changed absolutely everything was verse 17. Until I entered the sanctuary of God, until he brought his confusion, his frustration, his disillusionment, all of that to God, it made no sense and he couldn't deal with it. Holding all those feelings on his own drove him away from God and to not trust God. But coming into the sanctuary, so like God's presence with these ungodly, unfaithful thoughts changed everything. And we'll see that he saw God was not actually protecting the wicked, and that God was with him every step of the way. That even though he maybe felt abandoned, God was right there alongside, leading and guiding him. So let's read the rest of the Psalm 18 through 28. He says, Surely you place them on slippery ground, you cast them down to ruin. How suddenly are they destroyed, completely swept away by terrors? They are like a dream when one awakes when you arise. Lord, you will despise them as fantasies. When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered, I was senseless and ignorant. I was a brute beast before you. Yet I am always with you. You hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterwards you will take me into glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Those who are far from you will perish, you destroy all who are unfaithful to you. But as for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the sovereign Lord my refuge. I will tell of all your deeds. Now, what I think is fascinating about this psalm is on the outside, with the psalmist circumstances, nothing changed. Right? Like God didn't do any of those things. Like the wicked were still prospering, the psalmist was still struggling, nothing changed. Um, he already knew the right answer at the beginning of the psalm, right? God is good to his people, like yeah, that's the thing I'm supposed to say, right? But there is a huge difference between knowing something in your head and knowing something like deep in your heart and your soul and in your bones. Right? And the only way to kind of take your knowledge from just being up in your head to actually something that you believe deep down is to enter the sanctuary of God, to enter God's presence with your whole self and allow him to speak to you and to fill you up and to and to challenge you and to convict you and whatever else God might want to do in your heart and in your soul. But he is the one who can take that knowledge from just like a yeah, I know the Sunday school answer to I believe this and I live it and I hope in it. See, God has to do that. That's not something we can do ourselves. We cannot turn this head knowledge into something deep in our soul kind of knowledge. But what we can do is come to God and allow Him to speak to us. We need to go to Him honestly. And so our bottom line for today is God wants to hear from all of you so that He can speak to all of you. God wants to speak to your entire life, not just the like pretty parts or the parts you've kind of made really nice on the outside, but all the ugly, gross parts of your life too. God wants to speak to. And this is what praying the Psalms helps us do. It helps us bring all of ourselves to God so we can have a real encounter with God regarding whatever's happening in our life. The Psalms help us take our rants, our frustrations, our struggles, our anger, our despair into God's sanctuary so we can hear him speak to us, so we can open ourselves up to God's comfort, so we can be open to the ways maybe he wants to challenge our thinking about things, the ways he wants to guide us and lead us and convict us, or encourage us and fill us up. Now we don't need the Psalms to pray, but it also feels pretty silly not to use this book that God gave us in order to pray and has been tested for like thousands of years by people from all different cultures and walks of life. Like this is the prayer book God gave us to connect with Him. And so we're gonna practice using it over these next several weeks. Now, um, one of the uh action steps will be about praying a psalm. So I want to give you just that. That's kind of one of those things that can sound like, okay, we'll pray a psalm. What does that mean? Here's like five things that as I've practiced this and tried to like lean in that I found are helpful. One, read it slowly and prayerfully a few times, especially if it's a short one. If it's a long one, you might only be able to read it once. Uh, read it a few times, pay attention to what the Holy Spirit is bringing your attention to, right? Just kind of slowly read it line by line. Be like, God, what are you trying to say to me through this? Uh meditate on a line or an image, right? I kind of used that example earlier of thinking of God as my refuge. Like, so I I don't know, Friday or Saturday, one of the days, I read that and then just sat with that all day. When I was doing the dishes, when I was doing other stuff, just thinking, God, what does it mean for you to be my refuge? Do I trust you as my refuge? Just kind of let that picture swirl around in your head and think about it and meditate on it throughout the day. Number three, this is probably my favorite, just because I get really distracted, is read it with a journal in hand, reflecting on where it's connecting with your life. What is God saying to you in that? Like a journal helps me, like, okay, I have to like stop and I can't get like lost in my own thoughts or distracted. Like, I have to stop and really focus on what God is saying to me. You can pray through the movements of a psalm. So if we look at our psalm from today, it starts like, God, this is what I know the right answer is, this is how I'm struggling with that, but I'm gonna choose to trust you anyway. Right? So you can kind of take something in your life and pray through those movements of whatever psalm it is that you're reading. And then uh kind of a cool one that I liked was personalizing the language for you and your group, right? So instead of reading it in the third person, like you can read it as in like, I am feeling this way, and kind of like replace the pronouns there. Or if you're doing it with a group, right? You could read like Psalm 23, like, God, you are our shepherd. You guide us and you lead us beside still waters, right? You can like change the words in order to make it more of a prayer. Here's a couple action steps. You know, we always encourage some sort of reflection to continue to think about this. First one, just how honest are you with God in prayer? Is this a struggle for you? If it's is it not, what keeps you from being more honest? Second question is like, how much of your life do you bring to God in prayer? Because I could bring God like 25% of my life and be a hundred percent honest with it, but I'm missing out on this whole other part of my life that I might not be giving him access to. So, kind of what's happening there, and then a few prac practical practices. Use a journal. If you have, if you're like in a difficult season, I would encourage you grab a piece of paper, grab a journal, maybe you do it on your phone, and just write out your raw, honest thoughts to God. Don't worry about censoring them or about showing them to anyone. In fact, you probably shouldn't show them to anyone. That way you can be more honest and vulnerable and real and raw, and just let whatever is happening inside of you come out. Right? For me, um I remember talked about earlier with my mom passing away. There was like seasons where I would just drive and just like not have any music on and just talk to God out loud, right? Because no one thinks you're crazy. If they can't see you, they just think you're on the phone or whatever. Just talk to God out loud and and just like let it all out. And it's so helpful. Um, bring something honest to God consistently this week, like kind of every day choose a time that you're gonna I'm gonna bring myself to you. And then choose a psalm to pray through. Try this out. Try praying through a psalm. If you don't know what to choose, here's two options. And you can find all this online, by the way, too, all the notes and stuff and the action steps. Psalm 1 or Psalm 23 are like two super easy ones, great ones to spend some time with. So if you've never prayed through a psalm, choose one of those and just every day this week create it. Only takes like five minutes to do to sit. I mean, you could spend way more time with it if you want to, and that's great. But it only takes a few minutes to sit and pray through a psalm and then let those images start to work their way into your imagination and into your thoughts as you go about your day. So let me pray for us, um, and then we can go out and enjoy the day. Uh, God, thank you so much uh for your grace and your love, and that you are a God who wants to hear what is actually happening inside of us. God, we thank you that you don't want us to clean ourselves up before we come to you, but you want to experience us in our raw mess. So, God, I ask that you would give us the courage to do that. God, you would also give us the courage to listen to how you might want to speak to that. You wouldn't let us just sit in our raw mess, but you would speak to us and comfort us and encourage us in the middle of that. And and God, we just thank you so much for your love and your grace and the ways that you provide for us and you guide us and lead us, even when we don't see it at all. So, God, we thank you for that. In your name we pray. Amen. All right, have a great day.