# How to pray with the Psalms?



## Jash Comstock (Apr 3, 2012)

How exactly does one go about praying with the Psalms? How do I go about preparing my heart and mind to pray with the Word of God? How do I approach the Psalms with a goal of prayer? How do I know which Psalm to pray?


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## Contra_Mundum (Apr 3, 2012)

I'd say the first rule is you must be familiar with the Psalms. Here is a most outstanding passage from BB Warfield, on early Christian expectations for their children:


> The children were introduced to the Bible from the tenderest age. They learned their letters by picking them out from its pages. They were practiced in putting syllables together on the Bible names, the Genealogies in the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke supplying (one would think most umpromising) material for this exercise. They formed their first sentences by combining words into Bible phrases. As they clung about their mothers’ necks, we are told, amid the kisses they snatched, *they snatched also the music of the Psalms from their lips. Every little girl of seven was expected to have already made a beginning of learning the Psalms by heart*; and, as she grew to maturity she should lay up progressively in her heart the words of the Books of Solomon, the Gospels, the Apostles and the Prophets. Little boys, too, traveling through the years, should travel equally through the Sacred Books. We hear again and again of men who knew the whole Bible by heart.


_The Bible, the Book of Mankind_, A paper read at the World’s Bible Congress held at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco, California, August 1-4, 1915.
http://reformedaudio.org/audio/warfield/Warfield - The Bible, the Book of Mankind.pdf

What you have laid up in your heart will be produced at the lips, and then the life.

Learn the purpose behind each Psalm.

Study to know which of your emotions, or complex of emotions, may best be expressed by any one or several of them.

By the practice of them all, train or tune your emotional life to something that approximates what must have been our own Lord's "balance," who above any of us had his interior-life absolutely formed by the Word which his own Spirit had beforetime inspired. By this discipline, you will have the mind of Christ.

I believe that Paul's tiny dictum, "pray without ceasing" (1Ths.5:17) is in some sense fulfilled in living and breathing the Psalter.


To this non-exhaustive list, I welcome further additions.

Reactions: Informative 1


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