This is part one of Praying the Psalms on Your Worst Day, a ten-part series on the prayer book God put in the middle of your Bible. Today, why borrowed words are real prayers, and how to start praying them.

Most of us pray with a small vocabulary. We learned a few phrases as children, picked up a few more from the men who prayed over the potluck, and we have used the same twenty or thirty sentences ever since. Bless this food. Be with so-and-so. Guide and direct. They work fine on an ordinary Tuesday.

Then the worst day comes. The diagnosis. The phone call at two in the morning. The sin you swore you would never commit, and did. The months when heaven says nothing. You sit down to pray and the old phrases are gone, or worse, they are still there and they sound like a stranger talking.

At the end of Teach Us to Pray I told you that when you have nothing, you should borrow words. This series is me making good on that. Over the next nine posts we are going to open the Psalms on purpose, one hard day at a time, and learn to pray them.

The Objection

Some of you are already uneasy. You were raised to believe a prayer only counts if it comes straight from your own heart in your own words. Reading somebody else’s prayer back to God feels like turning in a paper you copied.

I understand where that comes from. Jesus did warn against vain repetition (Matthew 6:7), and every one of us has heard a prayer recited so fast it was over before anybody could mean it. But what Jesus warned against was babbling, words piled up to impress God or wear Him down. He did not forbid words someone else wrote. In the very next breath He gave His disciples a prayer to say.

And watch what the first church did on its first real day of persecution.

Peter and John had just been arrested, hauled before the same council that condemned Jesus, and released with orders to stop preaching. They went back to the believers and told them everything. And the church prayed. They did not reach for something new. They quoted Psalm 2 back to God, the nations raging and the rulers gathering against Jehovah and His Anointed, and they applied it to Herod and Pontius Pilate by name (Acts 4:24–28).

And when they had prayed, the place where they were assembled together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the word of God with boldness.

Acts 4:31 NKJV

The first church under real pressure reached for a borrowed prayer, and God shook the building.

Jesus Prayed the Psalms

The Psalms were Israel’s hymnbook and prayer book, and they were Jesus’s. After the resurrection He told His disciples that everything written about Him in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms had to be fulfilled (Luke 24:44). He did more than fulfill them. He prayed them.

On the night He was betrayed, Matthew says that when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives (Matthew 26:30). At Passover that hymn was almost certainly drawn from the Hallel, Psalms 113 through 118. If that is right, then within hours of His arrest Jesus sang Psalm 118 with His disciples. The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the day Jehovah has made.

From the cross He prayed the first line of Psalm 22. His last words in Luke’s Gospel come from Psalm 31:5. “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit” (Luke 23:46). At the moment of His death, the Son of God did not compose. He quoted.

If the Lord Himself prayed borrowed words in the upper room and on the cross, you can pray them at your kitchen table.

At the moment of His death, the Son of God did not compose. He quoted.

Praises and Prayers

The Hebrew title of the book is Tehillim, praises. That surprises people who know how much grief is in it. Some of the darkest prayers in the Bible sit inside a book named for praise.

Then turn to the end of Psalm 72, which closes the second of the five smaller books that make up the Psalter.

The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended.

Psalm 72:20 NKJV

The editors who arranged the collection looked back over seventy-two psalms, laments and thanksgivings and royal songs and confessions, and called every one of them prayers. So the book has two names. Praises on the cover. Prayers in the middle. That is a fair picture of an honest life with God. It moves back and forth between the two, sometimes inside the same chapter, and nobody gets to skip the prayers on the way to the praise.

Athanasius, a pastor in fourth-century Alexandria, wrote a letter to a young man named Marcellinus about how to use the Psalms. His point was that most of Scripture speaks to you about other people, but when you read the Psalms you find the words becoming your own, as if they had been written about you. Sixteen hundred years later that is still the best reason to read them.

The Words Under the Words

Word	Original	Strong’s	Meaning
tehillah	תְּהִלָּה	H8416	Praise, a song of praise. The plural, Tehillim, is the Hebrew title of the book
tephillah	תְּפִלָּה	H8605	Prayer, intercession. Psalm 72:20 calls the collection to that point the prayers of David
hagah	הָגָה	H1897	To mutter, to growl, to speak under the breath. “Meditates” in Psalm 1:2

The last word holds the method. If you read Feed Yourself, you met hagah in the post on word studies. Isaiah uses it for a lion growling over its prey (Isaiah 31:4). When Psalm 1:2 says the blessed man meditates on God’s law day and night, it means he is saying it under his breath, turning it over out loud. The very first psalm teaches you how to read all the others. Say them.

How to Pray a Psalm

I will keep the method simple, because the people who need it most are tired.

1. Read the psalm slowly and out loud. Your mouth slows your mind down, and words you have skimmed for years will start to catch.
2. Find the line where your life touches the psalm, and stay there. You do not have to pray every verse every time. Some days one line is the whole prayer.
3. When the psalm says something true of you, say it to God as yours. Change nothing. Have mercy upon me, O God. Those are your words now.
4. When the psalm says something that does not fit your day, pray it for someone it does fit. A believer in a prison overseas. The widow three pews over. The friend who walked away from the faith. The Psalms were sung by a congregation, and some line in every one of them belongs to somebody in the crowd.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a small book on the Psalms a few years before the Nazis put him in prison, and he made a simple point. A child learns to speak because his father speaks to him. We learn to speak to God the same way, from the words He has already spoken to us. Praying the Psalms is the Father teaching His children to talk.

For the One Who Has Run Out of Words

Maybe you came to this post because you are already there. You have not prayed in weeks. You still believe, but every time you tried, nothing came. Or the words came and you could not stand the sound of them.

I am not going to tell you to try harder. I am going to tell you to open your Bible to the middle and borrow. You do not have to feel what the psalm feels before you pray it. Some mornings the words go first and the heart follows a few steps behind, and some seasons it takes weeks to catch up. That is still prayer. The psalmists did not always feel it either. Read them closely and you will watch men talk themselves back toward God one line at a time.

Over the next nine posts we will take the worst days one at a time. The day of guilt, and the day after, when you are forgiven but not yet healed. The long silence and the low despair. The day you are furious at someone, and the day you cannot trust your own heart. The day you are afraid, and the easy days when you forget God without noticing. And at the end, the worst day there ever was, and the psalm Jesus prayed through it.

Pray It This Week

Start with Psalm 1. It is six verses long, and it is the doorway to the whole book. Read it out loud once in the morning and once at night. Then pick the one line that catches and pray it back to God, in your own words or in no words but His.

Jehovah, I want to be the man in the first verse of this psalm. I want to delight in Your law. Teach me to say Your words until they are mine. Plant me by the rivers of water. I have been dry a long time. Amen.

Discussion Questions

1. What phrases do you find yourself repeating every time you pray? When was the last time they were not enough?
2. Read Acts 4:23–31. Why do you think the church reached for Psalm 2 instead of composing its own prayer?
3. Does praying someone else’s words feel less sincere to you? Where do you think that idea came from?
4. Psalm 72:20 calls the psalms before it prayers. Which psalm do you know best, and have you ever prayed it instead of just reading it?
5. Who is one person you could pray a psalm for this week because the psalm fits their day better than yours?

Going Deeper

Read Psalm 1 and Psalm 2 together. Many scholars believe they were set at the front of the book as a two-part gateway to the whole collection. Psalm 1 opens with blessed, Psalm 2 closes with blessed, and between them you meet the righteous man and the anointed King. If you want a short book alongside this series, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible runs under a hundred pages. Athanasius’s Letter to Marcellinus is free online and takes about twenty minutes to read.

Next in the series, Psalm 51, and the prayer David prayed after Nathan said, You are the man.