One type of devotion is to pray the Psalms.  I first heard of this technique from my pastor when I told him that I was confused about how to have extended prayers.  I knew that Jesus would pray all night while I had trouble praying more than five minutes.  Basically, after a short time, I had informed God of my thoughts and did not want to repeat myself as if He were some deaf old man who did not hear the first time and could not remember what I said.  As a result, my prayers were short.  Fast forward to the day that my pastor gave a sermon exhorting us to spend time with God in prayer.  Afterwards, I told him my dilemma, and he suggested praying the Psalms.  When I first heard his suggestion, the idea simply did not compute.  It felt like I was telling him a problem I had with communication, and he was telling me a fake solution that did not meet my needs.  After all, I was asking him how to connect with God for a long period of time, and he was telling me to start reading Bible verses out loud.  In my mind, he was telling me to just recite rote passages, such as the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23, like a Buddhist mantra to try to get God’s attention.  I definitely knew that rote repetition was not the answer to my problem.  However, I filed the idea away in my mind to consider later since I respected my pastor and knew that he thought that he had given me helpful advice.

I continued to analyze my prayer life for several months and concluded that I did not know how to praise God.  My praise always turned into “Thank you for this” and “Thank you for that.”  You can only repeat thank you in so many ways before you are just droning on in a childish list.  It reminded me of a kid’s prayer that started with “God bless Mommy and Daddy and . . . “  continuing on and on with an endless list of people to bless.  I did not want to bore myself or God with a rote list of thankyous, but more importantly, I knew that gratitude is not the same as praise.  I decided to find examples of praise and turned to the Psalms as the location with the greatest amount of praise in them.  At that point, I began to understand the purpose of praying the Psalms.  They are a template of various ways to approach God in prayer and worship.  I decided to use the Psalms to teach me how to praise.  My first idea was to write down some praise from a song and then paraphrase it to get an idea of how to form sincere praise that sounded natural and that did not mutate into gratitude.  The first time that I tried this method, something amazing happened.  The Psalm verse became a stimulus for my own original praises that freely flowed across the page as my heart opened up to God in prayer.  I learned the power of praying the Psalms for myself.

There is more than one way to pray the Psalms.  In a course that I took about the Psalms, I was given these instructions:  “Read very slowly.  Read each word and ponder it, considering what it meant to the psalmist and what it might mean for you.  Talk directly with God about it. Be open for Him to show you His thoughts through the psalm, and be open for thoughts He may plant in your mind.  In this way, make your meditation a two-way communication.  After meditating on Ps 1, you could try writing a similar prayer of your own, expressing the general concepts of the psalm as you see and feel them” (Adventist Learning Community course:  Introduction to the Psalms). This is basically a variation of the technique that I had already developed for myself years before, but I include it here because it emphasizes the speaking part of praying the songs while my technique is only writing.  Another variation is to read the Psalm and add your own thoughts and words to the basic Psalm as you read.  I have seen this described as “decorating a Christmas tree”.  You can also memorize Psalms and use phrases from various Psalms in your prayers. 

My method of praying the Psalms is just as much a Bible study technique as it is a prayer technique.  Choose a translation of the Bible that you easily understand, but that has depth of meaning.  When I first started praying the Psalms, I wrote the verse down from several translations to get a better understanding of the Psalm’s meaning.  Nowadays, I usually just use the New International Version (NIV).  I do not like this translation for in-depth study, but it works well for helping me to transition from God’s words to my prayers when I am using this technique.  I recommend that you keep a special journal just for praying the Psalms.  Go back and read your prayers every once in a while for spiritual refreshment.   If you want to try this method, follow the steps below.

Step 1:  Choose a verse or two from one of the Psalms and write it out in a notebook. 

Step 2: After reading a thought from the verse, begin writing your own version of that thought.  This is not exactly paraphrasing the Psalmist’s words although you can paraphrase if you wish.  This is taking the thought and applying it to your own life and changing the words to fit your own experience.  Continue writing about your experience with God until you no longer have anything more to say.

Step 3:  Go to the next thought in the verse and repeat Step 2. 

Step 4:  Continue this process until you feel satisfied that you are finished or until the verse’s thoughts are finished.

Feel free to modify this technique so that it meets your own needs.  If you do not like to write, try speaking the Psalms using the same steps.  For singing Psalms in prayer, use these steps to sing your praises to God in your own words.  If you want to sing the Psalms, you might try using the Scottish Metrical Psalter. These psalms were written out in such a way that they will fit into the melody of any song that uses what is called the common meter. If you do not know what that means (I don’t), just use the tune of “Amazing Grace,” “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past,” or “America, the Beautiful.” You could also use these steps in a group prayer where each person adds his or her own version of the Psalm’s thought. 

You may want to dismiss the technique as a gimmick like I did at first, but try it before you write it off, and see if the Holy Spirit uses the Psalms to speak to your heart.  If the technique has no power for you, do not use it, but if it brings you closer to God, take it and make it a regular part of your time with Jesus.