Let the Scriptures Pray with You

         Calvary Baptist Church is where I have my earliest memories of going to church.  This little fundamentalist church in southern Iowa was like many other churches of its kind.  The order of worship was chiseled in the same stone, seemingly, that the Almighty had quarried for Moses' stone tablets.  Each weekly service was precisely the same, world without end. For all that scripted repetition, it was curious that all prayers were expected to be ad-libbed.  Anything that smacked of "high-church" was viewed with open hostility, and high-church folks read their prayers from the same book.  Great reverence, therefore, was given to those men who could extemporize the most solemn and eloquent prayers, and extra points were given for generous use of King James pronouns.

         I am eternally grateful for the foundations this church gave me, the abiding respect for the authority of Scripture, and the value of relating to God in a personal way.  Letting prayers spring up from one's own heart made sense to me; after all, no one else could be a Christian on my behalf, nor could anyone else pray in my stead.  These foundations have stayed with me, molding my strong belief in an immanent God who longs to speak to me directly through His Word, and who wants me to communicate with Him as freely as a child with a loving and attentive father.  The church folks from back then would probably think I went all haywire with this--I would probably seem a rabid charismatic to some of them.  Their view of the Thrice-Holy God was much more that of a distant and inscrutable Judge who keeps a firm distinction between Himself and wretched, sinful humanity.  In other words, they emphasized God's transcendence more.  He is above, wholly Other.  Now, I affirm God's transcendence at the same time as His immanence, but I find it strange today that this tradition--which so insists on a God who wants to share Himself with us through Scripture, and wants us to speak with Him in purely heartfelt and unscripted ways--would also visualize God in such aloof terms.

         We moved from that little, southern Iowa town, when I finished fourth grade, to a little, northern Iowa town--big change, right?  Bigger than you would think, actually, as we began attending an American Baptist Church in the absence of fundamentalist options.  That change altered the course of my family's history, culminating in my father coming to the Lord and entering the ministry.  My own thoughts about relating to God began to evolve at the same time, even though it would take some time.  Some of our most ingrained habits of thinking are hard to change!

         Take, for example, this pre-programmed distaste for prayers read from a book.  That was still with me.  It had not yet struck me as odd, the discontinuity between a strictly-scripted worship service and the insistence on a completely-unscripted prayer life as taught to me at Calvary Baptist.  I needed to be stretched, to examine why I believed the things I did, and the opportunity came for this when I went off to college. 

I joined Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, a multi-denominational group of evangelical Christians that has chapters at campuses around the world.  There I was exposed for the first time to the worship cultures of churches much different than mine.  This was also the time when I was seeking how I might engage in a much deeper prayer life.  I picked up one of Inter-Varsity Press' books called Jesus, Man of Prayer, by a Sister Margaret Magdalen.  This lady used to be a Baptist missionary in Zaire, but she had gone on to become an Anglican nun.  How interesting, I thought!  At the time I thought it was akin to an apple becoming an orange.  At any rate, her book examines the spiritual disciplines practiced by our Lord Jesus, and this was the first time I was confronted with the fact that Jesus did pray from a book--the book of Psalms.

Those of us who have an evangelical, free church background (we might call it low-church) have often assumed that our way of prayer and worship is the biblical way to do it.  Before we get carried away, however, we need to remember that our Christian faith is the flowering of the Jewish faith. The New Testament is not the replacement for the Old Testament; it is the consummation of it.  Therefore, any truly biblical worship practice should be the legacy of God's worshipping people from the very beginning, not just from 1 A.D. onward.  We Gentiles have been grafted into the olive tree that God planted when He first called Abraham and promised to bless all peoples of the world through His descendants (Romans 11:17-21).

Keeping in mind the Jewish roots of our faith, we are prepared to understand the significance of Jesus’' life of prayer.  It is no coincidence that when Jesus hung upon the cross, he was quoting from Psalm 22, the "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"” Psalm.  It is important that we understand that in reciting those lines, Jesus was not simply quoting them for the purpose of demonstrating that prophecy was being fulfilled right before their eyes, although that was certainly happening.  But we miss out on what Jesus was doing if we assume that Jesus was teaching in this instance--He was actually praying.  The entire Psalm perfectly expressed the pain, rejection and desolation that Jesus felt, as well as the hope He had, even in the midst of His darkest hours. Pay attention to the text following verse 22, and you will begin to see the faith in His Father, and hope for His deliverance and exaltation, that He was expressing in prayer even as His body's life ebbed away!

It is absolutely perfect that Jesus was praying with the Psalms at various points in His life, and letting those Psalms pray with Him.  For we must understand, the book of Psalms is not just a book of historic poetry; this was in every sense Israel's Book of Prayer.  It was used constantly when the congregation of Israel gathered in worship.  The Psalms covered every situation, good and bad, that Israel faced throughout her history.  Furthermore, they gave voice to every feeling: faith, victory, fear, grief, sorrow, defeat, desolation, depression, righteous and unrighteous anger--that the people of Israel could be experiencing at the time.  They prayed and sung the Psalms together, because the Psalms gave beautiful and powerful expression for the words they could not quite find themselves in the depths of their feelings.

I have a few trusted friends who worship in more liturgical traditions than ours, and through the years I have often sounded them out to understand the great riches they find in their liturgy.  One of the most powerful expressions came from my friend, Eric.  What I said about Israel's use of the Psalms in prayer is a paraphrase of what he told me--that there are times in life when one's feelings run so deep as to be inexpressible.  The emotions are too raw, and the words dry up and blow away while they are still on the tongue.  But through the Anglican Book of Prayer, he finds the Scriptures and the words that perfectly capture where he is at that moment.  They give him words to pray when he can conjure no words of his own. I thought that this explanation had great insight.

It has been many years that I have used the Book of Psalms to come alongside and empower my own private prayers.  In fact, through my brush with cancer, and the operation and recovery I recently went through, I prayed the 40^th Psalm over and over, sometimes with tears.  If you would do me a favor and read through it, maybe you'll be able to spot some of the things I was feeling and hoping, and offering before the Lord as an expression of my trust in Him.

Romans 8:26-27 tells us that:

"“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God's people in accordance with the will of God.”"  

It is wonderful that the Lord stands by to help us pray, to fortify our faith even when in our weakness we cannot find the words ourselves.  One of the ways He does this is through His Spirit-Breathed Word, where right there on the page before us, we find the words written that can give expression to our deepest emotions, and wings to our faith.  I heartily encourage you to start by opening the book of Psalms, and letting the Scriptures pray with you!