#DailyDevotion The Psalms Teach Us How To Pray
Psalm 39 12Listen to my prayer, O LORD, and hear my cry for help. Don’t be deaf to my tears. I’m a stranger staying with You, a guest like all my ancestors. 13Spare me and I’ll be happy before I pass away and am gone.
Based on my prayers and how I have heard other pray, I think sometimes our private prayers are a little wimpy. It’s why we have set prayers in the worshiping community. It’s why we are encouraged to pray the Psalms. When we pray the Psalms we pick up the language and the tone of the Psalms in our private prayers. We are taught by them to be bold, with faith and hope in God the LORD when we pray.
Try adding the above verses to the end of some of your prayers for a few days. Such boldness to pray, “Listen to my prayer, O LORD, and hear my cry for help.” Have you ever prayed to your Heavenly Father this way? Why not? Hebrews in chapter 4 writes, “14Now that we have a great High Priest Who has gone through the heavens, Jesus, God’s Son, let us cling to what we confess. 15 We have a High Priest Who can sympathize with our weaknesses. He was tempted in every way just as we are, only without sin. 16So let us come boldly to God’s throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace to help us when we need it.” This same Jesus gave us His name to use in prayer. He sits at the right hand of the Father interceding for us. We should be more bold and confident in our prayers like David, trusting in the promises of Jesus.
“Don’t be deaf to my tears,” David prays. Are our prayers as heartfelt as this? Do we feel our need? Do we know our need? Can we say this to our heavenly Father? You know, it does feel sometimes that our Father in heaven doesn’t hear us. Feel free to use David’s words here as your own when you pray. The Psalms are not just David’s words. They are the inspired Word of God which carried David to write these from his own experience but also prophetically. They are meant by God for us to pray. That is why He saved them for us in the Bible.
David tells the LORD he is but a foreigner and a guest, like his fathers, staying with Him. These words demonstrate David’s recognition that everything he receives is by grace alone. He has nothing in himself he can claim before God. Foreigners are often at the mercy of those whose lands they travel in and through. Before God, we are in unfamiliar places and are at His mercy and look to His grace alone for all good things. Now it is true, through baptism into Christ and through faith in Him, we are not citizens of heaven. But those things we have received by grace alone through faith alone.
David, concludes with if the LORD would just spare him he could be happy before he closes his eyes in death. Comforted may be a better word than happy here. When we see God had answered our prayers, that He has acted in our lives in some way, responding to our prayers, we indeed receive comfort and are comforted. While we hoped in the LORD we sometimes can receive no comfort until we see the LORD act. It may not be as we expected but it will be in the way that is best.
Heavenly Father, hear our cries for help when we turn to You. Do not be deaf to our petitions for mercy. Do for us what is good and right that we may receive comfort from Your hand and may praise and bless you before our fellows. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.