Pray The Precedents

Pray the Precedents

God’s way is perfect. All the LORD’S promises prove true. Psalm 18:30

Psalm 18 IS THE ULTIMATE ANSWER TO PRAYER. It begins with a moment of worship and recounts a desperate plea for help followed by a fiery, thunderous response from heaven. Not only is David rescued; he is resoundingly rescued as enemies are routed and humiliated in defeat. It’s the kind of heavenly response we long for whenever we are in a crisis, yet our urgent prayers are hardly ever filled with such glorious expectation. We’d love to have that psalm as our frequent experience.

Yet in the midst of a crisis, we fumble around for words. We struggle to articulate our specific requests because we aren’t sure exactly how we want God to answer. We want him to show up, to be sure, but when we can’t see a clear way out, we don’t quite know how to ask him for one. We forget that he has numerous possible solutions even when we can’t think of any. All he asks of us is to ask of him. Our trusting, believing cry for help is all that’s needed. A testimony that stirs up and builds our faith might be helpful too.

Why not pray this psalm or another like it? Many psalms begin in crisis and end in worship, with God’s deliverance, protection, and provision in between. Reading or reciting that trajectory back to God prayerfully—whether word for word or the gist of it—honors his testimonies and applies them to our lives. You’ll find prayers for all kinds of crises, including unfair accusations, secret plots, societies under siege, spiritual apathy, the heart’s deepest longings, confessions of sin and pleas for forgiveness, and much, much more. Whenever you feel under siege, plotted against (by real people or spiritual forces), weighed down, surrounded or overwhelmed, guilty and ashamed, or simply longing for something more, certain psalms are waiting for you. They are there for more than your encouragement. They are precedents waiting to be prayed, in faith, with conviction and expectation, for your life today. Envision God’s responses for you just as you read them in the lives of those who wrote them. He is tipping you off to his intentions through age-old words.

I find that the psalms are like a mirror in which one can see oneself and the movements of one’s own heart.