The Book of Psalms: A Gift For Our Daily Prayer

Dan Doyle

The Book of Psalms is a collection of 150 psalms, or prayers or songs that represent every emotion of the human heart, from praise to fear, from fury to wonder. There is even room for complaint. The psalms were composed over a thousand years, and about half bear the name of David; some by unidentified individuals said to be Temple poets. They were composed to be sung, and the range of their emotional content makes them very usable prayer forms for us today, in all of our own emotional highs and lows.

I am in the mood for joy and awe today. The sun is brilliant in a cloudless sky, and the fall colors are dazzling. Beauty has a way of making our hearts fill with overflowing joy. Psalm 139, particularly verses 1-6 and 13-14, really fit the bill for me today. This psalm expresses such an intimate and personal relationship to God and is truly a prayer of joy and awe.

“O Lord, you search me and you know me, you know my resting and my rising, you discern my purpose from afar. You mark when I walk or lie down, all my ways lie open to you” (vs. 1-3). The relationship between God and the psalmist, David, is one of both awe and incredible intimacy. Both of those realities exist together here. David realizes that God knows everything about him, both internally and externally. David recognizes that God’s faithful notice of him (us) is constant and intimate at all times; hence, he knows both our actions and our thoughts even before we do.

David, in the midst of this intimate prayer, continues to develop this thought. “Before ever a word is on my tongue you know it, O Lord, through and through. Behind and before me you besiege me, your hand ever laid upon me. Too wonderful for me, this knowledge, too high, beyond my reach” (vs. 4-6). David is overwhelmed by the recognition of such attention, such an intimate knowledge of himself that is ‘beyond his reach’. He is completely humbled by this.

Have you not felt such awe and wonder about God’s intimacy and knowledge of you at some moment in your life, either in prayer or maybe by some serendipitous gift of surprise while engaged in a peaceful moment or in the presence of beauty? Have you not been surprised by wonder, or stunned with awe of God through some word in Scripture, or in the shared presence of a dear friend or your spouse, or while out walking in nature, or listening to a beautiful piece of music, or standing before some powerful work of art? In these moments it is quite proper to be overwhelmed with the desire to lift a prayer of thanksgiving to the God of Creation.

In the Spirit, moved by awe, David has this remarkable insight: “For it was you who created my being, knit me together in my mother’s womb; I thank you for the wonder of my being, for the wonders of all your creation” (vs. 13-14). The sudden clap of insight that David had here includes all of creation, but more particularly, himself (us). For himself this: “You knit me in my mother’s womb.” As for the rest of creation, his thoughts echo the Book of Genesis and the wonderful truth that all of creation, the visible and the invisible, is made by this God who is Love itself, intimate and unquenchable. And, as it is written in Genesis, at the end of each day of creation he stood back and looked at it and said, “It was good”. But even more wonderful, when God made mankind, we are told: “God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). He continues to do so today.

If that thought, no, if that reality doesn’t fill us with the awe and wonder of God, I don’t know what else can or would. David certainly was humbled, awed by this incredible insight. It came to him, we can believe, in a powerful moment of prayer in solitude and silence, and it was so profound that he could not keep it to himself; he could not hold it in; rather, he felt moved to write this beautiful psalm. And we, thousands of years later, are able to contemplate the awe and wonder of God that he felt. I have only given you a taste of Psalm 139 here. Open it up and read and pray with it yourself, and be open to that same sense of awe in your own life.