{Thank you to Kristen S. for the “Closer to God” summaries!}
The book of Psalms is right in the heart and center of our Bible. We turn to our Bibles to learn lessons of how to live our lives and we become better Bible students the more we read from its pages. But how strong is our use of prayer each day? Beyond praying for meals, a safe trip, and all the other daily/habitual prayers we make – do we make the time to really pour out our hearts to God? We might feel distanced from the writers of the Psalms because they seem so much more “spiritual” with their powerful, poetic words… but the good news is we can learn how to use the book of Psalms to come closer to God in our personal discipleship.
From Moses to the time of the exiles, over 1000 years of time is represented in the words of the Psalms. And throughout scripture we see so many brothers and sisters of old quoting from this book. The Psalms teach us how to emotionally draw closer to God and strengthen our prayers. During the dark days of the exiles, we see that they wrote and turned to the book of Psalms during their hardest times. We too, need to do this. And just as the exiles were waiting for the temple to be rebuilt and true worship restored, we too are in the same predicament as we wait for our Messiah to return.
So when you read through the Psalms next… try to really soak it in. Meditate on it. Try to rewrite the words in your own simple language. Make it meaningful to you. We need to daily lift our eyes to heaven and make prayer a part of our life as it is fundamental to living closer to God. And thankfully we can look to the Psalms as a guidebook on how to get there.
– Thoughts taken from the “Closer to God” Class 1 by Bro. Tim Badger on www.livoniatapes.com