The first time I seriously prayed a psalm was when my wife had a health scare. All my words dried up that day. I know the Spirit interceded for me with groaning (Rom. 8:26–27), but I still needed words to unlock the logjam in my heart. So I turned to Psalm 91 and laid my case before the Lord. I inserted my wife’s name and her faithfulness throughout the psalm and pleaded with God to keep his promise to deliver those who love him (v. 14). It was exactly what I needed.

When my wife’s test results came back normal, I thanked God and went back to my typical relationship with the psalms. It didn’t seem right to keep praying them, because my ordinary life didn’t match the Psalter’s intensity. Normal life meant using the pretty psalms for inspiration and studying the rest. It also meant treating them as descriptions of other people’s experiences. I liked to read the book of Psalms alongside 1 and 2 Samuel to get a behind-the-scenes look at how David related to God, parsing the imagery to figure out what I could learn.

That changed when I began to understand Psalm 120 and the rest of the Songs of Ascent. Psalm 120 holds the key to an ancient yet revolutionary idea. It taught me that the Psalter could be used like a prayer book, that I didn’t have to wait for my life and a psalm to coincide. I could pray each psalm before it felt true. God intends the Psalter to prepare us and shape us. It doesn’t just describe our spiritual experience; the Psalter can prescribe it as well.

Pilgrims’ Prayers

The Songs of Ascent (Pss. 120–134) were prayed by countless Jewish pilgrims as they made their way to Jerusalem to celebrate religious festivals. Jesus would’ve prayed these psalms on his way to the Feast of Booths (John 7:10) and when he set his face toward Jerusalem for the final Passover (Luke 9:51–53). Paul would’ve prayed these psalms when he sailed from Asia Minor for the Pentecost (Acts 20:16).

Psalm 120 holds the key to an ancient yet revolutionary idea. It taught me that the Psalter could be used like a prayer book, that I didn’t have to wait for my life and a psalm to coincide.

You can almost feel the pilgrim’s journey as you read the first few songs. Psalm 120 is set in foreign lands, while Psalm 121 prays for traveling mercies. Psalm 122 rejoices at finally arriving in Jerusalem. Then, Psalm 123 marks the ultimate destination, with the believer gazing at God’s presence. From there, the songs go in different and surprising directions. What’s valuable to us is that these psalms offer a glimpse into how God wants us to pray and why we even pray in the first place.

The Songs of Ascent didn’t just describe the journey to Jerusalem; they prescribed how the pilgrims should experience it.

Prayer That Shapes Our Perspective

That’s where Psalm 120 comes in. It opens with a believer in distress, surrounded by people who lie and deceive. The psalm tells us this comes with living in foreign lands among Gentiles who want to fight. Implicit within the psalm is a longing for home. It points the pilgrim to Jerusalem, to the safety of God’s people and the refuge of his temple.

As the pilgrims prayed Psalm 120, they rehearsed the spiritual facts: The seed of the Serpent fights against the seed of the woman. The war was their spiritual reality, but not necessarily their physical one. In fact, Jews in foreign lands often had it better than Jews living in Jerusalem. The holy land was regularly in the crosshairs of world powers and almost always in trouble with whoever governed it. Famines were also the norm. Many of these pilgrims lived outside Jerusalem for a reason, yet Psalm 120:5 says, “Woe to me, that I sojourn in Meshech, that I dwell among the tents of Kedar!”

Maybe the pilgrims needed to pray these words because life elsewhere was good. They needed the vision of spiritual formation more than they needed a description of their circumstances. Can you imagine a psalm that described their pilgrimage? It would recount the pain of taking a month off work, and getting seasick or possibly robbed, only to arrive in Jerusalem to get price-gouged for food and lodging. God gave them something better than prayers focused on circumstances. God wanted them to think a certain way, so he gave them prayers to practice those thoughts.

Prayer That Practices Faith

God’s people have almost always used the Psalter as a prayer book, but modern Christians have opted to pray in our own words, with prayers guided by our individual needs and dispositions. That leaves many of us praying shallow prayers and wondering if we’re even praying the right way.  There’s a place for our own words, but the Psalter gives us so much more.

You’ll learn how to shake your fist at God and accuse him of falling asleep. You’ll pray against evil with boldness, and practice expressing doubt and praise. You’ll pray prayers of righteousness that force you to cling to Christ’s righteousness. You’ll do this even when you don’t feel the emotion expressed in the words. Just like with anything else in life, we practice the skills we want to have, and psalmic prayers allow us to practice our life with God.

Psalmic prayers allow us to practice our life with God.

Praying the psalms teaches us to see the world as God intended—not through study but through spiritual experience. Psalm 120 offers me the chance to rehearse the experience of a sojourner on this earth, even though I really like it down here. The practice helps dislodge my allegiance to the “things that are seen” (2 Cor. 4:18). I pray the words before I feel them and, invariably, I start to believe them. Prayer becomes a catalyst for faith, not just the fruit of it.