How to Use the Psalms to Deepen Your Relationship with God

When you want to deepen your relationship with God, you need to move beyond simply knowing about Him and seek personal encounters with Him. The Bible’s Psalms can help you do that. The Psalms are full of honest expressions of what it means to relate to God. They describe faith in action while dealing with the tension between this fallen world’s realities and the hope God offers you.

Here’s how you can deepen your relationship with God by reading and responding to the Psalms:

Express all the complexities inherent in a relationship with God. The Psalms show that sharing life with God involves communicating with Him in all types of circumstances, such as lamenting hardship, expressing joy and gratitude, raging against injustice, asking for needs to be met, complaining, celebrating, and more. Regularly and honestly express your thoughts and feelings to God, confident that He is listening and He cares.

Reorient your focus toward God. In the Psalms, people are stripped of worldly things that give them a false sense of security and fleeting fulfillment, and then discover that they can gain ultimate security and fulfillment through relationships with God. When worldly things fail to satisfy you, look beyond them toward God. Orient your life around your relationship with God, investing most of your time and energy into growing closer to Him, and then everything else in your life will fall into place in a healthy way.

Grieve over what makes God sad. The Psalms describe people whose hearts become broken over what breaks God’s heart, such as these factors that affect our lives today: our propensity to stray from God, our defensiveness against God’s claim on us, our disregard of God’s kindness, and the lack of trust in God’s love that we show in the ways we disobey Him. Let the Psalms help you sense how sin can alienate you from God and make your Creator sad, and let the grief you feel about that fuel penitence in your life.

The Art of Prayer

Like most children, I learned how to pray at the dinner table. I would fold my hands, close my eyes, and furrow my brow with concentration as my father asked God to bless our food. I employed the same technique at bedtime, adding requests like “Keep my family safe” and “please bring back dinosaurs” when it seemed important. Once I became a teenager however, this style of prayer was no longer going to cut it. More often than not, I’d fall asleep halfway through my monologue, and even when I managed to stay awake I never felt like I was connecting with God at all.

So what is the right way to pray? Is there even such a thing as a right way? I’ll admit, I don’t really know. However, I do believe there are many ways to pray, and that prayer is different for every person. In the wake of National Day of Prayer, I would like to share a few ways I’ve learned how to pray.

Pray in Action

“So what shall I do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my mind; I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my mind.” – 1 Corinthians 14:15

I suppose it’s best if I start off with the style of prayer I am most familiar with. I have never been good at sitting still during prayer. I am too easily distracted, and my mind tends to wander no matter how sincere my motives were when I began. So whenever I’m really looking to connect with God, I always go for a walk. I simply choose a direction and I start to pray.

I don’t know why walking helps. Maybe the activity focuses my thoughts or maybe a sense of direction gives me clarity, but personally, I believe it’s because prayer was meant to be natural. God made us to run, climb, swim, and dance, and I have no doubt he takes great joy in watching us do those things. In much the same way, we were also made to pray. If you are looking for a different way to connect with Christ, find something you do naturally and learn to pray through that.

 

Pray in Silence

“Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” – Psalm 46:10

Back when I was a student at Taylor University, I would frequently go to the campuses prayer chapel while doing devotions. Normally sitting still would have been a problem, but the Taylor chapel was different. The instant you passed through its doors the silence would close around you, enveloping you like a cocoon. It gave the building a separate peace you couldn’t find anywhere else on campus, making it simple to focus on Christ and just listen. Since graduation, I’ve found silence harder to come by.

The modern world is filled with so many distractions. TV, internet, movies, mobile phones, ipods and ipads, and whatever new piece of technology just became popular. Even our homes have become filled with things designed to eat up your time and attention. People have forgotten what feels like to be silent before the Lord. The next time you pray, find a place away from all those loud distractions and temptations.

Find a place that is silent, and just listen.

Read More: http://www.crosswalk.com/faith/prayer/the-art-of-prayer.html

10 Reasons to be Involved in a Church

1. Church involvement is evidence that you’re a Christian in the first place. It also helps keep you from abandoning the faith. According to the author of Hebrews, the antidote to developing an “unbelieving heart” that leads you “to fall away from the living God” is to “exhort one another” (Hebrews 3:12-13) — an activity that occurs most prominently in the church.

2. Gathering with a church encourages believers to love others and do good deeds (Hebrews 10:24-25).

3. A church is the main venue for using your spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12:1-31). God has given you abilities and talents intended to help other Christians. If you’re not involved in a church, others are being deprived of what you have to offer.

4. A church helps you defend Christianity against those who attack it. When Jude told the early Christians to “contend for the faith” (Jude 3), he directed his instruction toward a group of believers, not a scattering of lone-ranger Christians. Answering challenges from coworkers, friends and family members is always easier when you can ask fellow church members for help and wisdom.

5. A church is a great venue for pooling resources to support missions and benevolent works (2 Corinthians 8:1-7; 3 John 5-8). Your money combined with that of fellow church members can do a lot for Christ.