Dietrich
Bonhoeffer in his book, Psalms: The
Prayer Book of the Bible, tell us:
“If we want to read and to pray the prayers of the Bible and especially
the Psalms, therefore, we must not ask first what they have to do with us, but
what they have to do with Jesus Christ.
We must ask how we can understand the Psalms as God’s Word, and then we
shall be able to pray them. It does not depend, therefore, on whether the
Psalms express adequately that which we feel at a given moment in our heart. If
we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to
our own heart. Not what we want to pray is important, but what God wants us to
pray . . . The richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not
the poverty of our heart.” (pp. 14-15)
I
was struck by this when reading Psalm 38. What does this psalm have to do with
me, I asked myself. The psalm is about someone afflicted with terrible guilt
over a wrong-doing. If written by David, this would be appropriate. He slept
with another man’s wife then arranged for her husband to be killed in battle.
Certainly this is a sin worthy of this psalm.