God calls his people to see things the way he sees them. If God considers something good, so should we. If he reckons something evil, we must reckon it likewise.
Unfortunately, this does not come naturally for us. We are descended from Adam, born in sin, and live among those of the same lineage (Rom. 5:12). So our moral instincts are faulty from the start, and the world we inhabit has set itself against its Creator and Savior. So what hope do we have of not adopting the world’s values and priorities?
Praise be to God, we have hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ, God’s power to save all who believe (Rom. 1:16–17). This gospel plucks us out of the world and places us into the kingdom of Christ, and yet we struggle to be what we are — to be the holy, consecrated people God has objectively made us in Christ. Our Lord summarized this struggle when he prayed for us: “They are not of the world… I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one” (John 17:14–15).
The Apostle Paul turns that prayer into an exhortation: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2).
So how do we go about this supernatural endeavor? What resources do we have to fend off worldly conformity and pursue transformation? In his infinite wisdom, the Spirit of God has inspired the word of God so that we might have everything we need for life and godliness. The whole of Scripture is there for our instruction and edification, and yet we all likely have portions of the Bible where we feel more at home.
In what follows, I want to encourage you to avail yourself of the Psalms and add them to your armory, so that you can take up the Psalter in this holy war against worldliness and the noble pursuit of renewing your mind.
Here’s why the psalms are indispensable for the Christian life.
The Psalms Are for Praying
Pray without ceasing, be constant in prayer, and pray at all times in the Spirit. Those are all instructions the New Testament gives us. Most of us, if we’re honest, struggle in this discipline, in part because it’s so easy to fall into ruts and routines in our prayer life. Employing the psalms in prayer is a great way to infuse some fresh vigor into your communion with God. What can be better than praying God’s own words back to him, allowing him to renovate your desires and align them with his purposes?
As you pray the psalms, you’ll find yourself praying for things you may not otherwise pray for, you’ll find the vocabulary of the Psalter becoming your own, and you will experience what David promised: “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Ps. 37:4). It is not that delighting in the Lord is the key to getting everything you want, it’s that delighting in the Lord will transform what you want — and those who have the Lord possess all they could ever want. In other words, your desires and mind will be renewed.
The Psalms Are for Singing
Why is it that God inspired a carefully arranged collection of 150 songs for his people? Because the combination of text and tune makes it so that we internalize what we sing. And the words we internalize stay with us, finding their way into our thoughts, our speech, and our desires. Over and over again, God commands us to sing within the psalms themselves: “Sing praises to the Lord, O you his saints, and give thanks to his holy name” (Ps. 30:4; see also 33:3, 47:6; and 68:4 for a sampling of such exhortations).
You may not be in a position to choose psalms for your church to sing, but this is a practice you can adopt for your own edification. Find some good recordings of psalm settings, listen to them, and sing with them. The words, and the poetic devices that convey them, will burrow into your mind and heart, and you’ll find yourself not only repeating the words, but loving them. It was Augustine who said, commenting on Psalm 72, “He who sings praise, not only sings, but also loves.” This is the heart of transformation.
The Psalms Are for Fighting
Paul was not simply being creative when he referred to the word of God as “the sword of the Spirit” (Eph. 6:17); he was preparing us to fight against the forces of darkness in us and around us. The psalmists saw things the same way: “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you” (Ps. 119:11). David says that, because the righteous has God’s law in his heart, “his steps do not slip” (Ps. 37:31). And the path to righteous flourishing is to meditate on the law of God day and night (Ps. 1).
The Lord Jesus rebuffed the evil one by quoting the Scriptures, and we would be foolish to think we can survive with lesser weaponry. Read, meditate, and memorize verses from the psalms, and challenge yourself to memorize psalms in their entirety. There are imprecations that will challenge whether you think evil is truly evil, there are promises held out for those who fear God and hope in him, and there are confessions that express true contrition. If you want to fight temptation and worldliness, hide these words in your heart and be renewed.
The Psalms Are for Longing
The people of God have rarely been at home. Adam and Eve were briefly where they should be, dwelling in the presence of God in the place he provided. Then they sinned and were sent into exile. There were times when Israel resided peacefully in the Promised Land, but those periods were interrupted by enemies both without and within. Then, exile. And when they returned, the former glory was gone.
Christians now reside under a New Covenant, but with the same status as those Israelites of old: “sojourners and exiles” (1 Pet. 2:11) in a world with “no lasting city,” but seeking the city to come (Heb. 13:14).
You will find no more poignant expression of this homeward yearning than in the psalms. David declares that “one thing” he seeks is to “dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life” (Ps. 27:4). Israelites in exile recorded their heart’s desire: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion” (Ps. 137:1). And every time you read, “Wait for the Lord” or, “How long, O Lord?” you are reading the words of an Israelite eager to be back in God’s presence in the place he provides.
The psalms anticipate not just our final home, but the king who will lead us there. As articulated in Reading the Psalms as Scripture, the psalms teach us what to expect from the promised king. He will fulfill all that the Old Testament anticipated, and he will be king from David’s line, great David’s greater son whose dominion will be from sea to sea (Ps. 72:8). And the New Testament authors refer to the psalms with such frequency that, if we want to understand and anticipate the return of the Messiah rightly, we must know the psalms.
An important part of not conforming to the world is to give our allegiance ultimately to this royal Son and to long for his reign. We are not escapists — we want to love our neighbors and seek the welfare of our cities — but the path of faithfulness in the world is to have the highways of Zion engraved on our hearts (Ps. 84:5).
Conclusion: Hide the Psalter in Your Heart
One day, God will set things right, and he will call us out of Babylon: “Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins” (Rev. 18:4). Those who will be ready to respond to that sovereign summoning will be those whose minds have been renewed and have kept themselves ready. Hide the Psalter in your heart, and ready you shall be.
The psalms cultivate a life of prayer grounded in Scripture. In Reading the Psalms as Scripture, James M. Hamilton Jr. and Matthew Damico guide the reader to delight in the spiritual artistry of the psalms.
Psalms is a carefully arranged book saturated in Scripture. The psalmists drew from imagery and themes from earlier Scripture, which are then developed by later Scripture and fulfilled in Christ. The book of psalms advances God’s grand story of redemption, and it gives us words to pray by drawing us into this story. When we meditate on the promises and patterns in the psalms, we can read, pray, and sing them with faithfulness.
