--- title: "Praying the Psalms" url: "https://seekabove.com/guides/praying-the-psalms" description: "The Bible's own prayer book — 150 prayers for joy, fear, anger, guilt, and gratitude, prayed by Jesus himself. How to use them when your own words run out." published: "2026-06-09" updated: "2026-06-09" category: "Scripture" --- # Praying the Psalms The Bible's own prayer book — 150 prayers for joy, fear, anger, guilt, and gratitude, prayed by Jesus himself. How to use them when your own words run out. Right in the middle of the Bible sits a book that isn't *about* God so much as *addressed to* him: 150 prayers, collected over centuries, covering every state a human heart can be in. Joy, terror, fury, guilt, gratitude, boredom, despair, wonder — it's all there, often in the same psalm. This is the prayer book Jesus grew up on and prayed to the end: his cry from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", is the first line of Psalm 22, and his last words, "Into your hands I commend my spirit," come from Psalm 31. Jews and Christians of every tradition have prayed these prayers daily for well over two thousand years. When you pray a psalm, you are never praying alone. The great gift of the Psalms is permission. Most of us quietly censor our prayers — we tell God the presentable feelings and sit on the rest. The Psalms blow that open. "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?" (Psalm 13:1) is in the Bible. So God has, in effect, pre-approved the words: if it's in his book, you're allowed to say it to him. The Psalms don't teach you to feel differently before you pray; they teach you to pray *with* exactly what you feel — and somehow, prayed honestly, the psalms of darkness keep turning their faces toward hope. ## Borrowed words that become your own There's a common worry that praying someone else's words is second-rate — that "real" prayer must be spontaneous. The Psalms answer it. Some days your own words flow; other days grief or exhaustion or plain emptiness leaves you with nothing, and on those days the Psalms are words held out to you like a hand. You start by borrowing them. Then, somewhere in the middle of "The Lord is my shepherd," you notice you *mean* it — and the borrowed words have become yours. Christians have always prayed this way: the Psalms are the backbone of the monasteries' daily prayer, of the Liturgy of the Hours, of the Anglican daily office, of countless hymns and worship songs you already know. ## What about the angry ones? Read far enough and you'll hit psalms that ask God to break the teeth of the wicked — and worse. Don't skip them too fast. They are the prayers of people who had been genuinely wronged, and their first lesson is where rage belongs: *spoken to God*, not swallowed, and not acted out. The psalmist hands the case over — "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord" (Romans 12:19) — which is precisely what makes letting go possible. You may also find that the angry psalms give you words to pray honestly about real evil in the world; a faith that can't name injustice to God has nothing to say to most of human history. Pray them for the world's victims, and let them teach you the difference between handing anger to God and nursing it. ## Where to start Don't start at Psalm 1 and grind forward — the Psalms are a medicine cabinet, not a novel. Start with the psalm that matches today (the list below maps feelings to psalms), and pray one a day. Psalm 23 if you're unsure. Within a few weeks you'll have a handful of lines by heart, and they'll start showing up on their own — in the waiting room, in the dark, in the moment of relief — which is exactly how the Psalms have always worked. ## How to pray a psalm 1. **Pick one psalm** — short is fine. (Use the list below, or just start with [Psalm 23](/bible/psalms/23).) 2. **Read it slowly, aloud if you can,** as words *you* are saying to God — not a text you're studying. 3. **When a line fits your life, stay there.** Repeat it. Tell God why it fits. That pause is the prayer. 4. **When a line doesn't fit, pray it for someone it does fit** — the joyful psalm on your sad day belongs to someone rejoicing today, and the desperate one to someone in trouble. 5. **End in your own words** — even one sentence — and let the psalm's honesty carry over into it. ## A psalm for every season **Trust and comfort** — [Psalm 23](/bible/psalms/23) · [Psalm 121](/bible/psalms/121) · [Psalm 46](/bible/psalms/46) **Fear and anxiety** — [Psalm 27](/bible/psalms/27) · [Psalm 91](/bible/psalms/91) · [Psalm 56](/bible/psalms/56) **Sorrow and depression** — [Psalm 42](/bible/psalms/42) · [Psalm 88](/bible/psalms/88) · [Psalm 130](/bible/psalms/130) **Guilt and a fresh start** — [Psalm 51](/bible/psalms/51) · [Psalm 32](/bible/psalms/32) **Anger and injustice** — [Psalm 13](/bible/psalms/13) · [Psalm 10](/bible/psalms/10) · [Psalm 94](/bible/psalms/94) **Gratitude and joy** — [Psalm 100](/bible/psalms/100) · [Psalm 103](/bible/psalms/103) · [Psalm 116](/bible/psalms/116) **Wonder at creation** — [Psalm 8](/bible/psalms/8) · [Psalm 19](/bible/psalms/19) · [Psalm 104](/bible/psalms/104) **Feeling abandoned** — [Psalm 22](/bible/psalms/22) · [Psalm 77](/bible/psalms/77) **Longing for God** — [Psalm 63](/bible/psalms/63) · [Psalm 84](/bible/psalms/84) ## Reflect The Psalms are the prayers God gave us to pray back to him — which means even your anger, grief, and doubt already have approved words. 1. The Psalms include complaint, fury, and despair alongside praise — and God put all of it in the Bible. What does that tell you about what's allowed in prayer? 2. Looking at the 'psalm for every season' list, which season is yours right now — and which feeling have you been keeping out of your prayers? 3. Could you pray one psalm a day this week — starting with the one that matches today — and stay on the line that fits?