Praying the Psalms: Psalm 5

Psalm 5 shows David coming to God in the morning and receiving the strength and joy he needs to make it through the day against many enemies.

It’s safe to say that David was a morning person. It probably helps to be a morning person when people are often trying to hunt you down and kill you. Nonetheless, many of David’s songs and prayers seemed to have been crafted in the morning.

While you mightn’t consider yourself at your best in the morning, beginning the day with Jesus renders our sweet spot on the clock a little irrelevant. Like David, it gives our day and our lives perspective and context. It reminds us where our strength comes from and in whom we place our trust and hope. In verse 3, David lays out his requests to God before waiting in expectation of God’s response. I don’t know how this looks for you, but some of my best prayer times are in bed before the day begins. It’s in these times I seem to be able to pray without my prayers being particularly clouded by the circumstances of the moment (I know that will happen later in the day!). It’s the time when I can pray for people and situations without it being hijacked by much other than falling asleep all over again!

I’m not saying that we should all get up at 2am or 4am and pray for 2 hours (although, for some, it may be your best time to be doing that). I am saying that, however it looks, it makes sense to begin the day thanking and communicating with the one we call Lord and Saviour.

In Psalm 5, David asks God to listen to him three times on the trot*. Some reading I was doing on Psalm 5 took me to the ‘Psalm Treasury of Charles Spurgeon’. He wrote this about the way in which we pray while reflecting the nature of David’s prayers:

There are two sorts of prayers—those expressed in words, and the unuttered longings which abide as silent meditations. Words are not the essence but the garments of prayer.

That last line is a good’un. It’s the posture of our heart not the words that emanate from our lips that communicate to God. The words simply cloak the essence of our prayer. It’s words that frame our petitions and request to God but it’s the cry of our heart that God hears.

From a literary and advertising perspective, Psalm 5 employs a a technique really common in the advertising industry: the rule of three. The basic notions is that a single message has little impact, but if you can repeat the message three times in a relatively short space of time, the customer starts to hear you. David seems to nail the brief using parallel repetition three times in three lines (Give ear to my words/Consider my meditation/Give heed to the vouch of my cry). There’s little doubt: David wants God to listen to him.

Psalm 5 is another that God is not a sidebar on the life we live, but the centre. David simply reflects the supremacy of God through his action, his words and the meditation of his heart. Sometimes the obvious takes a little longer in the application…

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* I always find it a little curious that we ask God to do things that He has promised us in His Word that he’ll do. The fact that we read that ‘we can have confidence that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us’ doesn’t stop us from pleading for God’s ear for our prayer. I think, like many of these Psalms we’re orating through, it’s much more about reminding ourselves, in humility, who God is than it is about reminding God who he is – the omniscient only has a memory deficit when, in His great mercy, he chooses to!

– Simon Elliott