Let the Choirmaster Lead
Psalm 104
“Feelings are the scourge of prayer” (Eugene Peterson).
There is a category of psalms that I particularly struggle to connect with, songs that bless the Lord through the beauty of creation. This is a strange confession, I admit, for I love the outdoors. I love the grandeur of standing on the beach and staring across the ocean or standing on the highest point of a snowcapped mountain range or walking through the forest or even the barren West Texas landscape. I would rather walk through a park and pray than sit on a pew. But still, these creation songs have always alluded me.
Psalm 104 is one such song. This psalm blesses the Lord as both Creator and Sustainer of all things. It speaks of how God created everything from heavenly bodies (19) to mountains (8) to the seas (25), and all living things therein, including angels (4), donkeys (11), birds (12), humans (14), storks (17), goats (18), rock badgers (18), lions (21), sea creatures (25), even the Leviathan (26). But the song also exalts the Lord’s ongoing sustaining care for creation by making springs gush with water (10), causing the grass to grow (14), strengthening man’s hearts (15), giving all creatures their food (27) and filling them with good things when He opens His hand (28).
This meditation, the fact that God both creates and sustains a gloriously beautiful creation, calls us to sing to the Lord (33), to meditate on Him (34), to rejoice in the Lord (34), and to talk in righteousness (35). The call is for me to “bless the Lord” with all my soul (35).
Then why do these “creation songs” fall so flat to my soul?
Eugene Peterson, in his book Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer, notes that 55 of the psalms have the subheading “for the choirmaster,” demonstrating that there was a director commonly involved in the praying life of Israel. The implication, Peterson writes, is that “we all learn to pray by being led in prayer….Someone stands in front of us and says, ‘Let us pray.’ We don’t start it; someone else starts it, and we fall in step behind it” (86).
His point is that prayer, by its very design, is answering speech. God speaks first, and we respond. But this is not how we tend to pray. In our prayers, we speak first and expect God to respond to our words. However, this means that our feelings are the primary factor in our conversations with God and our view of God’s work in our lives. This is why Peterson writes, “Feelings are the scourge of prayer” (87).
At first, I couldn’t disagree more. After all, how many psalms are laments where David or others poured out their “feelings” in prayer? But Peterson continued to make his point. Because feelings lie, deceive, even seduce us, they are not reputable guides to reality. They are part of how God made us, but they are not to be trusted. They are not to have the first or controlling word. While feelings are to be incorporated into our prayers, our prayers are not to be incorporated into our feelings.
How can we be “rescued from the tyranny of our feelings” (87)? By being led in prayer.
Peterson writes,
If we insist on maintaining the initiative in prayer, praying when we feel like it according to what we feel we need, we take on a psychic burden that is too much for us….That is why there is so much intermittent prayer—people who pray in spurts and then lapse, leaving behind them abandoned schemes, failed methods, but always on the lookout for another that will keep them faithful in prayer. It never occurs to them to let the “choirmaster” do that part for them. (88)
The “choirmaster” is the systematic, daily praying through the psalms. Praying the assigned psalm for that day, allowing the choirmaster to lead in prayer, to be rescued from the tyranny of my feelings on that day, to let God speak first, to submit my feelings to the Words of God, this is the path to abiding in Him instead of trying to get Him to abide with me.
How does this change my praying of Psalm 104? Instead of dismissing it because it wasn’t what I wanted to pray about, I surrendered my feelings to the choirmaster of Psalm 104. Instead of basking in my feelings of frustration or fear or boredom, I was called into the majesty of Creation and God’s sustaining power. Not only did the Creator create everything from the moon to the donkey, He sustains everything from the grass to the angels. And in that glorious creation, He cares enough about me to gladden and strengthen my heart, to fill me with good things, to even be blessed by my little soul.
What a glorious day to live under the Creative and Sustaining care of the Lord. Bless the Lord, O My God, for You are very great!
(Quotes are from Eugene Peterson’s book, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer)