How do we pray? Do we pray with
the same reverence that the disciples would have brought to their prayers? I don’t know about you, but I struggle with
it at times. I would argue that most of
us focus our prayer energy on winning God’s favor and getting him to do things
for us. The psalms teach us that we have
this backwards. The purpose of prayer is
not to question God, but to answer him. It is not to win his favor, but for him
to win our hearts. It is not to bend his
will to ours, but to bend ours to his.
Prayer is about coming to know Jesus and learning to live like him. Using Psalm 16 as our guide, this lesson
explores how we might rethink our prayers as a way to know our Lord.
Listen to Praying the Psalms: Learning to Pray
Lesson Plan
Jesus cried on the cross, “My God, my God, way
have you forsaken me!” These words haunt
us as we imagine him nailed to the cross, dying an excruciating death for
crimes he didn’t commit. But what did he
really mean? Did he really think God had
forsaken him, or did he have something else in mind? Psalm 22 helps us unpack the mystery of the
cross, giving us a greater understanding of our faith and how God hears our
prayers.
Listen to Praying the Psalms: Psalm 22
Lesson Plan
Joy
and anger are the focus of this lesson on Psalms. True joy reflects our
connection with God. Its absence may indicate that we are not as well
aligned with God as we should be. Anger can be a righteous reaction to
injustice, but more often it is a prideful response to not getting our own way. Connecting these emotions to Easter week, we see how Christ's disciples
found true joy after the resurrection while those who despised Christ were
consumed even more by their unrighteous anger. How do we find righteous
joy?
Listen to Emotions at Work #4 - Joy and Anger
Lesson Plan
Handout
