Podcast: How the Psalms Act as a Model for Prayer, Lament, and Praise (Winfree Brisley and Sharonda Cooper)

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Learning to Understand and Cherish the Psalms

In this podcast Sharonda Cooper and Winfree Brisley talk about the way that the Psalms shape our prayer life, teach us about God, and show us how to turn to him in any of life’s circumstances. They talk about key themes that we can look for in the Psalms and how learning to read them with a Christ-centered mindset can change the way we understand them.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

• The Psalms as Part of Redemptive History
• Key Themes in the Psalms
• Genres in the Psalms
• Ways We Are Tempted to Read the Psalms Incorrectly
• Reflections on Psalm 27 and Psalm 84

00:30 - The Psalms as Part of Redemptive History

Matt Tully
Winfree Brisley and Sharonda Cooper work together at the Gospel Coalition, where Winfree serves as an editor, and Sharonda serves as a content coordinator for women’s initiatives. Their new book together is called Turn Your Eyes: A Bible Study on the Psalms from Crossway. Winfree, Sharonda, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Winfree Brisley
It’s great to be with you.

Sharonda Cooper
Thanks for having us.

Matt Tully
Before we jump into some of the really important and interesting things that you two explore about the Psalms in your new Bible study, I wonder if we could just start really broad. What are three or four of your favorite things about the Psalms? Sharonda, can we start with you?

Sharonda Cooper
Yes. I think one of my favorite things about the Psalms is the fact that they give words to our emotions. A lot of times you feel sad, you feel happy, you feel scared, and you want to pray, but you don’t necessarily have the words. So there are psalms that help us give words to our prayers and really think through how the Lord is shepherding us through our fears and through our sorrows and through our joys, through the things that are good.

Matt Tully
The Psalms kind of blow up some of our, honestly, unbiblical ways of thinking about prayer, where we sometimes can think that we have to approach God all buttoned up, and maybe faith means that we can’t express our struggles and pains and fears to God. But the Psalms say, no, actually you can be honest with God.

Sharonda Cooper
Yeah, exactly. I think another thing is just that the Psalms actually are teaching us things about God. A lot of times you read them and you’re thinking, I’m just saying these words, or you associate them with a song. But they do teach us things. That’s one of the things I learned as we were writing is that there’s actually a lot of theology in the Psalms.

Matt Tully
Right. Winfree, how about you? Are there a couple things that you really love about the Psalms?

Winfree Brisley
I appreciate that they don’t always feel like they have it all figured out. There’s some of that sitting in the tension of life, some of the messiness. There are some that I read and I realize that I think what’s really modeled here is just when we confront difficult things, things we don’t understand, that the right place to go with them is to the Lord. And so even as they express them, I’m not sure the psalmist totally has maybe all the theology worked out. There’s theology for us to learn from it because it’s inspired Scripture and it teaches us, but I can sort of feel sometimes the psalmist is not even really knowing what to make of it. But just that example of when we’re in that place, the Lord is the place to go with it. That’s where we take those struggles. He’s the place we go with our joys. He’s the place we go with our sorrows. He’s the place we go with our questions. And so just that model of moving toward him, no matter our life experiences, because I think when we’re happy and things are going well, we can tend to not come to him because we don’t feel the need. And we see the psalmists say, No, bring him the praise he’s due in your joy. And then when we’re struggling, we can tend not to go because maybe we’re angry at him or frustrated that he’s not doing something differently. And the psalmists say, No, come to him and cry out and plead with him. And so I just love that example. I think it’s also just sort of part of the fabric of my family. I have a personal affinity for the Psalms. I’ve often heard my mom tell people to read a psalm a day, and you’ll be blessed. She’s done it for decades, and I’ve just seen that be such a blessing to her. There’s a story I love going back to my great grandmother. My grandfather was shipping out to fight in World War II, and I can only imagine what that felt like for his mother (I’m a mother of sons). I never met her and I don’t know exactly what that season looked like for her, but there’s this beautiful story passed down in our family that what she did every day that he was gone in the war was pray Psalm 121 for him. Psalm 121 talks about the Lord being our keeper. And so that’s kind of become part of the fabric of our family, of parents praying Psalm 121 for their children. I pray it for mine. And so I think the Psalms just have that way of becoming part of our spiritual heritage and something that we can pass on to our children.

Matt Tully
The Psalms are kind of unique in Scripture in that we are drawn back to them so often, and they become this place where we can just return to again and again. And as you said, they kind of give voice to our feelings and emotions and our prayers to God. We’re going to explore some of that as we get into this conversation. My guess is that everyone listening right now has read at least some of the Psalms for themselves. Maybe for many of them, they’ve read them many times over. Even if we’ve read a passage many times, we’re not always super familiar with it’s historical context and how it fits within the whole storyline of the Bible. Sharonda, I wonder if you could help us situate the Psalms within the context of the Bible and redemptive history. What are they? Because again, that’s something that we sometimes maybe don’t think about. Who wrote them, and when did they write them?

Sharonda Cooper
Well, that is a heavy question. There are 150 psalms, and many of them are written by David. But sometimes we don’t know very much about the psalms. Some of them have a superscription that gives you an understanding of the circumstances and the context so that you know a little bit. Others don’t have that information, and so we don’t know necessarily even who the author is of some of the psalms. Asaph wrote some of the psalms, and they were also written across a number of years. And so the good thing about that is that when we read them, we go to them for life information, we go to them to learn about God. A lot of them don’t pinpoint a particular incident, which is actually kind of helpful.

Matt Tully
Kind of freeing for us because we might then limit their application if we knew it was only about this one situation.

Sharonda Cooper
Right. But Winfree may have more to add on that.

Winfree Brisley
One thing I found that was interesting as I researched to prepare for the Psalms, thinking about the fact that they’re organized into five books, and so that might seem sort of arbitrary. It will say, This is the Psalms of David or something like that. But there was one theologian I came across who talked about the fact that the five books are parallel to the five books of the Pentateuch. And so in the way that those first five books of the Bible are set out to give us the Law and show us the basic story of redemptive history and set us on this course of how we ought to live, also these five books of the Psalms are meant to be instructive for us. I think sometimes we think we come to them and it’s just about engaging the emotion, or we hear it called “the song book of the Bible.” And certainly, they were written to be sung and can be used as hymns and all those sorts of things, but they’re so complex. They’re not just songs.

Matt Tully
There’s a lot going on.

Winfree Brisley
Yes. There’s an intention that they might be instructive for us as well, and I think that is helpful to keep in mind.

07:53 - Key Themes in the Psalms

Matt Tully
Winfree, what are some of the key themes in the book of Psalms that we might see pop up in various places?

Winfree Brisley
You can think in terms of categories. We find praise, we find lament, we find thanksgiving, we find songs of kingship. Sharonda, chime in if I’m missing some of the major ones here.

Sharonda Cooper
Wisdom.

Winfree Brisley
Wisdom, yes. So, you can think in some of those themes. But also I think just running through all of them is that they point to Christ. That might be somewhat, and sometimes it’s just a very small mention. But you can see at lots of points that even though David, for example, might not have known exactly who he was pointing to, that there was still always this theme of hope of the Lord fulfilling this promise of a Messiah. And you can see that woven throughout

Sharonda Cooper
When we read the Psalms, we should think about Jesus singing that song or praying that prayer, because they’re fulfilled in Christ, but they also speak to his life and his death and his experiences. So that’s a helpful way to approach the Psalms. When you read the Psalms, think, Okay, how is Jesus praying this psalm?

Matt Tully
How do we think about that Christ-centered nature to the Psalms when it’s not maybe as obvious or evident?

Sharonda Cooper
Yeah, thinking about the fulfillment. When you read the psalm, it doesn’t mention Christ, but it might mention something about his life, his death. The kingly psalms are beautiful, and when you read those, you’re thinking, Oh, this is about king David. But it also points to Christ. So. those are just some things that you have to think about as you’re studying them. And in this study, we really try to help people understand how to do that for the different types of psalms. It’s something that you have to learn to do, but I think we do that in this study.

Winfree Brisley
And I love what Sharonda said about we can think about what it means for Christ to sing or say these things. I also think it’s helpful to, as we read them and pray them, sometimes I would come to verses and think, How can I say this? And maybe how could even David have said that? There were some psalms that I wrote about where David says to the Lord, “I’ve been blameless in your sight,” and I’m thinking, Do you remember Bathsheba? And so there are verses we come to and I think, I would never feel that I could say before the Lord that I’m blameless, and how could David say this? And then we have to look to Christ, like Sharonda said, and realize that in Christ I am blameless before the Father, and I can come before him and say these things. And so sometimes even it’s just saying I can only make this my prayer because of what Christ has done for me. Because I’m in Christ, then I can come before the Father and say these things.

10:52 - Genres in the Psalms

Matt Tully
If we haven’t spent a lot of time reading or studying the Psalms, or maybe even if we have, it might be easy to miss that there are these different categories of psalms, different genres of psalms within the Psalter. So again, you kind of hit on some of these already, but Sharonda, can you summarize what are some of those different genres that we find?

Sharonda Cooper
In the study I think we covered eight different types of psalms. And depending on where you read, you might find more categories than that. But in general, you’ll find praise psalms, you’ll find wisdom psalms, you’ll find kingly psalms and psalms of lament. It’s helpful to think about the categories. As you’re reading, you’ll start to see some patterns and some commonalities.

Matt Tully
They’re not all grouped together, right?

Sharonda Cooper
They’re not all grouped together. So when you think about it, the psalter has 150 Psalms, but there’s no particular order. It’s not like you’re going to find twenty-five psalms of praise and then twenty-five psalms of lament, or something like that. And as you study the different types of psalms, you’ll start to recognize the patterns. Some psalms actually overlap. You’ll read it and you’ll think, Oh, this is this type of psalm, but it also could be this type of psalm. So, some of the categories overlap a little bit.

Matt Tully
They’re not mutually exclusive. Let’s talk a little bit more about a couple of those categories. So the first one I think that would be helpful to talk about are those psalms of lament. And these are the psalms that we read them and maybe we almost feel like we can come away from that feeling down or discouraged, because they can be so dark at times—surprisingly dark. I think of Psalm 88 in particular. It’s often referred to as one of the darkest psalms in all the Bible, because there really doesn’t seem to be a lot of hope or redemption or restoration at the end. It just kind of ends on a down note. So Winfree, why do you think it is that God included passages like this in Scripture? Because we believe this is not just David’s writings, but this is divinely inspired. What’s the purpose of including something like this?

Winfree Brisley
I think part of it is it shows us that the Lord invites us to come to him in all manner of circumstances and in all seasons. We don’t have to get ourselves worked up to a point of praise before we can come to him. We can come in all of our pain and with our questions and in our struggling, and he welcomes us to bring those to him. Like I was saying before, I love that beautiful model of saying, even in Psalm 88, where usually we see, at least by the last verse, there’s some little turn where the psalmist says, “And yet I will hope in the Lord.” And then there’s Psalm 88, and it’s not really there. It’s just dark all the way through. And so even just that model of you might not be yet at a place where you can see any light or where you’ve come to terms with any good in your situation. It might still be all completely dark to you. And yet the right thing to do with it, what you really need, is to bring that before the Lord and ask him to meet you in that darkness. And so I love the model of that. And even in some of those really dark psalms, I’ve read things and thought I don’t know that on my own I would’ve felt comfortable saying things like this to the Lord. I might have wondered, Is that irreverent? Is that inappropriate? And so I think having that model in Scripture says to us the Lord is ready to receive us with all of those hard things. If we see in his inspired word that people ask him these hard questions and tell him how they truly feel, then that means I can do that too.

Matt Tully
Winfree, why is it that it seems like that, though, is so contrary even to our church culture sometimes? As Christians, it can feel hard to even be that honest with each other. What’s going on there where it might even feel uncomfortable for us to read a passage like this out loud in a service, because it doesn’t fit with how we do church?

Winfree Brisley
I think to some extent we it’s cultural influence. On one hand, there’s the American ideal of you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you make things happen and you take responsibility. And so we have this sense that I ought to be able to fix this. If there’s something wrong, I ought to be able to do something about it. And so then maybe there’s a bit of shame if I have to be open and admit, even to my brothers and sisters in Christ, that I don’t have it all together or I really am struggling. Maybe I think I should be at a different point. I shouldn’t be grieving this way. I shouldn’t be angry this way. I should be able to just trust the Lord and just proclaim his goodness and not have all these questions. And so then we feel like we can’t let anyone else know what’s really going on inside. And so I think when a whole lot of us have that mindset and no one ever actually talks through some of these hard things or is open about it, then we just don’t have a culture where we see that. But I also think our culture has lost sight of, even in Christian circles, what is our good. And so we are so conditioned to think that good is ease and it’s comfort and it’s happiness and it’s health and it’s wealth and it’s all those things. And so I think we have to work so hard as believers to point each other to a Scriptural definition of good. When God is working for our good, that is that we are growing in Christlikeness, that we are coming to know and love him more. And often it will be in the hard things that that happens. It’ll be through our suffering that he does that good work. And so I think when we can see suffering and hardship as that cultivating of good in our lives, then we’re more willing to talk about it. We can say, This looks really bleak, but the Lord is doing something here. And so we can invite others into that and be more comfortable reading passages that talk about it when we have a different understanding of good and how the Lord works that in our lives.

Matt Tully
Sharonda, we’ve been talking a lot about how the Psalms teach us how to approach God and be honest with God. What might a practical application be, looking at these psalms of lament, for how we interact with other believers?

Sharonda Cooper
That’s a great question. Actually, at our church right now we’re going through Lamentations, and so our pastors have been trying to help us understand that we need to become more comfortable with the suffering of others. When we come together, it needs to be a place where we can be honest. I appreciate that because I’ve generally had kind of a happy life, and it’s more comfortable to talk to people about things that are going well.

Matt Tully
How’s it going? Who wants to say, Not good? That’s just hard.

Sharonda Cooper
Exactly. That’s the thing. It’s much easier to say, Oh, I’m fine. And so reading the psalms of lament and praying them is actually really helpful, even if you’re not in a season of suffering. Because what you do is you develop a compassion for people who are suffering. And surely, you will enter a season of suffering at some point, so you need to have language to speak. And one of the things I was thinking about, when Winfree was just explaining lament, is we don’t always find out the end of the story. We don’t always get the happy ending. We don’t always find out why. Why did I go through that season? Think about Job. God never told him exactly what happened. And this is what happens. Sometimes you have a friend and she’s going through something, and she won’t find out why. She won’t find out why she was in that accident or why her child had that terrible thing that happened. And so the psalms of lament allow us to lament with other people. It teaches you how to pray with them and how to just sometimes not even say anything. Just be with them, visit with them, and just sit in silence with them because they’re suffering. So, I appreciate that because I haven’t experienced a lot of seasons of suffering, but I want to be a person who suffers with my sisters and brothers.

Matt Tully
Yeah, absolutely. Another type of psalm that you explore in the Bible study are those that extol God as our Lord and our King. And so Sharonda, give us an example of that kind of psalm, and why are they, as a distinct category, worth really thinking carefully about?

Sharonda Cooper
The kingly psalms are excellent because, again, a lot of times they’re talking about David as the king. And David points to Christ. So the psalms that are are kingly psalms that talk about David, they’re teaching us something about David, but they’re teaching us something about David as an insufficient king. And so they’re pointing to Christ as the ultimate King. And I loved reading them and studying them because they teach us things about the king, but they also help us understand what Israel was expecting in a king. How were they praying? What did they think the king was going to do? A lot of times those psalms pray that the king has a long reign. I thought about how they wanted a king that would not die. I loved that because you’re reading the psalm and you’re thinking about how they’re praying that the king has this forever reign. But every king they had died. Jesus is the King that reigns forever. And I think I brought that out when I wrote that chapter, that Jesus is the perfect King. All of these prayers that you’re praying, they will not be answered in an earthly king, but they are answered in Christ as King.

20:49 - Ways We Are Tempted to Read the Psalms Incorrectly

Matt Tully
Winfree, what are some of the wrong ways that we can maybe be tempted to read the Psalms?

Winfree Brisley
I think one of the common ones is to not realize that it’s poetry, which is a very specific genre of writing. And so I was a high school English teacher before the work I do now, and I would spend a lot of time with my students helping them understand the genre we were reading in, because that has a lot to do with how an author has organized their thoughts. And so if you think about a traditional fiction plot diagram that you might have done somewhere along the way, there’s going to be some initial story that’s presented, it’s going to move up to this point of climax, and there’s some conflict that’s going to be resolved by the end. You have a nice resolution in your traditional story arc. But one of the things I point out in the study is that the Psalms don’t follow a plot diagram of fiction, and they don’t even necessarily follow what we’re used to for nonfiction, where maybe a writer will sort of logically work through some argument, and then they’ve come to their conclusion by the time you get to the end. They set forth this premise, and they’re going to work through and make this logical case. Well, that’s not really what the psalmists are doing, because it’s poetry. And so there are some different structures used in the Psalms, but the most common probably is the chiastic structure. If you sort of write it out, it would look like a V turned sideways, where you have parallel ideas that move towards a central point. And the main idea of the psalm actually comes at that center point.

Matt Tully
That’s the big point.

Winfree Brisley
Yeah. So if we look for the last verse to convey the main idea, it often won’t. Usually we’ll see a similar theme in the first and last verses, and they start working towards the main point that’s in the center. And so we can maybe misread or misunderstand the emphasis that the psalmist wanted us to see if we don’t look at that center point.

Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful nuance to share. I think of high school writing classes I had where you actually learn how that last sentence in a paragraph is meant to summarize and wrap up what you were trying to say. But that’s not how the psalms are structured. That’s actually not how most of Scripture is structured.

Winfree Brisley
Right. Chiastic structure is actually in lots of places in Scripture, and so I think understanding how different parts of Scripture are structured makes a huge difference in our understanding. It can even help work out some of the more difficult verses in the Psalms. As you read through, sometimes you come up against things and you’re like, What is the psalmist even saying here? How can I understand that?

Matt Tully
Sometimes it can feel random. It can feel like there are these big jumps where from one verse to another, all of a sudden things are totally different. Is that just poetry that we’re having to maybe spend a little bit more time thinking carefully about?

Winfree Brisley
Yeah, I think it really does. And even charting out the chiasm helps. And we even include some of these in the study where you can see it written out, because a lot of times it does seem like, Where is he going with this? Sometimes it seems repetitive as well. Didn’t he already say that? Why is he back around there? Well, yeah, because he started there, he is going to end there, but there was some point in the middle, so go back and find that. So I think even trying to chart it out sometimes can be helpful.

Matt Tully
Sharonda, any other thoughts on bad ways that we can read the Psalms?

Sharonda Cooper
Yeah. I would say, and this is something I learned during our preparation and writing, is that the Psalms are actually meant to be read slowly and thoughtfully. Sometimes when you’re reading a story, you just want to get through it. I want to find out what happens. But that’s not the way the Psalms work. Part of the reason that you see so much repetition with the parallelism is that I believe the Lord wants you to slow down and really think about it. Sometimes he says it one way, and then he says it another way so that you can really grasp the point and meditate on the material and digest it.

Matt Tully
That’s a common feature, that idea of there’s one line that says something, and then there’s a follow-up line often indented underneath it that is sort of restating that same idea. Sometimes we can try to look for the differences there perhaps. But actually, the point would generally be that you’re actually trying to emphasize the same thing.

Sharonda Cooper
Yeah. So I think that’s helpful. I love that you said, Winfree, to read one a day, because one a day is really, I think, all you can take. You need to think about it, and even throughout the day, come back to the ideas. It’s just that with a lot of Scripture, you can read through it quickly and get through the story, so to speak. But with a psalm, a lot of times it is emotional, and you do want to kind of slow down and take it all in.

Winfree Brisley
One other thing I just thought about is that I think we also have to recognize that, and Sharonda pointed this out earlier, but a lot of times the psalmists are writing in response to a specific situation that they’ve encountered. And so for us to really understand what they’re saying, often we can go back to other parts of the Old Testament and see, Oh, this is what David was going through when he wrote this. It will make a whole lot more sense if I know the story and even some of the imagery that can be difficult. Because it’s poetry, there’s a lot of really involved imagery and describing. For example, “My God is a rock,” comparing God to these inanimate objects and trying to figure out what we’re really supposed to glean from that. Sometimes if we can go back and see what was David doing and where was he physically and what were the challenges he was facing as he wrote these things, it makes more sense why he compares God to this thing or that thing. And it can help us not just ask what that means to me or what I imagine when I read this imagery, but what David meant when he wrote it.

26:30 - Reflections on Psalm 27 and Psalm 84

Matt Tully
That’s one thing that I do love about the Psalms is that there is a lot of meaning and benefit and help that is just right there on the surface. Anyone could come to the Psalms cold and get a lot out of that, get language to speak to God. We can just sense it. But for many of them, though, and this is true of so much of Scripture, if we invest even more time studying and trying to understand the poetic structure and the historical background, there can just be so many more layers of meaning and significance that we can glean from that. Maybe as a final question, and I’d love to hear from both of you on this, what’s a psalm that you have maybe been particularly helped by in recent months? Maybe you’ve spent time meditating on it and just found that it really has helped to give you words to approach God in the midst of whatever you’re facing. Winfree, can we start with you?

Winfree Brisley
Well, there are lots of psalms that I love, but one I come back to again and again, and especially in the season of life I’m in, is Psalm 27. It’s the one that starts out, “The Lord is my light and my salvation.” But in verse 4, which is where I camp out a lot, David says, “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.” And I think that “one thing” resonates with me because I’m just in a season where I have young kids, I’m working, I’ve been writing a Bible study, etc. There are so many things calling for my attention. There are so many ways I can be distracted or just be pulled aside in so many directions. And at the end of the day, I think, What did I even do? Was I faithful today? Was I fruitful in my labors? What was going on? And just that call to one thing, that the Lord would be primary, that if nothing else gets done today and I can’t check anything off my to-do list, did I seek the Lord? Was I in his presence? And realizing that that sustains me for everything else.

Sharonda Cooper
I have a lot of favorites too, but the one that I wrote about last, and I think it was the Lord’s kindness that this was the last psalm that I wrote about—Psalm 84. It’s the one that starts, “How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts. My soul longs, yes, faints, for the courts of the Lord. My heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.” The author goes through and he talks about the beauty of the place of God and how much he wants to be there and how he longs to dwell there. And as I was studying this psalm, I thought about how this is how I feel about being with the people of God. This is how I feel about going to church. I love being with brothers and sisters. I love singing praises to God. I love everything about fellowship and worshiping together. But there is an element of longing. There’s a longing for the final place, the place where we will all be together with all the saints from the past, and we will see Jesus face to face. At the end
he says, “For the Lord God is a sun and shield. The Lord bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.” And I love that because, again, we talked earlier about what is good. The good in this psalm is to be in the presence of God. The highest good is to be in the presence of the Lord. And we have his presence now, but we will have his presence in completion, in fullness, when we are in the new heavens and the new earth with our King. And I love that this is the psalm that ends this study, because what is our highest good? To be in the presence of God.

Matt Tully
Amen. Sharonda and Winfree, thank you so much for leading us through some of these psalms, helping us understand a little bit more clearly what this amazing book of the Bible is in our Bibles for and what it can mean to us as believers.

Winfree Brisley
Thanks, Matt. It’s been a pleasure.

Sharonda Cooper
Thank you. So fun.

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