I don’t know a lot about NASCAR, but whenever I watch a race like the Daytona 500 on television, I hear technical talk about something called a restrictor plate. As I understand it, this is a device installed at the intake of an engine to limit its power. Apparently, as fast as stock cars go, they could go even faster if they removed these things.
When it comes to our interactions with God, I think sometimes we keep something like a restrictor plate latched on to our souls, and the Psalms, more than any other book in the Bible, tells us to take it off. If you’d like some evidence of this, well, start up your engines because Psalm 109 is fast and furious. It’s as if its author has just been put into the wall by a rival driver.
Send the evil one to accuse my accusing judge. Dispatch Satan to prosecute him. When he’s judged, let the verdict be “Guilty,”...Give him a short life and give his job to somebody else. Make orphans of his children. Dress his wife in widow’s weeds....May the bank foreclose and wipe them out...May there be no one to help him. No one willing to give his orphans a break. Chop down his family tree so that nobody even remembers his name.
Wow.
There are several like this. Psalm 58, 59, 69, 79 and many more. They’re called the cursing psalms, and they offer us a lesson on honesty with God. Yes, as Christ-followers, we ought to read all Scripture in light of the Gospel and mustn’t hate our enemies. Nevertheless, these psalms show us that when we’re overtaken by out-of-control anger, we’re not supposed to stop praying but take it to God. Perhaps there’s something about acknowledging it before our God of grace that leads to a change within the inner-most parts of our being. Maybe it clears the poison out. The bottom line, though, is that the Psalmist is telling us to take off the restrictor plate.
Then there are the laments: Psalm 12, 44, 130, and others such as Psalm 6, which begins like this:
Lord, do not rebuke me in Your anger or discipline me in Your wrath. Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am faint; heal me, Lord, for my bones are in agony. My soul is in deep anguish. How long, Lord, how long?
Prayers of lamentation help us grasp the contours of our sadness, to process it, and to invite God to work on it with us.
It’s the same with our regret. Here’s the opening of Psalm 51:
Generous in love, God, give grace! Huge in mercy—wipe out my bad record. Scrub away my guilt, soak out my sins in your laundry. I know how bad I’ve been; my sins are staring me down...Enter me, then; conceive a new, true life.
Sure there’s great wisdom in Psalm 1, comfort in the well-known 23rd, and arresting beauty in Psalm 8, 121, and 150 among many others. But perhaps most remarkably of all, the Psalms give us a permission structure to go straight to God with every human feeling we experience, especially the ugly ones we often don’t know what to do with.
Take a look at Psalm 88. It’s a singular wail. No turn in direction. No turn in theme. Just one long mournful cry seeking to evoke a response from a God who it seems has double-bolted the door from the inside. Yet, there it is in our Bible.
The Psalmist tells us that whatever we’re feeling, we need to up our honesty game with God, offering not some curated social media version of ourselves, not some well-polished Madison Avenue advertisement for ourselves—but just ourselves.
Authentic. Human. As we really are.
If people in the congregation he pastored said they didn’t know how to pray, Eugene Peterson gave them the Psalms. When they returned to him saying they didn’t expect such things in the Bible he’d reply, “Did you think these would be the prayers of nice people?” Prayer, Peterson wrote, is not what good people do when they’re at their best but rather how we get everything in our lives out in the open before God.
Taken as a whole, the Psalms seem to be telling us not only that God wants all of us, but that we find more and more of Him when our pursuit, emotional and honest, looks a lot like wild abandon.
God, help me to pray as I am, not how I wish that I was. Amen.
