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Praying with Psalms

Mar 23, 2025 | Seminarian Jacob Scheler

Praying Our Anger

The world is full of sin and injustice; when it affects us, we begin to feel angry and vengeful. Maybe you think a good Christian shouldn’t feel anger. Perhaps you’ve been told about specific ways to manage your anger. What does Scripture say? Tonight we pray through Psalm 137 and reveal six truths about how God’s Word doesn’t just manage anger but, through Christ, removes it and sets us free.

 

Psalm 137

 

1 By the waters of Babylon,

   there we sat down and wept,

   when we remembered Zion.

 

2 On the willows there

    we hung up our lyres.

 

3 For there our captors

    required of us songs,

and our tormentors, mirth, saying,

    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

 

4 How shall we sing the Lord's song

    in a foreign land?

 

5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

    let my right hand forget its skill!

 

6 Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,

    if I do not remember you,

if I do not set Jerusalem

    above my highest joy!

 

7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites

    the day of Jerusalem, how they said,

“Lay it bare, lay it bare,

    down to its foundations!”

 

8 O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,

    blessed shall he be who repays you

    with what you have done to us!

 

9 Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones

    and dashes them against the rock!

Series Information

During Lent, our midweek messages will focus on Praying the Psalms. To read over the Psalms is to discover that many of them are not about lofty, high doctrine but about how the human heart works. Our message themes will revolve around the guilt, doubt, anger, fear, hostility, rawness, and white heat of the emotions expressed in the Psalms. Each week, and culminating on Good Friday, where Jesus is praying Psalm 22 from the cross, we will take one of these deep feelings, and instead of expressing it or just discussing it, we will see how they pray it.