Psalm 25:1 Unto thee, O LORD, do I lift up my soul.
Recently, my pastor has been preaching through the Psalms on Sunday nights, and most recently he has preached through Psalm 25. It has been a great blessing to me. Something I noticed when listening to the teaching of Psalm 25 is just how many synonyms there are for prayer. If you are doing a word study on prayer in the Bible, you might actually miss half the references to prayer because not all of them go by the word “prayer.” Other words that are used to describe prayer and what it means really reveal a lot about it.
Psalm 25 gives us four synonyms, at the very least, for prayer. David says in Psalm 25:1, “Unto thee, O LORD, do I lift up my soul.” There are four things that he says that he does. The first thing is “I lift up my soul.” What does he mean when he says, “I lift up my soul”?
Well, in Jeremiah 11, Jeremiah talks about revealing his cause unto the Lord. When King Hezekiah got a menacing letter from the enemy, the Bible says he “spread it before the LORD.” All these things have the same idea: you are giving or revealing your problem to God. What a wonderful way to live! Instead of bottling my problems in my own heart and trying to vanquish them in my own power, I lift up my soul unto God.
A second synonym for prayer is found in verse 5. It says, “Lead me in thy truth, and teach me: for thou art the God of my salvation; on thee do I wait all the day.” He repeats in verse 21, “For I wait on thee.” What does he mean by “I wait”? Waiting is the very essence of prayer. I have said more than once that we wait on God in order to get what we want. On the other hand, our waiting on God is itself what God wants from us.
The worst condition in the world is to be healthy, wealthy, have no worries, and think therefore that you have no need of God. Generally, people in ill health or with big problems are closer to God simply because the problems that are most readily recognizable lead them to realize their deeper needs, spiritual needs. Trusting God is one thing. Trusting God over a prolonged period when you do not know how He will answer is something else again. “I wait on thee.” That is talking about prayer.
A third synonym is found in verse 15 which says, “Mine eyes are every toward the LORD.” Are your eyes on your problems, are your eyes on yourself, or are your eyes looking to God? Psalm 123:2 says, “As the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters…so our eyes wait upon the LORD our God, until that he have mercy upon us.” We are talking about a focus, an asking. It is prayer.
One morning about a year ago, I was fixing breakfast at the kitchen sink when I felt a pair of eyes on me. When I looked down, I could see my little dog looking up at me. What she was doing was asking without a word. Her eyes were on me. I looked out the window, and perched on the window sill was my cat. She was doing the same thing, looking right at me and my breakfast and asking.
I looked over the top of her back and across the field where five horses were lined up at the fence looking toward the horizon, hoping they would soon be fed the grain they get each morning. All of these animals were putting their eyes on the one who provides. In every case in our life, God should be the One to Whom we look, and we do that through prayer.
A fourth reference to prayer is in verse 20 which says, “O keep my soul, and deliver me: let me not be ashamed; for I put my trust in thee.” How do you put your trust in God? Is it something you just feel? Are we talking merely about making a feeling happen or about an action you can take? I am not really trusting God as I should if I am not asking God as I should, if I am not coming to Him on a regular basis acknowledging His authority, thanking Him for His provision, and asking Him for the things that I need. There is a cycle here: trouble, prayer, and the mercy that God gives.
This morning, there is more than one word for prayer, and the book of Psalms is filled with them.