The following article is an excerpt from Praying with David by Michael Phillips.
What would it have been like had Jesus kept a prayer journal that was preserved for us?
David did. And we have it.
What a gift from God to illuminate one man’s life of intimate prayer. In the Psalms we possess David’s spiritual autobiography.
It may seem incongruous to read Psalms through the lens of David’s weakness. But that is the appropriate place to begin if we would truly understand him. David was a man, in many respects a selfish and immature man. His strength, in Paul’s words, was truly made perfect in weakness.
This is the doorway into understanding the prayers of David.
The inescapable reality of human weakness is also the doorway into understanding ourselves.
David is you and me. We are David.
In David we observe the exact image Paul spoke of in Romans 7. He is a man constantly wrestling with the two sides of his nature. Paul’s words pinpoint David’s character with precision: “In my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body…making me a prisoner of the law of sin.” (Romans 7:22-23, NIV) These words might have been written by David himself.
We understand. It is the plight of our humanity. All our lives we vacillate between the two polestars of the inner human compass—toward righteousness and toward sin.
– Excerpted from pages 39-40 of Praying with David by Michael Phillips
Continue Reading: Praying with David by Michael Phillips
In Praying with David, best-selling author Michael Phillips explores how David’s prayers were inwardly focused on his thoughts, sin, frailty, spiritual character, and his need for God. When the fiery tempest within him stilled, hearkening back to his youth as a shepherd boy on the hillside with his sheep, the divine Fatherhood slowly crept into David’s heart, mind, and soul.
In those moments of solitude, David discovered what it meant to have a personal, transparent, authentic relationship with his God.