One of the things we are trying to build at Trinity is a robust culture of Psalm singing. We’re at the very beginning of this work and so we’re trying a bunch of different routes to this destination - a bit of a convulsive start to what we pray will be a pervasive part of Trinity’s culture not only on Sundays, but in every context where we gather. We imagine parishes, elder meetings, men’s and women’s gatherings to be marked by singing the Psalms together. There are a number of different reasons for us to pursue this sort of thing, but there are a few particularly reasons that are vital to the cause of discipleship in our age. 

1. We need instruction in how to pray in our age.
   God promises us in Romans 8 that the Spirit will instruct us in how to pray, because we do not know how to pray as we ought. The primary tool the Spirit wields in teaching us how to pray in an age where all our allegiances can be so easily confused is the Psalter. Far too many Christians either abandon the Psalms altogether or see them merely as a kind of divine permission for self expression. The idea being that the Psalms are filled with all kinds of joy and doubts and anger, therefore we are allowed to express our own joys and doubts and anger. But the Psalms are not primarily about Divine permission. They are about Divine instruction. The Psalms reframe the world, they redefine it for us again. They help us to discern history and our neighbor and the acts of God all around us. Here is a collection of prayers that teach us to pray rightly in the face of God’s providential work all around us.
   

2. We need instruction in what to feel in our age.
   In an age where people are either trained to abandon their emotional life altogether or they are utterly ruled by their emotional life. The Psalms teach us what to feel and when. Our emotional lives are simply the expression of our loves, our fears, our anxieties and our allegiances. They are vitally important in our obedience to God and they must not rule us. Rather, me must, as in everything else, submit them to God’s word. Here in the Psalms we learn how to conform our emotions to the realities described in its songs and prayers. We learn when to rejoice. We learn what to hate. We learn how to be thankful. Our age has often made a god of what we feel. Right and wrong, truth and falsehood are no longer in submission to God and his decrees, but rather are merely expressions of our own feelings. The Psalms offer an oftentimes jarring corrective to this sort of thing.
   

3. We need the right enemies and the right conflict in our age.
   We live in a divided age and oftentimes those divisions are dictated to us from secular sources named CNN or Fox News. The problem isn’t so much the reality of division, its where they tend to draw the lines. The Psalms are the songs of God’s hosts - his armies. And if you approach them expecting that here, in the sphere of Christianity and religion we are escaping the divisions that are so prevalent in our day you will not understand them. Here are enemies defined by God. Here is a framework for understanding the good guys and bad guys, good and evil, and the great conflict at the heart of our history. We learn how and where to fight in the Psalms from God Himself. 

So let us sing these Psalms with brothers and sisters, children and old, in defiance of the old dragon and his children. May we sing loudly, having our affections reordered and our allegiances set right.