Praying About Politics

Your kingdom come and your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. - Matthew 6:10

As we pray through the different aspects of the Lord’s Prayer/House of Prayer (at bottom), we’re going to close our week with seeking God’s priorities - his kingdom and his will.

Jesus’s prayer was not new in this regards. A dozen times in scripture we hear him quoting from the prayer book of the Bible, the Psalms. He knew those prayers by heart and they helped form his prayer life. So today we’re going to pray one of the psalms that Jesus prayed. It’s a psalm about our political priorities.

Praying about politics can be subversive. It can feel dangerous. It can also be very liberating - to name what really needs to be named in a world gone crazy. So as you pray Psalm 146, take a moment and pause after each line or two and then freestyle a little, adding a few sentences in your own words about what your heart is saying about the priorities you’re reading in the text. Let your heart align with God’s heart in this very political psalm.

Psalm 146

Praise the Lord.

Praise the Lord, my soul.

I will praise the Lord all my life;
    I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
Do not put your trust in princes,
    in human beings, who cannot save.
When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;
    on that very day their plans come to nothing.
Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
    whose hope is in the Lord their God.

He is the Maker of heaven and earth,
    the sea, and everything in them—
    he remains faithful forever.
He upholds the cause of the oppressed
    and gives food to the hungry.
The Lord sets prisoners free,
 the Lord gives sight to the blind,
the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down,
    the Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the foreigner
    and sustains the fatherless and the widow,
    but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.

The Lord reigns forever,
    your God, O Zion, for all generations.

Praise the Lord.