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Why pray? To fulfill the will of God. You are the means that God has
ordained. You are the channel through which He is going to do it. He is
still going to do it, but He wants to use you. You can say no to that, but
He delights to use you. He wants to use you. He ordains the end; He
ordains the means. We cannot change His will, but we can fulfill His
will, and He can and will use our prayers.

Reading PSALMS to know God

Chapter 7 Praying to Know God

Here are the five principles we have looked at so far:

1: All prayer is praise.
2: Pray in the very words of Scripture.
3: The heart of prayer is the poured out life.
4: God always over answers prayer.
5: Prayer is the fulfilment of God’s will.

Now I want to wrap up our thoughts on prayer by continuing to relate
prayer to the Historical Psalms. These are Psalm 78, Psalm 105, Psalm
106 and Psalm 136.

If you read those psalms, you will see that the psalmist sweeps over
many years of history as he praises God. He is not praising God for what
happened this afternoon or what happened yesterday or last week. He is
not praising God for what happened a year ago or two years ago. He is
not even looking at the life of a human being – forty, fifty or sixty years.
When you read these Historical Psalms you see he is going all the way
back. This is the history of a nation. These Psalms take you back, and
he is saying, “Praise God, He took us out of Egypt! Praise God, He
took us through the wilderness! He took us into the land of Canaan. He
was with us during the seven year war to take possession of Canaan”. In
other words, these Psalms can cover many years, one actually deals with
over seven hundred years!
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