How Should You Read the Psalms? By Singing Them

In the book of Psalms, we encounter Scripture in a distinctive form. It is written in order that we might sing it and that, through song, its words might become our own.

Introducing his lectures on the Psalms, Martin Luther described the book as “a little Bible,” on account that “in it is comprehended most beautifully and briefly everything that is in the entire Bible.”¹

• Psalms 104 to 106 recount both God’s acts of creation and his dealings with Israel.
• Psalms 19 and 119 discuss the law of the Lord.
• Wisdom themes are found in places like Psalms 73 or 127.
• Elsewhere, the Psalms are nearer in character to prophecy: Psalm 22, for instance, is related to the sufferings of Christ.²

Like a prism in which a white beam of light is refracted, Psalms is a book in which we encounter both the unity and diversity of the scriptural text.

Why sing the Psalms: 4 key benefits

The most notable feature of the Psalter is that it is a songbook. Although there is much benefit to be found in reading the Psalter as we might other biblical books, our principal encounter with psalms should be singing, ideally in an assembly of God’s people.

Song glorifies speech. Habitually singing the Word of God teaches us better to treasure it. The form of the psalms themselves helps us to recognize that Scripture is not merely some prosaic thing, but the living, active, delightful, and glorious Word of God.

1. They engage our affections

By its very nature, song encourages and facilitates certain forms of engagement with texts. Placing words to music and singing them is one way emotionally to attune people to a text. We sing the words of the psalmist so as better to inhabit his lamentation, praise, or petition. Music and song stir and conscript our affections and desires. Whereas the words of the law are largely external, second-person imperatives, with little in themselves to encourage hearers emotionally to resonate with them, it is in the Psalms that we most powerfully encounter the answering love and the internalization of the Word for which the law always called (Deut 6:4–9).

2. They aid memorization

Music and song also help words to stick. Which of us has never struggled to dislodge an earworm, perhaps a theme for a commercial! By singing psalms, their words start to lodge themselves in our memories and, over time, become part of us.

A central promise of the new covenant is that God’s law would be placed in the hearts of his people. The treasuring of the words of Scripture encouraged by memorizing psalms is a form that this takes, and its results were described by David in Psalm 40:8: “I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.” Scriptural memorization is a very neglected practice, but the best place to start is with the Psalms. Having memorized several psalms in my early childhood, their words now come unbidden to my lips as calls for aid amidst struggles or expressions of praise amidst joys.

3. They encourage meditation

Closely related to both emotional engagement and memorization, music and song also encourage repetition. As words become both familiar and delightful or engaging for us as they are set to music, we will naturally repeat them. This, in turn, encourages meditation: As we repeat psalms, whether in our minds or singing them aloud, we will likely find ourselves chewing over their meaning. Through such repetition and meditation, we metabolize the Word.

4. They unify God’s people

Music also allows for the bringing together of many voices in a united song. In Psalm 148, the psalmist summons both the hosts of heaven and the manifold creatures of the earth to join like antiphonal choirs in a common declaration of the Lord’s praise. On a more modest level, whenever we sing psalms in a congregation of God’s people, they serve to unify us in a single expression of praise, our individual voices being caught up in that of the whole gathered assembly.

Psalm-singing, then, helps us to develop a new form of engagement with Scripture, one that exceeds bare “reading.”

Psalm-singing, then, helps us to develop a new form of engagement with Scripture, one that exceeds bare “reading.” Through repeated emotional engagement, memory, meditation, and singing in unison, the Psalms work the Word of God into us. Colossians 3:16 describes psalm-singing as a way in which Christ’s Word can dwell in us richly, much as the parallel text of Ephesians 5:18–19 describes it as a means of the Spirit’s indwelling.

How to read the Psalms: 7 guiding principles

The above are strong claims on the benefits of meditating upon and singing the psalms. How might we best engage in such reading and singing, so as to gain the most from the practice?

1. Interpret Christologically

First, the Psalms need to be read in relation to Christ, as it is in him that they are fulfilled.

The Psalms have historically been identified as the psalms of David, as he is the author of the core body of them and, as several of their superscriptions suggest, many of them have traditionally been read in relation to specific and non-specific events of David’s life. Yet David and his life point beyond themselves to something—to Someone—more glorious. As David’s Greater Son, Jesus is both the one spoken of in the Psalms—the righteous man who delights in the law, the king exalted by God, the faithful sufferer, the true worshipper—and the one whose voice we hear in them. When we sing the Psalms, it is, as Paul recognized, the Word of Christ that is dwelling in us.

The Psalms were evidently of immense importance in the earliest Church’s consciousness and practice. Jesus had taught them to seek him in the Psalms (Luke 24:44) and, in the opening chapters of the book of Acts, the apostles saw the experiences of the church within it, too. In Acts 1:20, Peter relates the removal of Judas from the apostolic company to Psalms 69:25 and 109:8. In his Pentecost sermon, he refers Psalm 16:8–11 to Jesus’s resurrection (2:25–28) and quotes Psalm 110:1 in relation to Christ’s ascension (2:34–35). The apostles used Psalm 2:1–2 to explain the opposition they faced in Acts 4:25–26. Such reading practice is instructive for us.

2. Appropriate personally

Second, and connected with the first point, psalm-singing is a form of our union with and a means of our being conformed to Christ.

We can imaginatively figure our own experiences—our loves, our struggles, our joys—into the lyrics of popular songs. Young people especially can be obsessed with their favorite singers and songwriters, feeling an intense emotional connection with them, not merely on account of musical skill, but because theirs are the voices that give expression to their most profound and otherwise inarticulate feelings. We should do something similar with the Psalms, yet in a way that is more warranted by the reality. When we sing the Psalms, we should not merely parrot them as the words of the psalmist or look for parallels, but make them our own, “borrowing” their inspired words to sanctify our hearts and their longings.

We encounter the voice of Christ in the Psalms, and he sings forth the deepest realities of the lives of the people of God. It is in the Psalms that we can experience something of the truth that Christ is our older brother. Here we might observe the way in which the author of Hebrews uses Psalm 22:22 in 2:12 of his epistle, presenting Christ as the psalmist and chief singer, leading his brothers and sisters in praise. We do not merely find Christ in the Psalms, but find our relationship to Christ in them.

3. Read meditatively

Third, singing the Psalms is a form of spiritual reading of Scripture. The book of Psalms opens by speaking of the blessedness of the man whose “delight is in the law of the Lord,” constantly meditating upon it (Ps 1:2). The Psalms also contain some of the most famous declarations of and meditations upon the goodness of the Word of God. Psalm 19:7–10, for instance:

The law of the LORD is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the testimony of the LORD is sure,
making wise the simple;
the precepts of the LORD are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the LORD is pure,
enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the LORD is clean,
enduring forever;
the rules of the LORD are true,
and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
and drippings of the honeycomb.

Psalm 119 is another extended meditation upon the goodness of God’s words.

By its nature, the book of Psalms encourages repeated chewing over of and delight in Scripture. If we are to enjoy its richness, we must commit ourselves to the savoring of the Word of God that the singing of the Psalms encourages.

4. Inhabit performatively

Fourth, as Gordon Wenham has argued, singing the Psalms is a performative act and consequently of great ethical importance. When I sing, “You are my God,” I am not merely making a statement of some detached fact: I am expressing a deep commitment that requires and propels the transformation of my life. Such statements, which pervade the Psalms, are not merely objective statements about God, but self-implicating statements about us in relation to him.

I am expressing a deep commitment that requires and propels transformation of my life.

It is easy to sing unthinkingly, yet true singing of the Psalms conscripts our minds, our hearts, and our undivided attention and energies. We should reflect upon the words of the Psalms that we sing and, when we sing them, sing them prayerfully with our whole hearts.

5. Teach your heart to sing

Fifth, the Psalms furnish us with a rich repertoire of itineraries of the soul that we can follow. They assure us that, wherever we find ourselves in the realm of life, it is not uncharted by the grace of God, a place we are without faithful companions, nor lacking in a trustworthy way that we can follow back to him.

• There are psalms, for instance, that present movements from crisis, to trust, to deliverance, and then to answering praise.
• There are other psalms that lack deliverance, but by which the psalmist transposes despair in or complaint about crisis into trusting cry for aid.
• In others, the psalmist addresses his wavering soul with the trustworthy truth of God, enabling him to face trials with confidence.
• When alienated from God through sin, the psalms provide us with songs of penitence like Psalm 51 and subsequent joy at forgiveness, such as Psalm 32.
• When we are experiencing blessings, the Psalms will also give us fitting words of praise by which we can render thanksgiving to God.

As a devotional practice, Psalms equips us to relate the diverse experiences and feelings of life to God and his Word and to articulate them faithfully. If we desire hearts that are freed and equipped to express their deepest longings to God, meditation upon and singing of the Psalms should be part of our daily time in Scripture.

Use the Psalms Explorer in Logos to browse, sort, and group the Psalms.
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6. Connect historically

Sixth, the Psalter is a means by which we are united to the people of God across history, who have been singing them for nearly three thousand years. When we take up their words to relate our hearts to God, we are doing so as members of a vast company of the faithful who have done the same over the centuries, something that, irrespective of their lyrical value, is not the case for modern compositions.

We should sing the Psalms alongside study of the history of the people of God in Scripture, discovering within psalm-singing something of the unity of the people of God in Christ across the centuries.

7. Sing communally

Our engagement with the Scriptures can often be narrowly focused upon private and silent reading. The public reading of Scripture, the significance of which is greatly downplayed, is a more primary form of encounter. Yet there is something distinctive about the singing of psalms: We do not merely silently take the Word in with our eyes, but proclaim it forth with raised voices.

Likewise, the words are sung in unison with others, uniting us in a company of song. In singing the Psalms, we do not merely address God, but we address our brothers and sisters in Christ. As the Apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 5:19, part of what being filled with the Spirit entails is “addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” Singing together builds up the body of Christ, deepening our unity and encouraging struggling members, as profound and faith-eliciting truths of God’s Word are presented to our hearts in the confident song of fellow believers.

Psalm-singing should not be restricted to private devotions, but should be at the heart of our gathered worship.

Conclusion

How, then, should we read the Psalms?

Different types of books call for different modes of engagement. One does not “read” a work of history in the same way as a novel, a recipe book, the script of a play, or a computer manual. Engaging with the book of Psalms on its own terms invites us to the habitual, and frequently communal, singing of God’s Word. It establishes a form of engagement with Scripture that foregrounds the internalization of that Word in memory, meditation, and conscription of our affections and desires, and the beautiful external expression of that Word in the upraised voice of song. It equips us to respond to God’s address of his truth to us in answering praise, habitually to address God’s truth to our own faltering hearts, and to buoy up our struggling neighbors with an inspiring song of praise.

Alastair Roberts’s recommended resources on the Psalms

• Laurence, Trevor. Cursing with God: The Imprecatory Psalms and the Ethics of Christian Prayer. Baylor University Press, 2023.

Related content

• Beyond Rituals: How Liturgy Shapes Ethics
• What Is Worship Music For? 5 Reasons to Sing
• Logos Live: James Hamilton and the Psalms
• Why Are There Lament Psalms at the End of the Psalter?
• Pray the Psalms with Your Church

1. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 35: Word and Sacrament I, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan et al. (Fortress, 1999), 254.
2. In passages such as Matthew 27, its words are found in the narrator’s description of the division of Jesus’s garments (v. 35; cf. Ps 22:18), in the mouths of the crowd at Jesus’s crucifixion (v. 43; cf. Ps 22:7–8), and in Jesus’s own cry of dereliction from the cross (v. 46; cf. Ps 22:1).