Restore us, LORD God Almighty; make your face shine on us, that we may be saved.
The Psalms are rightly treasured because of the wonderful way they express our deep individual dependence on God, in all the changing scenes of life. The LORD is my shepherd, writes David (Psalm 23:1).
But read the Psalms as a whole, and you can’t help noticing how many of them express corporate prayers for God’s visible people, Israel. Asaph is a writer particularly concerned for this: O God, why have you rejected us for ever? he writes (Psalm 74:1). O God, the nations have invaded your inheritance, he writes later (79:1). Then there is his Psalm at the head of this post.
It strikes me that there is something for us to learn here. In our own prayers, we rightly bring our own needs and those around us to God. But how much do we pray for the cause of the Lord’s people across our land? How much does it stir us to pray when His name is not known, or brought into disrepute, and His commandments ignored, even by His visible people?
At our monthly church prayer meetings we pray each time for the Church of England. This doesn’t sound very exciting, but it is an example of an Asaph-like prayer, in that here is a big old denomination, which in the public mind is still associated with our Lord Jesus, and which has extraordinary opportunities for witness (13,000 parishes, church buildings, schools etc). It is far from the only denomination, but it is the one we are part of.
As it faces a terrible attack on its Biblical foundations, we should be in prayer for it! If we pray as the Psalmist does, our family devotions and individual prayers should include these wider concerns.
If we think Asaph-like about the wider scene, surely this will also draw us to join the wider-scene prayer that our Lord Jesus actually tells us to pray: to ask the Lord of the harvest… to send out workers into his harvest field (Matthew 9:38). There is an urgent need for gospel workers across our land (and abroad!) – will we pray for more?
If we pray these wider prayers, we’ll also want to pray for revival. The Lord has done it before – in the great movement of the eighteenth century in the UK and North America – let’s be asking Him to do it again!
