Church Camp 2027: Praying with our King
By Ps Danny Chua
What is your favorite Psalm? Why do you love it so much?
For three thousand years, God’s people have prayed and sung the Psalms. As many church fathers put it, the Psalms are “the church’s prayer book.”
In these 150 prayer songs, we find every season of the Christian’s soul expressed honestly in raw form: joy and grief, trust and confusion, praise and lament. I believe the Psalms are God’s grace to us – they are not just the Word of God teaching us about God. No, the Psalms give us a prayer language for the mountains and valleys of our lived realities in this broken world to go to God.
Personally, I’ve also been struck by the idea that Jesus Himself would have also grown up reading, singing and praying through this prayer book! As some have said, the Psalms “were the prayer book of Jesus”.[1]
This makes total sense, especially given what we have been hearing through King David’s life and words in our Samuel series. As David says out of his own experiences in various Psalms: “Those who look to Him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed.” (34:5), and “On God rests my salvation and my glory; my mighty rock, my refuge is God.” (62:5)
Ultimately, what David experiences, falters in, and rejoices in – they are all fully realised in King Jesus. What an encouragement and joy the Psalms must have been to Jesus as He journeyed through them on His path of affliction to the Cross.
It is no wonder the Holy Spirit often uses the Psalms to assure us that our God understands our sorrows, is present with us as our refuge, and will bring a sure rescue one day – that was how He worked through King Jesus. I love how Dietrich Bonhoeffer states it, “Whenever the Psalter is abandoned, an incomparable treasure is lost to the Christian church. With its recovery will come unexpected power.”[2]
Next year, as our church family rediscovers our vision to #GetDeep in God’s Word, I have one prayer for us at Church Camp 2027: that God’s Word would not only shape our hearts and minds, but draw us into the very life of Jesus and the Spirit. Indeed, that it may draw us nearer to our God as we learn to pray with our King – the very words that He learnt and lived out in the valleys of sorrow and pain.
Would you join us on this journey together? Please prayerfully consider setting aside a few days in June 2027 with us at camp! (See announcements/bulletins for details).
[1] Hans-Joachim Kraus, Theology of the Psalms, trans. Keith Crim (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986), 188.
[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Prayerbook of the Bible, in Life Together; Prayerbook of the Bible, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly, trans. Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness, vol. 5 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 162.[2]
