Show Notes
In this New Year’s Day episode, Derek kicks off 2026 by reflecting on the power of habits over resolutions. He describes a spiritual habit that has shaped his life for years: praying one psalm a day. This ancient practice formed Israel, Jesus, and the early church, and continues to form Christians today.
Derek shares how he first learned to pray the Psalms during a season of frustration as a young youth pastor, discovering that David’s battles with enemies gave him language to fight the interior enemies of his soul. Praying the Psalms taught him emotional honesty, resilience, and trust.
He then walks through five reasons to adopt this practice in 2026, emphasizing how the Psalms root us in an ancient community, embrace every human emotion, provide a language of prayer, and use powerful metaphors to connect the seen and unseen.
Highlights
Habits shape us more than resolutions.
Praying one psalm a day is a simple and transformative spiritual practice.
The Psalms root us in the ancient prayers of Israel—and of Jesus Himself.
They give voice to every human emotion, including anger, lament, and hope.
The Psalms teach us how to pray when we don’t know what to say.
Their metaphors help us encounter God in ordinary life.
Derek shares how praying Psalm 71 reshaped his early ministry by helping him confront inner enemies.
Resources
Psalm of the Day Chart: https://derekvreeland.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Psalm-for-the-day.pdf
Book mentioned in this episode: Answering God by Eugene Peterson
Scriptures mentioned in this episode Psalm 71, Psalm 23
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Transcript
Welcome back.
To another episode of Peaceable and Kind.
I am your host, Derek Vreeland, and happy new year 2026 is here.
And I hope you have plans in 2026.
I know it’s popular to set New Year’s resolutions, so hopefully you have resolved to do something new in a new year.
And I
Also hope that you have a plan when your resolutions fail.
I’m not trying to bring you down.
I’m just trying to be honest.
that we set these New Year’s resolutions every year.
We go back to the gym.
We’re gonna eat right.
We’re gonna start exercising.
And then February rolls around and we’re like, well, I tried.
And I really don’t want to bring you down at all because it is January 1st, 2026, and when that calendar changes from
December to January, it feels like newness is here.
But I have just had a history of absolute failure with New Year’s resolutions.
A couple years ago, my New Year’s resolution was to be nice to my wife, to uh to stop teasing her with my sarcasm and my witty little jokes
And I think I lasted three days.
I have been teasing her for over thirty five years since we were teenagers, even before we started dating
I was teasing her and I don’t see that changing at all.
And to be honest with you, habits are more powerful than resolutions
So in 2026, let me challenge you to set aside resolutions and instead pick up some new habits.
And so because it is day one of a brand new year, I wanted to talk about a daily habit
That has deeply transformed me and my church.
And it’s a prayer habit.
It’s an ancient prayer habit
that has been shaping the people of God for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
It’s a habit that formed ancient Israel.
It’s a habit that formed Jesus.
It’s a habit that formed the very early Christians, and it’s a habit that continues to form me.
And this habit
Is praying the psalms praying one psalm a day
And when I say praying the Psalms, I’m not talking about reading the Psalms.
I’m not talking about studying the Psalms.
Instead, I’m talking about this habit of using the Psalms as prayer.
We have a local tradition.
in our church of praying one psalm a day, praying what we call the psalm of the day, and it aligns itself with the day of the year
Now this does require a little bit of work as the months roll on.
In the month of January, it’s simple.
Because today is January 1st, and so it is day one of a calendar year, so we’re praying Psalm 1.
And tomorrow, January 2nd, will be day two of 2026.
And so we’re praying Psalm 2.
So really through the month of January, it’s easy to find the psalm for the day because it aligns itself with the day of January.
Now,
February things get a little tricky because there are 31 days in January.
February 1st is day 32 of the calendar year.
And so on February 1st, we are praying Psalm 32 because it is the 32nd day of the year.
Now, there are 365 days in the year, but only 150 Psalms.
So here’s what we do.
On day 151, we simply start back over with Psalm 1
Now this has been a local tradition just here at our church, and as our pastor has taught his prayer school, it has spread to others, and I know it can be somewhat difficult
I was talking to a pastor friend.
He was asking me how I pray in the morning.
He said, I need
I need help in my prayer life.
So what do you do?
And I said, well, you need to come to one of our prayer schools.
We’re doing them online.
joined one of the online prayer schools and and he he said I need to know now I’m I’m getting desperate so I said if you give me about an hour hour and a half I can walk you through
what I do in morning prayer.
It’s it’s very scripted.
I follow a liturgy.
There are similar things that I do.
There are memorized prayers.
Some things change every day.
Some prayers change every week.
There’s a place where I make my petitions known to God.
There’s time for silence.
But one of the practices is in there is the practice of praying the Psalm for the day.
So I walked him through it.
And then it was maybe a month, month and a half later, I texted him.
I said, how’s it going?
And he says, I really like it.
It’s really good, except for that psalm for the day.
I just can’t figure out what the psalm of the day is and what the day of the year, so I stopped doing that.
I responded
to him with a text, in all caps, you must do the psalm of the day.
I think I had a multiple exclamation points
Then I went in in this long text.
I went into the psalm is the most important thing you do.
Because learning how to pray has been deeply formative for me, learning liturgical prayer.
Learning to pray from my heart, learning practices of contemplative prayer.
All these things have been very important.
But when I think about my prayer life, the most important thing I do, I mean not the most important,
Maybe the most transformative, the most helpful thing I do in prayer is every day I pray a psalm.
And so I wanted my pastor friend to know, you can skip all the other prayers, but make sure you pray a psalm every day.
So to help him and others, I have created a Psalm of the Day chart, and it’s on my website.
We’ll put that in the show notes.
You can find that
In the show notes, wherever you’re listening to this podcast episode, just look for Psalm of the Day chart.
I create this chart, it makes it easy, you figure out
It’s June 27th, and the chart will tell you exactly what psalm to pray on June 27th or whatever day it might be.
So I encourage you in a brand new year to form this habit of prayer
that’s rooted in the psalms.
And I don’t know what you do in your devotional life, but maybe this is something you can add.
For me, I read scripture every day.
I’m reading from the Old Testament, the Epistles, the Gospels every day
But I don’t read from the psalms.
Instead, what I do is pray one of these psalms.
And I didn’t always do this.
I first learned about the tradition of praying the Psalms when I was a youth pastor.
Many, many, many years ago.
I was in my very first church.
I was in my twenties.
I was a young husband, a young dad.
I was trying to figure out ministry.
This is more than 20 years ago.
And I was leading a small student ministry.
And Wednesday nights were beginning to get frustrating.
I had started a small uh worship band, so we were having worship music, and I was trying to teach
the scriptures and the way of Jesus in a real faithful way, and it just wasn’t clicking with the students.
They weren’t interested in anything we were doing.
And I was frustrated.
And so the next morning I went to my pastor.
It was a Thursday morning.
And I said
I’m not going back to that youth group.
You can fire me if you have to, but I’m done.
I’ve tried everything.
They don’t care about what I have to say, what I’m trying to do.
And I just poured out my soul to my pastor.
And as a very, very wise pastor, he listened.
He encouraged me and then he asked me about my prayer life, which is not what I expected.
And in my frustration I said, I don’t even hardly pray anymore.
I don’t know what to do in prayer.
And he was the one that first told me.
He said, Well,
If you don’t know what to pray, why don’t you pick a psalm and let that be your prayer?
And I thought, huh, pray the Psalms.
I didn’t know about this.
I didn’t know this was a tradition.
I didn’t know that Christians even did this
And he explained to me.
He said, well, you know, the Psalms, their songs and their prayers.
Many of them are the prayers of David.
So if you don’t know what to pray, pick a psalm and pray it.
And he encouraged me, pick one psalm and pray it every day.
Let it be your prayer every day.
And so I took his advice.
I flipped through the Psalter.
That’s a traditional word for the collection of psalms.
flipping through there, and I I settled on Psalm 71.
And what my pastor encouraged me to do, he said,
As David is praying that God rescue him from his enemies, he said, think about God rescuing you from the enemies of your soul.
And so I started doing that.
Actually, for six weeks, I prayed Psalm 71 every day.
And it taught me how to bring everything, every emotion, every fear, every bit of frustration.
Into the presence of God.
And so when David was praying, you know, Lord, my enemies surround me, rescue me, O Lord, I was thinking about.
The enemies of my my heart, that that anger and that frustration that I was feeling.
And after six weeks, I can tell you
that those those negative emotions, that anger, that that that that disgust, that frustration, that angst, it dissipated
And I wish I could say I carried on that practice, but I didn’t.
My prayer life has has ebbed and flowed
And it wasn’t until I learned a complete liturgy of morning prayer that I started praying a psalm every day.
And so I’ve done that at least now for 10 years, if not longer.
And so I want to really convince you of this because I can give testimony by by just telling you my story.
But I want to convince you of the value of praying the Psalms.
So there’s at least for me five reasons why the Psalms should be part of your prayer life.
Let me give you the list.
And then I want to unpack it a little bit.
Alright, so here’s five reasons why praying the Psalms is so important to me and why I think it should be important to you.
Number one, they’re Jewish prayers and they remind us that we belong to an ancient community.
It teaches us that prayer is not just about me, but that prayer is a part of what we do as a community.
Number two, the Psalms cover the entire spectrum of human emotion.
The Psalms validate the feelings that we have as human beings and reminds us that it is okay to feel and to feel deeply.
Number three, Jesus and the early church prayed the Psalms.
And as you know, I am big on tradition.
Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.
This has been called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.
These are four D values for me as a pastor, as an author
And also as a follower of Jesus.
But there’s a tradition behind praying the Psalms.
Number four, Psalms give us a language of prayer.
They give us the words to say when we pray
And finally, number five, the metaphors of the Psalms connect the unseen with the seen.
Let’s walk through each of those reasons.
I gotta jump into this podcast episode to let you know I have a new book that’s out.
Incarnation, eight lessons on how God meets us is available now.
Go order it.
Link is in the show notes.
First, the Psalms root us in an ancient community.
When we pray the Psalms, we step into prayers that have been spoken for thousands and thousands of years.
And at first, when I started praying the psalms, some of the psalms just sounded very, very
Jewish, which is, to state the obvious, they are Jewish prayers, they are Jewish songs, but some of them were just very, very Jewish in the sense that they were talking about
cities and tribes and Mount Zion and places in geography that had nothing to do with my life
And so I felt very disconnected.
But this is the beauty of the Psalms.
The Psalms move us from thinking about prayer as something I do as an isolated individual.
Prayer is something I do for me, to what is much more Jewish and Christian, and that is prayer is what we do together.
We might pray by ourselves, but we are praying the words of the community with the community.
Not only for ourselves, of course, you can pray for yourself, but more importantly, we’re praying with the community in mind.
These Jewish prayers remind us that we are standing in a long line of worshipers.
Israel in the wilderness, Israel as exiles in Babylon, as worshippers in the temple
Even early Christians gathered in homes, they were all praying the words of the Psalms.
So praying the Psalms draws me out of myself and into the presence of God.
And now some of those very, very Jewish psalms are some of my favorite psalms because it reminds me that I belong to an ancient people and that I belong to an ancient story.
See, I got grafted into this story.
I didn’t create this Christian faith.
It didn’t even start with my quote unquote people.
It started with God’s covenant with Abraham.
and the children of Abraham.
And I’m a Gentile.
I’m on the outside.
I got grafted into this.
covenant, this covenant faithfulness that started with the children of Abraham.
And so I love the the Jewishness of the Psalms.
It just reminds me that prayer
It’s not about me.
And my faith that I have, it didn’t begin with me.
My prayers don’t begin with me.
When I pray the Psalms, I’m joining a community that goes all the way back to Abraham and David, and of course, Jesus himself.
Number two, the psalms contain the full range of human emotion
The psalms give us words in prayer for joy and gratitude.
But also for fear, anger, betrayal, lament, and indeed I’d say doubt
When I first learned to pray the Psalms, I discovered something very freeing: that God is not offended by my honesty
I mean, if David could cry out to the Lord, how long, O Lord, then why couldn’t I do the same thing?
I think Christians have a tendency of being way too nice in prayer.
We feel like we have to be prim and proper in how we address a holy God.
The Psalms teach us that we can pray with brute honesty, that we can express all human emotion
when we are praying.
And so in that season when I first learned to pray the Psalms, when I was praying Psalm 71 every day
It helped me see that these negative emotions like anger and frustration, it wasn’t sinful to feel those things
But what the Psalm did is it gave me an invitation to not hide those negative emotions, but to bring them out into the presence of God.
Anger is not a sin.
To feel anger is not a sin.
Now, anger can motivate you to then commit sins
Which is why anger has to be dealt with.
But anger itself, the human emotion of anger, isn’t a sin.
Anger is to the soul what pain is to the body
It’s a warning sign.
It’s a red flashing light that something is not right.
Anger is a secondary emotion
When we feel anger, we have to ask ourselves, what’s not right here?
What’s underneath that anger?
And I have had a very poor habit over the years of dealing with my anger
For years, I felt the best thing to do with anger is to shove it down, to just stuff it down and not let it out.
It was like I was stuffing my anger in a giant wooden box.
And I had a wooden lid on top and I was
Driving three-inch deck screws down into that lid trying to just keep that anger at bay
Well, what I learned from the help of counselors and others is that doesn’t work.
Eventually, that anger is going to burst out.
And as a pastor, I was able to hold that anger in at church
But then often when I was at home, it would be my wife or kids who would experience my outburst.
I’d start.
yelling.
My oldest son Wesley talks about the day I threw a hanger across the room.
Now we we laugh at that story, but it is
embarrassing somewhat for me to admit that I didn’t always know how to deal with my anger.
But
I learned by praying the Psalms that what I can do is bring my anger into the presence of God.
When there’s something not right with me, something not right with someone that I love, something not right in our world, and it makes me so mad,
I can’t live with that anger.
But what I do now is I bring it into the presence of God, and in prayer, I let God have it.
I let God know about it.
And so sometimes my prayers aren’t nice because the Psalms have taught me.
Prayer is not about being nice, it’s about being honest.
But here’s what happens.
When I bring my anger into the presence of God, that anger disappears.
I feel a release of that anger.
I don’t have to hold on to it anymore.
Now, in the habit I’m encouraging you to pick up this year, praying one psalm a day, with the psalm that aligns itself with the day of the year, you don’t get to pick the angry psalms when you’re feeling angry.
This practice has us pray a psalm every day, and we’re not trying to find a psalm that connects with how we feel.
We are trying to feel what the psalm is expressing.
Now, that habit has helped me so much.
It allows me to rejoice with those who are rejoicing.
Even though I may not be joyful on that day.
Praying this way has taught me to grieve with those who grieve or mourn with those who mourn, even though I don’t feel sad on a particular day.
But because the full range of human emotions are expressed in the Psalms, I know that it’s okay
To weep, to cry in God’s presence, to yell in God’s presence, to hoop and holler with joy in God’s presence, all of it is welcomed
Next reason I want you to pray the Psalms is because the Psalms were Jesus’ prayer book.
It was the prayer book of Jesus
The apostles and the early church.
Jesus himself prayed the words of the Psalms
I believe he memorized many, if not all the Psalms.
The clearest example of this is Jesus upon the cross when he cries out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
He’s not merely expressing random thoughts based on what he’s feeling in that moment, I believe, but a number of scholars would say.
That Jesus was praying Psalm 22.
And if you look back at Psalm 22, you can see all sorts of references.
to an individual suffering.
And as a Christian, when you pray Psalm 22, you quickly will think of Jesus.
Dogs surround me, they’re mocking me, they’ve pierced me
But that opening cry, God, why have you forsaken me?
See, there’s the human emotion.
Jesus, as he was suffering and dying, he felt like he was abandoned by God
Now God the Father never turned his back on God the Son.
The Father never abandoned Jesus, but as he was suffering, it sure felt like that.
And so if Jesus prayed these words,
and his followers and the early Christians prayed the words of the Psalms, then maybe we should see value
In that tradition.
And just personally, when I’m praying the same words that Jesus prayed, it forms me, it anchors me, it keeps my soul awake
To what God is doing in it, and it centers me on Jesus Himself.
Fourth reason I want you to pray the Psalms is that the Psalms give us language.
Most people who are following Jesus that I’ve talked to over the years, they want to pray.
They may or may not feel guilty that they don’t pray.
But they don’t know how to start praying.
They don’t know what to say.
I’ve talked to so many people who will say to me, Well, when I do pray, I just tell God what I want.
I just give God my list.
And that’s not a bad way to pray.
I think it’s it’s what seems to be most natural, but people realize something’s lacking.
And so they’re like, well, outside of just asking God for stuff.
Which seems so elementary.
I don’t know what to say.
What am I supposed to do?
The Psalms give us the words to say
And yes, we’re praying other people’s words, but they give us a language.
And so when you don’t have prayers to pray of your own,
Pray other people’s prayers.
Pray these words until they become your own
In this sense, the Psalms are a beautiful school of prayer.
We learn to pray by praying prayers given to us.
If you want to learn to pray, if you want to become a praying person, you become a praying person by praying.
And if you don’t know what to say, pray these words.
Because the Psalms will teach us how to trust, how to hope, how to confess our sins, and
and how to rejoice and how to praise God.
They they shape our desires, they train our emotions, and they give us a voice before God, which helps us to draw near to God
And the last thing I want to say about the beauty and the value of praying the psalms is that the psalms are composed in poetic language.
They use metaphors.
And the metaphors in the Psalms are able to connect the unseen with the seen
Now, the Psalms will call God a rock.
The Psalms call God a fortress, a shepherd, a refuge, a strong tower.
Now,
Is God a rock?
No.
I think we understand that.
If you start looking at a rock and calling it God, we would call that idolatry.
God is not literally a rock.
God is not literally a fortress, a shelter, a refuge, a shepherd, a tower.
These are metaphors.
They are physical metaphors, things that are seen
That help us understand and connect to God, who is unseen
So many of the psalms, the majority of the psalms are filled with beautiful metaphors.
Of course, if if David has his greatest hits, if he had a greatest
hits album of his psalms, number one would be Psalm Twenty-Tree.
Indeed, Psalm 23 is the most familiar, maybe the most popular Psalm, but I love Psalm 23 for the metaphors.
Because they help us to connect with what we know and what we see with this unseen God.
You know, Psalm 23: the Lord is my shepherd.
I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures, and leads me beside still waters.
He revives my soul.
He guides me along right pathways for his namesake, and though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.
For you are with me.
Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
You spread a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Praying that psalm will bring you into a place of stillness and peace
But notice all the metaphors in there.
God as a shepherd, and by implication, we are his sheep.
And because he is our shepherd, there’s nothing that we need.
We don’t lack anything.
And what does our shepherd do?
He makes us lie down in green pastures.
He leads us beside still waters.
Metaphors and imagery like that, it brings peace to my soul.
In part because I love the outdoors and hiking and backpacking.
There’s a place in Nebraska where I have done a lot of hiking.
There’s a state park that has.
20 miles of hiking trails and it’s river bluffs.
It’s right off the Missouri River.
When you think of Nebraska, you think it’s flat.
And most of Nebraska is, but along the river in both Nebraska and on the Missouri side of the river, there are these bluffs.
And so there’s this part of the trail in this state park where you’re going up and down these bluffs.
And then you break out of the woods, and there’s this beautiful
open meadow at the top of one of those bluffs.
And they do mow it, I can tell.
I don’t know how they get equipment up there, but it’s it’s usually well taken care of, but there’s no trees.
And I’ve been hiking up there before and break out of the trees into that meadow and the sun is shining.
And I just want to lay in that green grass.
But Psalm twenty-three is filled with metaphors, with imagery.
God is not literally causing us to lie down on green grass.
He’s not literally leading us beside still waters.
He’s not literally
create a banquet table for us in the presence of our enemies.
But all of these metaphors are things that we can conceive of.
They are things that we see, and they help connect us to the unseen.
In Eugene Peterson’s book on the Psalms, titled Answering God, it was.
one of my favorite books from last year.
He says this about metaphors as related to the Psalms.
Peterson writes
Metaphor is the witness of language that spirit and matter are congruent.
It uses the language of sense experience to lead us into the world
Of the unseen.
And I think we see that in Psalm 23.
These metaphors given to us as a way to pray in the Psalms.
It heals, it mends the divide between the visible and the invisible.
Because sin creates that division
God and humanity were always designed to be together.
Heaven and earth was meant to be together
But sin has created this divide.
And when we pray, we are using
our physical voices to connect with the unseen God, and the metaphors given to us in the Psalms, this poetic language, helps to bridge that gap.
Well, that’s all that I have for you in this episode, but I want to encourage you, pray a psalm every day.
Today is January 1st.
Pray Psalm 1.
Open your Bible and read it out loud as a prayer.
Now as with any habit, it’s difficult to start new things.
Stick with it
At least through the 31 days of January.
I think if you will pray a psalm a day through the month of January, 31 days in a row is enough time to form a new habit.
And let me know if you’re praying the Psalms how it’s going.
You can reach out to me on social media.
All my social media links are in the show notes.
But thank you so much for joining me for this episode.
Go in peace.
And be kind
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.