I recently accepted a suggestion to meditate on one verse of Psalm 119 each day. Doing so truly has deepened my love for this psalm of psalms and shaped my thinking.

Consider verse 20: “My soul breaketh for the longing that it hath unto thy judgments at all times.” What depth of emotion is in this writer’s religion and relationship with God! Here is passion, yearning for understanding. Pondering the purity, holiness and perfection of God’s judgments reveals exquisite beauty. Comparing them to your own conduct creates a longing, an ache.

This is a wonderful example of the poetic spirit of the Psalms.

In an anthology of Robert Frost’s poems, Louis Untermeyer wrote, “The creator, the artist, the extraordinary man, is merely the ordinary man intensified: a person whose life is sometimes lifted to a high pitch of feeling and who has the gift of making others share his excitement.”

This is certainly true of the Psalms: They contain common feelings intensely expressed. Not mere love toward God, but passionate, dramatic love. Not mere irritation toward evil, but fervent hatred.

The intensity of the Psalms reveals the language of prayer “after [God’s] own heart” (Acts 13:22). James 5:16 tells us, “The effectual fervent [Greek: energeo] prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” “This prayer gets results because of the energy, effort and labor poured into it,” our book How to Pray says. “Fervency … includes feeling and expression, extreme vigor and ardor, being in a state of intense mental or physical strain, emotion or activity. When you pray, really pour out your heart before the throne of grace!”

Such is the language of poetry. “Poetry is thought, sometimes philosophy, sometimes argument, but always emotion,” Dr. Theodore G. Sores writes. “[P]oetry belongs to those realms of life where we feel most deeply.” “Poetry is that impassioned arrangement of words … which embodies the exaltation, the beauty, the rhythm, and the truth of life,” Richard Le Gallienne said. “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness,” Robert Frost wrote.

Psalm 119 is poetry. “I will run the way of thy commandments,” its author wrote in verse 32, “when thou shalt enlarge my heart.” Pleading for God to broaden his understanding, he promised not just to walk, but heart beating, blood pumping, to run.

Godly emotion and impulse toward action require cultivation. Poetry in your study, your thinking, your prayer, can help. Appreciating poetry takes work. It is out of step with the speed and superficiality of modern life. It requires time and searching. Like getting to know a person.

Charles Spurgeon wrote of Psalm 119: “Many superficial readers have imagined that it harps upon one string, and abounds in pious repetitions and redundancies; but this arises from the shallowness of the reader’s own mind: those who have studied this divine hymn, and carefully noted each line of it, are amazed at the variety and profundity of the thought.” I have found this to be true.

What a spectrum of emotion it embodies. “Horror hath taken hold upon me because of the wicked that forsake thy law” (verse 53). This man saw wickedness, as you and I do. But in him it stirred distress, indignation, fury! When he saw people rejecting God’s law and causing suffering, he shed rivers of tears (verse 136). In our time, as in his, prophecy shows that lawlessness is leading to destruction. Truly understanding the imminent deaths of nations should stir us to such godly anguish (e.g. Ezekiel 9:4).

“This sacred ode is a little Bible, the Scriptures condensed,” Spurgeon wrote. “Holy Writ rewritten in holy emotions and actions.” Why is Psalm 119 and much of the Bible replete with poetry? Because God wants us to cultivate godly emotions, zeal and intensity.

“What is a poet?” Wordsworth asked. “He is a man … endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind ….”

An artist friend of mine described the maturity of perception required of an artist. A child drawing a tree might place a green circle or a triangle on a brown stick. The greater the artist’s powers of observation, the more nuanced and closer to reality that tree becomes. Winston Churchill described the effect that taking up painting had on his life. He found immense pleasure in noticing the interplay of light and shadow, reflection and texture, in the world. “And I had lived for over 40 years without ever noticing any of them except in a general way, as one might look at a crowd and say, ‘What a lot of people!’” he wrote. “I think this heightened sense of observation of nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint.”

In a world of sensory overload, think like an artist. Unplug from mindlessness, resist distraction, exercise your God-given senses and mind power to observe, to feel, to be passionate.

Immature thinking yields shallow impressions—of your environment, of other people. The more you mature, the better you can see and can render people and the rest of reality as it truly is—as God views it. This is also true of God’s truth. As you grow spiritually, you recognize the fullness of the deep things of God. How worthwhile is the effort to think more like a poet, an artist—more like your Creator!