A lengthy excerpt, but much food-for-thought on the function and design of the Psalms.

And it is my thesis, in this chapter, that in the Psalms, praise is the expected outcome, but meditation is the underlying activity which we undertake in Psalm singing. Unlike modern church songs which are primarily about ‘getting right to the point’ and declaring praise, the Psalms are designed to help people who don’t always feel like praising begin by meditating on the mess the world is in, and only through a full and robust process of meditation, to come out with praise.

Praise is so vital an outcome from psalmody that we use the word ‘Psalms’ (lit., ‘Praises’) to describe them. In Hebrew, the volume is called Tehilim, meaning ‘praises,’ and in Greek it is called Psalmoi, which likewise indicates songs of joy and praise. But even a cursory reading of the Psalms reveals that they are not all hymns of declarative praise. There is a lot of moaning and groaning going on in the Psalms. The book is called ‘Praises,’ not because each individual hymn contained in it is joyful. The book is called ‘Praises’ because the nature of the whole collection is to carry us from sorrow to praise.

We use a similar method for naming streets in our culture. I live on the edge of Indianapolis, just south of another city called Lafayette. One of the major north-south routes on my side of Indianapolis is a street called, ‘Lafayette Rd.’ It is called Lafayette, not because I live in the city of Lafayette (I live in Indianapolis), but it is so named because, if you follow that road where it leads, you will end up in the city of Lafayette.

In the same way, the book of Psalms is so named because these are sung meditations, which meet us in the ‘city of confusion and trouble’ where we live and, if we follow them where they take us, they carry us ultimately to the ‘city of praise and rejoicing.’ This is true of each Psalm within its own compass on the small scale (each Psalm, generally trends to lift us from questions to answers). This is also true of the Psalmbook as a whole. In fact, the Early Church Father Gregory of Nyssa, wrote a book [Inscriptions of the Psalms] in the fourth century to describe how the Psalter carries us from the sorrow of living in a place of ungodly, sinners, and scorners (in Ps. 1) to the heavenly assembly of joy (in Ps. 150) (Michael LeFebvre, Singing the Songs of Jesus: Revisiting the Psalms, 96-98).