Teaching the Psalms in Come Follow Me: Lesson Ideas That Actually Work

Coming up in the Old Testament schedule, we hit three straight weeks in the Psalms, and I think it's one of the harder stretches of the year to teach well. Not because the material is thin. It's the opposite problem. There are 150 psalms, they were written across centuries by different people in wildly different circumstances, and none of them come with a plot. You cannot summarize a psalm the way you summarize a story about Joseph or Moses. A psalm is not something that happened. It's something someone felt, and said to God.

That difference changes how we should prepare. Personally, I think the biggest mistake we can make with the Psalms is to teach them like narrative and end up flattening them into a list of nice verses about trusting God. They deserve better than that, and so does our class.

Why the Psalms Are Hard to Teach

Most of Come Follow Me moves chronologically. We read about people, watch them make choices, and talk about what we learn from those choices. The Psalms break that pattern entirely. They are poetry, and poetry works by feeling, not by sequence. Psalm 23 does not have a beginning, middle, and end. It has an image: a shepherd, a valley, a table set in front of enemies. The whole lesson can live inside that one image if we let it.

The three weeks in this block cover a lot of ground:

• Week 34, Songs of Praise and Trust, covering Psalms 1-2, 8, 19-33, 40, and 46
• Week 35, Create in Me a Clean Heart, covering Psalms 49-51, 61-66, 69-72, 77-78, and 85-86
• Week 36, Praise Ye the Lord, covering Psalms 102-3, 110, 116-19, 127-28, 135-39, and 146-50

Three weeks, well over sixty psalms between them. Nobody is teaching all of that in one lesson, and nobody should try. Pick two or three psalms per week that say something specific, and let the rest go.

Start With Parallelism, Not the Word Parallelism

Hebrew poetry does not rhyme the way English poetry does. It rhymes ideas instead of sounds. That's called parallelism, and it is genuinely useful to understand, but I would never put that word on the board in front of a class. Instead, just read a verse and ask what the second half is doing to the first half.

Psalm 19:1 is a good one to start with: "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." Ask the class what the second line adds to the first. They'll notice it right away even without a vocabulary word for it. The second line restates the first with different words, which is the whole trick. Once someone in the room notices this pattern, they start seeing it everywhere, and psalms stop feeling like a wall of text. They start feeling like a rhythm.

Sometimes the second half pushes further than restating, it contrasts. Psalm 1 sets up "the ungodly" against "the righteous" for its entire length. That's parallelism working as structure, not just style, and it's worth pointing out because it shows the whole psalm is built like an argument, not a diary entry.

You do not need a seminary-level grammar lesson here. You need one good example, live in the room, so the class has a lens for reading the rest of the psalm on their own.

Devotional Versus Analytical, and Why Both Matter

There are two honest ways to approach a psalm, and I think good teaching uses both without confusing them.

The devotional approach treats the psalm as a prayer we're borrowing. We read it slowly, we notice what it says about pain or trust or joy, and we ask where our own life shows up in it. This is the natural way to teach Psalm 42's "as the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God." You don't need history or authorship debates for that verse to land. You need quiet and a question like, when have you longed for God like that.

The analytical approach asks who wrote this, when, and why, and what it meant to its first audience. Many of these psalms are attributed to David, and knowing that some come from his years running from Saul, and others from later in his reign, changes how a line lands. Psalm 51, traditionally connected to David's repentance after his sin with Bathsheba, hits very differently once the class knows what it's responding to. "Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me" reads as generic if you don't know the story, and reads as devastating once you do.

My rule of thumb: use analytical context to set up the psalm, then let the devotional reading be the actual lesson. Context is the door. Feeling is the room.

Teaching Age by Age

Primary: Let Them Sing It

Primary-age kids do not need a lecture on Hebrew poetry, and honestly, they're already ahead of the adults here, because Primary has been singing psalms their whole lives without calling them that. "The Lord Is My Shepherd" borrows straight from Psalm 23. Ask the class to say the words of the psalm out loud, then sing the hymn or Primary song version, and ask what feels the same. That's the whole lesson for a Sunbeam or CTR class, and it works because it meets them where they already are, in a song, not a text.

For older Primary kids, Psalm 8 works well: "What is man, that thou art mindful of him?" It's a short, honest question a nine-year-old can actually sit with. Ask them to look up at the moon and stars this week and see if they feel what the psalm writer felt.

Youth: Meet the Raw Emotion

Teenagers are often more comfortable with the Psalms than adults expect, because teenagers already talk in extremes, and so do the Psalms. Psalm 22 opens with "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" That's not a comfortable verse to put in front of a class, but it's real, and teens respond to real. Ask them to find a line in one of the week's psalms that sounds like something they've actually felt, good or bad, and share it if they're willing. You will get more honest discussion out of that prompt than out of almost anything else in the manual.

This is also a good week to talk about how the Psalms model bringing hard feelings to God instead of hiding them. A lot of youth have been taught, unintentionally, that prayer is supposed to sound polished. The Psalms are proof it doesn't have to.

Adults: The Messianic Psalms

Adult classes, whether Sunday School or Relief Society and Elders Quorum, have room to go further into the psalms that point toward Christ. Psalm 22, the same one that opens in despair, ends up describing details that read as prophetic of the crucifixion, "they pierced my hands and my feet" and "they part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture." Psalm 110's "The Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou at my right hand" is quoted directly by Jesus in the New Testament and by the apostles afterward. These are worth slowing down for, because they show the Old Testament was never disconnected from Christ. It was pointing at Him the whole time, which is a useful frame heading into the New Testament year that follows.

A Simple Lesson Shape for Any Class

If you want one structure that works across all three weeks:

1. Pick one psalm, not six.
2. Read it once for feeling, no commentary yet.
3. Point out one parallelism example to build the reading habit.
4. Give the context if there is a story behind it, David and Saul, David and Bathsheba, the exile.
5. Ask where the class's own life shows up in the words.
6. Close with the psalm again, maybe read responsively, half the class reading each line.

That's twenty to thirty minutes depending on your calling, and it leaves the psalm as something felt rather than something covered.

Where ComeFollowMe.io Helps

Three weeks of unfamiliar, non-narrative material back to back is a lot to prepare from scratch, especially if poetry isn't your natural strength as a teacher. That's exactly the kind of week where ComeFollowMe.io is worth using. Tell it your calling, whether that's Primary, Sunday School, Elders Quorum or Relief Society, or Gospel Principles, and it will build a lesson sized to your class and your time, with discussion questions already pulled from the specific psalms in that week's block, plus printable activity cards if you're teaching kids. If you're the one leading family home evening instead, it scales the same content down to something all ages can sit through together.

You still have to read the psalm and decide what matters. The tool just saves you the hour of staring at sixty chapters trying to figure out where to start.

Whichever week you're teaching, the Psalms reward patience more than most of the Old Testament does. Don't rush them. A single verse, read slowly, tends to do more work than a whole chapter read fast.