Tag: Prayer

Part of our Christian culture has absorbed an idea from the nineteenth century Romantic movement, that only spontaneous prayer is authentic prayer. Only the unscripted, in the moment work of the Spirit counts as real, while anything prepared or written is somehow second best. I want to push back on that, and on a few other habits we’ve fallen into along the way.

Prepared Prayers Aren’t Cheating

One of the best habits I’ve built into my own rhythm is praying prayers that others have written. They give me words I wouldn’t naturally reach for myself. In one particularly difficult season, it was often just a Psalm or two that got me through, prayers already written for exactly that kind of day or week or month. Prayers composed by Christians from earlier centuries can do the same, putting good theology and honest feeling into words when I can’t find my own.

It’s a little amusing, really. Peter Adam makes the point that we’re perfectly happy singing prepared songs when we praise God together, yet we can treat a written prayer as somehow less spiritual than praying off the cuff. 

I’m fairly sure nobody wants to hear me sing off the cuff!

Colossians 3:16 reminds us that the message of Christ is to dwell in us richly. As he does the overflow of our hearts will come out in prayer and praise to God, and it doesn’t matter if it’s resonating with a written prayer or one that is extemporaneous. 

Pray the Bible Back to God

It was a long way into my Christian life before anyone taught me that praying the Bible was even an option. By that I mean taking the actual words of scripture, a Psalm, a passage Paul wrote, a prayer of Hannah, Mary or Zechariah, and praying them back to God as our own. Who would have thought that praying the Bible is simply returning to God the very words he has revealed to us in his Word?

When we do this, our prayer life is shaped and enriched by scripture at the same time. We recover the old habit of turning our Bible reading straight into prayer, letting its phrases become our own.

This might be something you’ve never thought of too. It’s worth having a go. I’d encourage trying a Psalm first, since they were written to be prayed as much as read, and see how you find it. As we train ourselves in this our prayers become soaked in scripture and are helpful not only in our prayers but our knowledge and experience of God. 

Don’t Get Tunnel Vision

Detectives can fall into what’s called tunnel vision, narrowing in on one suspect so tightly they stop considering other evidence or other people altogether. It’s something good investigators are trained to guard against.

Our prayer life can suffer the same problem. In time our prayers can shrink down to a narrow band of familiar concerns, and lose the imagination and breadth the Bible calls us to. Many of us rarely pray for rulers, politicians, and nations, especially those we don’t relate to. Other countries and peoples can go entirely missing from our prayers too, along with thanksgiving for what God is doing in places we’ll never see or influence. We need prayers that reach further than our own circle. We need prayer that asks the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest field (Matthew 9:38).

We’ve Stopped Praying Together

Public and private prayer are both a weakness in our contemporary church culture. There was a time when Christians expected each other to turn up to the regular prayer meeting. That’s largely gone from Western church life now. I once heard of an African pastor visiting a church in the UK whose first question was where the prayer meeting was, and how many people came. If someone asked us the same thing, what would we say?

Praying together as a church matters. It’s one of the clearest ways we express our shared life with God as we walk this journey with others. But the gap isn’t only in the prayer meeting. Some churches have dropped pastoral prayer from their Sunday gathering, couples stop praying together, parents stop praying with their children, and close Christian friendships can drift along without much prayer at all.

It’s a stark contrast to our forebears, and something worth considering in our own practice of prayer today.

Most of us know we should pray more than we do, and most of us have never really stopped to ask why we don’t.

A few years ago I signed up for prayer training, six sessions with an experienced pastor and mentor who led a group of us through the breadth of praying available to us in scripture, then walked with us as we prayed together and grew in it. It was as much experience as it was knowledge. Like most things in the Christian life, it turns out we need someone to teach us how to do this well. Jesus himself taught his disciples to pray through the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9-13. Evidently being trained in prayer is something we need as his followers. 

In his recent book, Prayerfulness, Peter Adam outlines weaknesses that can creep into our praying or view of prayer. Using these weaknesses as a basis for this post and the next, I think it is a helpful corrective and challenge to us. 

We Don’t Trust God Enough

One of the deepest weaknesses for many of us is that we lack real trust in God. In practice, many of us are practical deists. We believe in God, but we don’t quite trust his constant, sustaining rule over the universe. We assume he isn’t especially active in the world, or that even if we pray, he might not act. Without meaning to, we undermine his sovereign involvement in what happens around us, and end up trusting ourselves instead, as though everything depends on us.

How often do we go about our day without prayer, not even considering that it might change something? Anything!? We end up working for God rather than with his grace, praying to him out of duty rather than with his enabling. We forget that nothing happens apart from him. It’s a good reminder that when we pray we trust, and when we trust we pray. It’s like the man who comes to Jesus in Mark 9:24, we believe, but we need help to overcome our unbelief! 

We Don’t Think It’s Productive

We swim in cultural waters that prize making the most of every minute. The technology we use trains us to move faster, work more efficiently, and produce more, whether that’s quicker meals, a fuller inbox cleared, or another project ticked off the list. Prayer runs against all of this.

It asks for intentional time away from what the world calls a good use of time. In fact, it flips our usual measure of time on its head. Prayer requires us to stop, to be attentive, and to take up a posture of worship before God rather than productivity. We might not see an immediate benefit in the hour after we’ve prayed, but that is never the point. The point is the relationship we have with our Heavenly Father, and there’s no more productive use of time than that.

Martin Luther once quipped that he had so much to do in a day that he needed to pray for three hours first just to get through it. I wonder if we’ve ever thought of praying with that attitude in mind? 

We Make It Too Narrow

How often do we pray for the things going on in our own life, and neglect prayer for God, for the world, and for the many other ingredients prayer can hold? A good meal usually needs a variety of ingredients working together, and the same is true of a rich prayer life.

One of our weaknesses is how much weight we give to intercession alone, praying on behalf of others and ourselves. That matters, of course, but on its own it can become transactional, a running list of requests rather than a relationship. What about the other ingredients of prayer: praise, thanks, worship, confession, lament, trust and love? When our prayers stay narrow and close to home, so does our emotional engagement with God. Paul writes to Timothy at one point reminding him to bring petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving for all people to God (1 Timothy 2:1). Paul clearly has more than just intercession in mind here. 

I know I’m certainly prone to this. Missing in my prayers is often adoration, praise for God and his character, and certainly lament and confession are harder to find as well. 

This is a great reminder to widen the range of our prayers and see how God might work.