Those of
you who are in a Home Fellowship Group likely have been helped in your prayer
life by D.A. Carson’s Praying with Paul. There is great richness in prayers informed
by Scripture.
Our
Wednesday night prayer gathering is finding the same thing as we have begun the
practice of praying Scripture together.
If you’ve never done this, I’d highly encourage you to join us. Praying Scripture has numerous benefits, two
of which address a couple of the biggest impediments to consistent prayer. Those impediments are a wandering mind and
mindless repetition.
If you’ve
tried to make a habit of praying, it’s likely that you’ve disciplined yourself
to find a time and place where you can be alone, uninterrupted. Everything is perfect. You begin to pray…and shortly you realize that
you’ve stopped praying and are instead thinking about how badly the grass needs
to be cut or that conversation you need to have with one of your kids or “where
did I put those toenail clippers?” Then
you feel like a clod because you couldn’t focus your attention on the most
important Person in existence. You
lament how easily your mind wanders from the magnificent to the mundane.
Man, you’re
a horrible person! Just kidding. I’ve done the same thing a million
times. We all have.
How about
this one?
Monday: “Lord,
please help my spouse to grow spiritually and help my kids to want to know
you. Please help me to kill my sin. And please bless the church…”
Tuesday: “Lord,
please help my spouse to grow spiritually and help my kids to want to know you.
Please help me to kill my sin. And please bless the church…”
Wednesday:
“Lord, please help my spouse to grow spiritually and help my kids to want to
know you. Please help me to kill my
sin. And please bless the church…”
Thursday-Sunday:
(loud snoring sounds)
I can’t
say whether God ever gets bored with this kind of thing, but I’ve bored myself
to sleep with my own repetitive prayers too many times to count. A great
way to focus the mind and gain a larger vocabulary of prayer is to pray through
passages of Scripture.
There are
a couple of excellent resources to help you learn this wonderful practice. The first is Donald Whitney’s Praying the Bible. It’s simple and relatively short. Most people could read it in one sitting. Talk to people like Anthony Mele and Dave
Doerman. They’ve read it and love
it. They’ll tell you how helpful it is.
The second
resource is Matthew Henry’s A Method for Prayer. Here is a link to an online version. This is a longer resource than
Whitney’s and is a little different in that for the most part it assembles for
you a plethora of Biblical passages for different kinds of prayer (adoration,
confession, petition, thanksgiving, intercession). Jason Odel and John Botkin will both tell you
how helpful it is.
Whitney’s
resource may be better for teaching you how to pray the Scriptures on your
own. Henry’s resource allows you to just
open it up and start praying the words on the page – he’s already gathered the
verses for you. Better yet, grab one of
these resources and join us on
Wednesday nights to practice this method of prayer corporately. You will be encouraged and blessed.
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