Praying the Bible Page 5

  “Some people wonder how you can pray longer than five minutes,” says John Piper, “because they would lose things to pray for. But I say that if you open the Bible, start reading it, and pause at every verse and turn it into a prayer, then you can pray all day that way.”12

  “It Seemed Like a Real Conversation with a Real Person”

  That’s what prayer is, remember? Prayer is talking with a person, the person of God himself. So prayer shouldn’t be considered a one-way conversation. And yet, somehow, many people assume that when they meet with God, they must do all the talking.

  “Lord, please hear me, for I’ve come again to talk about what I want to talk about and to ask you to give to me and do for me the same things as always.”

  Of course, we’d never speak so crassly to God, but in effect that’s exactly what we do. Since we typically want to pray about the same things almost every day, and because we usually don’t have the time or creative energy to think either of new directions to go in prayer or of different ways to talk with God about our daily concerns, we end up saying the same old things about the same old things. Perhaps we imagine the Lord folding his arms, silently enduring the next installment of our repetitious monologue.

  When we pray the Bible, though, our monologue to God becomes a conversation with God. I’m not alluding to the perception of some spiritual impression or hearing an inner voice, imagining God saying things to us—away with that sort of mysticism. Instead, I’m referring to the Bible as the means by which God enters the conversation, for the Bible is God speaking.

  So when you read verse 1 of a psalm, even though the words were originally put on paper by a man, the inspiration of Scripture—that is, God the Holy Spirit inspiring the man to write exactly what he (God) wanted—means that ultimately God is speaking in verse 1. And then you respond by speaking to God about what he’s just said in verse 1. After you’ve finished talking, you do as you do in a real conversation with a real person: you let the other person speak again. In this case, letting the other person speak is called “reading verse 2.” If something God says there prompts a reply, then you speak to him again.

  That’s why people who try this often report, “The pressure was off. I didn’t have to think about what to say next, and it just kind of flowed.”

  Unlike the difficulties of trying to talk with a poor conversationalist, you don’t have to initiate this conversation or feel the awkward responsibility of keeping it going when you can’t think of anything to say. God begins the dialogue by speaking to you in verse 1. You simply respond to what he initiates. When you’ve finished, God bears the burden of continuing the conversation from there, for he speaks again in the next verse, and the cycle begins again. And God is willing to continue this conversation with you as long as you want and to have another with you whenever you want.

  “The Psalm Spoke Directly to the Life Situation I Am in Right Now”

  If you will quickly scan five psalms, it is indeed amazing how often at least one of them applies to the major concern of your life at the moment. The psalms were written by men of flesh and blood who were also men of God. They experienced real struggles and hard trials, just as we do. You don’t have to read very far before you find their words becoming your words and their hearts expressing your heart.

  “I Thought More Deeply about What the Bible Says”

  One of the many reasons I love praying the Bible is that not only is it a method of prayer; it is also a method of meditation on Scripture. You read the verse, think about it for a moment, talk to God about it, then perhaps you look at it again and go through the process once more. By so doing, you are not only praying the Bible; you are absorbing it.

  The conference I lead most frequently in local churches and retreats typically focuses Friday night on praying the Bible, and Saturday morning on Scripture meditation. Late Saturday morning, when I’m teaching various ways to meditate on a text of Scripture,13 I suggest praying the Bible as one of those ways. When I come to this point, I remind the participants about the brief exercise from the night before, when they spent just seven minutes or so praying through a psalm. Then I’ll ask how many can recall at least a phrase from that psalm. It never fails that the vast majority can remember a line from a psalm they prayed through some fourteen hours earlier. What’s really amazing is that these people also say that normally they can’t remember anything they read in the Bible, even immediately upon closing the cover. But now they testify that they have actually memorized all or part of a verse they read the night before.

  And they’ve slept since then.

  And they spent no more than seven minutes on the passage (and probably only a few of those seven minutes were spent on the verse they remember).

  And they were tired when they prayed through the psalm (which was done about 8:30 p.m. on Friday, often the most weary night of the week).

  And they weren’t trying to memorize anything—but they did.

  And they didn’t know they were going to have a pop quiz the next morning.

  I’ve actually seen people weep at this point and say, “I can remember the Bible!”

  When you remember what you encounter in the Bible, you are far more likely to think deeply about what it says, not only while you are praying but also at random moments all through your day, and thus to “meditate on it day and night,” as described in Joshua 1:8 and Psalm 1:3.

  How about you? Can you remember a phrase from the psalm you prayed through during the exercise a few minutes ago? If you can remember a line you read in the psalm fifteen minutes ago, you’ll probably be able to remember it on your way to work, while waiting in line during the noon hour, and if you wake up in the middle of the night. During unscheduled occasions, “day and night” you’ll find yourself able to say, “Now, what was that verse? Oh, yeah, I remember.” And you’ll be able to think about it some more or pray about it again.

  So simple. Such sustained profit from a very short time in the Scripture. And with very little effort.

  You can do this. In fact, I no longer have to persuade you that you can do this, for if you did the exercise, I’m confident you have already testified to me (in response to my question above, “Can you remember a phrase from the psalm you prayed through during the exercise?”) that you have done it, that is, you have remembered something you read in the Bible several minutes ago and did so without a special effort to memorize it. Be encouraged, my brother or sister! This should convince you that if you have the Bible and the Holy Spirit, you have all the equipment necessary to profit satisfyingly from the Word of God and to experience a meaningful prayer life.

  “I Had Greater Assurance That I Was Praying God’s Will”

  The Bible makes plain in 1 John 5:14–15 that we must pray according to the will of God if we expect him to answer:

  This is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.

  Since it is so important to pray in conformity with God’s will, can you have any greater assurance that you are praying the will of God than when you are praying the Word of God?

  That doesn’t mean that praying the Bible ensures that we’ll never misinterpret or misapply the Bible as we pray, thinking we are praying the will of God when we are not. Nevertheless, what better way to discern God’s will and to conform our prayers to God’s will than to pray God’s Word?

  “I Prayed about Things I Normally Don’t Pray About”

  This is one of the most common responses I hear. When you pray through a passage of Scripture, you’ll often find yourself praying about matters that would never come to mind otherwise. You will intercede for people and situations you would not think to include on a prayer list even if you made one as long as the New York City phone directory.14 You’ll pray for national or international events, world leaders, unreached people groups, people you live near or work with, m
inisters and missionaries, long-forgotten places, and people you’ve not encountered in years.

  Another time, when I was teaching this in California, a woman I’ll call Jenny told me on Saturday morning what had happened to her during and after the exercise on Friday night. Something in the psalm through which she was praying brought to mind a friend—I’ll call her Pam—she had known in New York prior to moving to California fifteen years earlier. Jenny had not heard once in any way from Pam in a decade and a half. Nevertheless, when Pam came to mind during the exercise, Jenny prayed for her. After Jenny got home that evening, Pam called her from across the country, reaching out for the first time in fifteen years, anxious to talk about spiritual matters.

  God’s mind and God’s Word are so much broader than our own perspective, and he will prompt you through the Bible to pray with an awareness for things far beyond the same old things.

  “I Prayed about the Things I Normally Do Pray about but in New and Different Ways”

  This is also one of the most frequent replies I receive when I ask, “How did it go?” When you pray the Bible, you’ll still bring to the Lord the same matters you always pray about—your family, the future, finances, work, school, church, ministry, Christian concerns, and the current crisis—but you’ll pray about them in fresh ways almost every time.

  At the seminary I begin every class with Scripture reading and prayer. I make essentially the same request every time: “Lord, please bless this class.” How many different ways can you think of to pray, “Lord, please bless this class”? But I use this occasion to model praying the Bible for my students. So I’ll read one of the Psalms of the Day and begin praying through part of it. If I ask God through Psalm 23 to bless the class, then my prayer becomes, “Lord, please shepherd us in this class today.” That same request prayed through Psalm 51 is, “Lord, please forgive us for not always applying our minds to our studies as we ought, but help us to do that today.” If the psalm is 139, then the prayer is more like, “Lord, we acknowledge your presence here in room 102 today; you are the teacher here, and we ask you to teach us in this class.” It’s basically the same prayer (“please bless the class”) on each occasion, and yet, because that prayer is prayed through a different psalm every day, it’s a different prayer in every class.

  I believe it’s good for me to ask the Lord’s blessing in every class, just as I believe there are a number of matters in other parts of my life about which it is good to pray every day. You surely have your own set of good and regular requests. The way to transform them from a routine recitation into a mindful, heartfelt petition is to send them heavenward through a different passage of Scripture each time.

  “I Didn’t Say the Same Old Things about the Same Old Things”

  This is best of all. It bears repeating that a stale prayer life can experience a new freshness with a simple change of method. Anyone with a Bible and the Holy Spirit has everything necessary to enjoy God in prayer and to banish the boredom born of repeating tired phrases about the same old things.

  Suppose you won a contest in which the grand prize was the opportunity to spend an hour in conversation with any person of your choosing. For a full hour, you could ask any question and talk about whatever you wanted with any person in the world. Whom would you choose? The president of the United States? A world leader? A famous singer, musician, or actor? An influential Christian? One of the world’s best-known athletes? A preeminent scientist or scholar? A best-selling author? A possible romantic interest?

  What if I said, “Great news! A one-hour conversation between you and that person has been arranged for tomorrow morning.” Tonight you’d hardly be able to sleep because of the anticipation. Then suppose that the conversation proved to be everything you imagined, and afterward I said, “Great news! Tomorrow you get to have another hour-long conversation with that person. The only caveat is that both of you must say exactly the same things you said today.”

  Hmmm. Well, you might pick up a few things in that second conversation that didn’t register with you the first time. But what if you had to have that same conversation every day for the rest of your life? It probably wouldn’t be long before you’d rather die than endure that conversation again.

  It’s a sad truth, but we can feel the same way even about talking with God. You can be talking to the most interesting Person in the universe about the most important things in your life and be bored to death. Is that because you don’t love God? No. Is it because you don’t love what you are praying about? No. It’s because you have essentially the same conversation about those things every day. If you do that, even talking with God himself can be boring.

  But now you have a solution. Let God initiate the conversation by means of your Bible, and you simply respond to his words there. Isn’t that easy? Anyone can do that.

  If You Teach This to Others

  If you ever teach these things to a group of believers, be sure you do two things.

  First and most importantly, give your listeners an opportunity to try praying through a passage of Scripture right then. In other words, don’t teach them how to pray the Bible in one session and then wait to have them try it in the next day’s or the next week’s session, because after you teach them, they’ll say, “That’s a great idea. I’ll have to try that someday.” But they never will.

  However, if you’ll give them a few minutes to actually experience praying the Bible, then, just like you, many of them will be hooked. Also, like you, they will never again pray the same old things about the same old things. They will not need any notes to remember how to do it. Like riding a bicycle, once they learn how, they’ll never forget. It couldn’t be simpler: just open up the Bible and talk to God.

  Second, immediately after the prayer exercise, ask for some feedback. I’ve always found that as people report their experience, their excitement becomes contagious. And not only will the participants encourage one another through their testimonies, but also each of their comments will provide you with an occasion to respond with additional insights into the practice, just as I’ve illustrated above.

  So give people an opportunity to experience praying through Scripture, then ask them to talk about the experience.

  9

  What Have We Learned?

  Praying the Word means reading (or reciting) Scripture in a spirit of prayer and letting the meaning of the verses become our prayer and inspire our thoughts.

  John Piper

  So what have we learned? We’ve recognized the almost universal tendency to pray the same old things about the same old things and that such prayer is boring. When prayer is boring, we don’t feel like praying. And when we don’t feel like praying, we find it very hard to pray. When we have to compel ourselves to pray, our prayers are joyless, our minds wander, and a very few minutes in prayer seems like hours. As a result we feel like spiritual failures, certain that we are second-rate Christians.

  But now we’ve learned that instead of saying the same old, gray, colorless prayers, we can pray in fresh, new ways about almost everything we pray about virtually every time we pray.

  A woman, let’s say, who wants to pray every day for her children or grandchildren might pray for them today as she prays through Psalm 23. This text prompts her to pray that God “shepherd” her children in various ways, and there’s something about that shepherding imagery that transforms the same old things she usually prays into a dynamic new prayer enriched with the inspired words of God.

  Tomorrow she might pray through 1 Corinthians 13, and doing so leads her to ask the Lord to develop in her children the kind of love taught in that chapter. The next day, while making her way through Psalm 1, the text guides her to pray that her children would become meditators on the Word of God. Isn’t that a wonderful thing to pray for your children? But would you ever pray that if you didn’t pray through Psalm 1? The following day she finds herself in Galatians 5 and pleads with the Lord to develop the fruit of the Spirit in her children. After that she’
s back in the Psalms, and while conversing with the Lord through Psalm 139, she asks that her children would sense his presence wherever they go that day.

  In reality, the heart of her prayer—“Bless my children”—remains unchanged, even though her words change. By filtering that prayer through a different passage of Scripture each time, her prayer changes from a mind-numbing repetition of the same old things to a request that ascends from her heart to heaven in unique ways every day.

  10

  The Examples of George Mueller, Jesus on the Cross, and Christians in the Book of Acts

  For thirty centuries, God’s people have found in the Psalms an answer to the disciples’ plea, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

  Ken Langley

  George Mueller (1805–1898) is widely considered one of the greatest men of prayer and faith since the days of the New Testament. He lived nearly the entire nineteenth century, two-thirds of it in Bristol, England. He led four far-reaching, influential ministries, but we know him best today for his orphanages. During a time in England when most orphans lived in miserable workhouses or on the streets, like Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Mueller took them in, fed them, clothed them, and educated them. Through his orphanage in Bristol, Mueller cared for as many as two thousand orphans at a time—more than ten thousand in his lifetime. Yet he never made the needs of his ministries known to anyone except to God in prayer. Only through his annual reports did people learn after the fact what the needs had been during the previous year and how God had provided.15

  Mueller had over fifty thousand specific recorded answers to prayers in his journals, thirty thousand of which he said were answered the same day or the same hour that he prayed them. Think of it: that’s five hundred definite answers to prayer each year—more than one per day—every single day for sixty years! God funneled over half a billion dollars (in today’s dollars) through his hands in answer to prayer.