A Praying Life - Practice, Pray, and Plagiarize

We’ve just finished up a four part sermon series over winter break on the topic of prayer. We learned that prayer can include a number of things including adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. Last Sunday (1/19/20), Jake Blackwood finished up the series with an excellent sermon on supplication, or the making of a humble plea before God. Throughout the series, we tried to give a few helpful hints for how to put these sermons into practice since prayer really isn’t anything if it’s not practice. So where to begin?

Here are a few more hints for entering into a life of prayer.

Practice

As I said earlier, prayer is nothing if it isn’t put into practice. One of the most important things to understand about praying is that the way you learn to pray is by praying. Don’t be discouraged if it’s hard at first. A lot of things are hard at first - walking, running, reading books, reading music, solving math problems. We expect these things to be hard at first and we keep trying knowing that practice will lead us into a place of proficiency. Strangely enough, we often times don’t think this way about the spiritual life. If it’s hard we think there is something wrong and we quit. Know that it’s similar to most worthwhile things in your life, it is hard and takes practice. So don’t give up and keep working at this. They don’t call prayer a spiritual “discipline” for nothing.

PRAY

Jake said this in his sermon, that we should pray about praying. If you’re struggling with your prayer life, ask God for help. Confess your inability to focus, your lack of motivation, your desire to do other things instead of praying. Our desires for lesser things come from a heart that is jacked up by sin. We can’t subdue it without help. Without the transforming grace that’s been given to us at the cross, we’ll never grow into a praying life. Also pray about what to pray about. Pray for God to give you wisdom about praying (Colossians 1:9). Jot down your thoughts in a journal or on a single sheet of paper that you keep stuck in your Bible. After you pray about WHAT you want to pray for then pray about HOW you want to pray. The best place to go for the how of prayer is the Bible. Think about scripture verses that communicate your requests for the person or situation you are considering. This is a very sure way to pray in accordance with the will of God (1 John 5:14).

Plagiarize

Plagiarize means to take and use ideas, passages, etc., from (another's work). Usually this is a very bad idea, especially if you are writing something and not giving proper citation of the original work of another. That said, when it comes to prayer, one is free to plagiarize and can learn a great deal by doing so. There are a number of books out there that can be training wheels for pray-ers and also a way to pray with the historical and global church. Here are a few suggestions that have been helpful to me and others:

The Bible - The Bible is always going to be the best place to go to learn to pray. Riff (borrow and elaborate on) on the prayers of God’s people in both Old and New Testaments. The book of Psalms is essentially a book of 150 prayers for every conceivable condition of the human heart.
Valley of Vision - A compilation of puritan prayer. The depth of these prayers is honestly breath taking in light of today’s shallow spirituality.
Book of Common Prayer - Written by the Episcopal Church and full of written prayers of all kinds that are put in a rhythm of morning, noon, and night and in accordance with the liturgical church year.
The Divine Hours - Compiled by the author and includes scripture, liturgy, and various hymns. Also put into a schedule of prayer that is quite extensive but can be adjusted as needed.
Praying With Paul - This book isn’t for devotional reading per se but explores the prayers of the Apostle Paul and reflects on how these prayers can inform our own prayer life. The MH staff team read this and found it quite challenging and helpful.