Why we pray scripture (Part 1)
In our last post on prayer we talked about how many people have different starting points in their journey of learning to connect with God through prayer. Those with no background of prayer or those who are first learning to pray, often learn to use either a conversational approach or to use a model to help them pray. Others may have grown up with a formal or liturgical style of prayer where they read written prayers as part of worship.
All of these ways of praying are good and beautiful and have many helpful aspects to enable us to pray. Over time, we may find that we struggle with connecting in prayer using those approaches. Maybe we want to feel a deeper connection, or maybe we feel like we're doing all the talking, or it might be that we're simply not sure where to go next.
This is where I found myself in my own journey about 5 years ago. I grew up in a church background where I was taught to pray conversationally as well as using the A.C.T.S model of prayer. At a certain point, I found myself feeling dry and unable to connect with God. My prayer life felt like I was doing all the talking and that I was saying the same things over and over again. This is when I came across a powerful and practical little book by Donald Whitney titled Praying The Bible.
Praying the same old things the same old way over and over again
In the very first chapter, Whitney summarized the way I had been feeling. He writes, "When you've said the same old things about the same old things about a thousand times, how do you feel about saying them again?...Yes, bored. We can be talking to the most fascinating person in the universe about the most important things in our lives and be bored to death."
Then he goes on to describe how that makes us believe that we're failing in prayer. We feel like we are a kind of second-rate Christian. He points out that there's usually nothing wrong with the things we regularly pray about. These things are normal for us and for every believer. We pray for our families, our future, our finances, and our work. We pray about things associated with our church, and crises that we're experiencing. These are the normal things we pray about because they are the things our lives regularly consist of. So there's nothing wrong with praying for these things.
We just get tired of praying for them the same way every time. We feel like we're bad at praying, or we're bored with praying. However, if we long for a better prayer life or a deeper prayer life, it is the sign of the Holy Spirit working within us and stirring us to seek to connect with God more intimately. We're not failures. We maybe just need another method of prayer to help us connect with God more fully.
Praying like Jesus and like the early church
What if God gave us words to help us pray? What if Jesus himself used those same words to pray? What if the early church followed the example of Jesus in the way that they prayed?
The truth is that God did give us words to say in prayer. The book of Psalms was the songbook of God's people. God inspired the Psalms to be written through the Holy Spirit so that they could be sung back to God. These songs are simply prayers set to music. Whitney tells us that, "it's as though God said to his people, ‘I want you to praise me, but you don't know how to praise me. I want you to praise me not because I'm an egomaniac, but because you will praise that which you prize most, and there is nothing of greater worth to you than I. There is nothing more praiseworthy than I, and it is a blessing for you to know that’... In other words, God gave the psalms to us so that we would give the psalms back to God." The psalms were the basis for much of the prayer that God's people said to him.
We can see this in the life of Jesus as well. When Jesus was on the cross he made only seven statements. Of those short but powerful phrases, two of them were from the book of Psalms. I believe that Jesus himself was praying scripture. The first Psalm that he quoted was from Psalm 22. This psalm speaks about the physical pain he was experiencing. It foretells the mocking that he received from those watching, and most vividly pictures that his clothes would be gambled for. Even though he only says out loud the first part that says, "My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?", I believe he was silently praying the rest of it. Jesus also prayed Psalm 31 when he said, “Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit."
Additionally, I believe Jesus prayed this way to show us how he was fulfilling God's word and how we should pray when we personally experience deep pain and suffering. We can look at the example of how Jesus, at the end of his earthly life, prayed using scripture. We can safely assume that this had been part of his regular routine of prayer throughout the rest of his life. When hard times came, his prayer naturally overflowed by using words from scripture that helped him express what he needed to say. He gave us an example of what it looks like to pray scripture.
So we see that God gave us words to say in prayer, Jesus himself prayed that way, and then his followers continued to do so as well. In Acts 4 we see the story of Peter and John being arrested for preaching that Jesus was alive and was the son of God. The followers of the early church prayed for them. This is what we hear about how they prayed.
“And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God and said, ‘Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them, who through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit, ‘Why did the Gentiles rage, and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers were gathered together, against the Lord and against his Anointed’—" Acts 4:24-26
The prayer that is recorded in Acts 4 is first spoken in Psalm 2. The people are responding to the crisis and fear of the situation by praying using the words of Psalm 2. Again, imagine that you are seeing the possibility that your pastors are arrested and could possibly die. The same things that happened to Jesus, that are happening to your leaders, could happen to you as well. How do you pray in that situation? Psalm 2 gives us language about a King who will overcome even though the world may rage against him. These words helped them pray just like Jesus had prayed, using the words that God had given them in Acts 4:24-26.
So, now that we have covered why praying scripture is so helpful for us to grow in our own lives of prayer, let's look at the practicality of how to pray scripture in our next post.