Praying the Scriptures

Weekly Update – November 21st, 2024 

One of the common trends among many Christians is discouragement when it comes to prayer.  Often times, we have the tendency to set out on the path of prayer looking to pray for everything we can think of to only glance at our watches and discover that we have only been at it for all of 3 or 4 minutes.  Quite frankly we feel as if we are simply praying the same old things for the same old things.  But if God expects us to pray, and I hope that we would all agree that he does, then there must be a better way to go about it.  If the Holy Spirit is alive within us, then we would also say that there is within us a desire to pray as well.  What all of this means is that the problem with prayer does not lie with God, nor does it always lie with our desires.  Perhaps the problem lies within our method.

There are many different methods that people have come up with when it comes to prayer.  One that comes to mind is the ACTS acrostic:  A-adoration, C-confession, T-thanksgiving, S-supplication.  For many years I used this as a basic guide to my prayers.  In addition to this, I even have a list of people who I pray for depending on what day of the week it is.  I will pray for certain ministries on one day, missionaries on another day, fellow church members on another day, and so on.  But even with a popular method such as ACTS and an endless list of people to pray for, there is still the risk of saying the same old things about the same old things.  So then let me suggest to you an even better method.  Praying the Scriptures

The advantage to praying the Scriptures is that we are simply communicating back to God what he has already revealed to us.  Now typically, when it comes to devotion times, we might read our Bibles, then close them up and move into our prayer time.  But what if we read our Bibles and then kept them open, allowing the words of Scripture to inform our prayers.  You can really do this from any passage in the Bible too, though some will be easier than others.  Throughout the New Testament, and in particular in the apostle Paul’s letters, you see examples of his prayers and truths that are easy to turn into prayer.  But, even better than the epistles are the Psalms. Consider the purpose of the Psalms.  Many of them were prayers in the first place.  And you get a full range of emotions within the Psalms as well.  So, if we want a place to start in our prayer lives when it comes to praying the Scriptures, open up to the book of Psalms. 

Here is what you do then.  Take a Psalm, read one phrase at a time, stopping each time and praying whatever it is that comes to mind.  Not all of the Psalms will lend themselves to this, but most of them will.   Consider the 23^rd Psalm.  The first line says, “The Lord is my Shepherd.”  Read this phrase, stop and simply pray everything that comes to mind.  You might pray, “Lord shepherd me in my decisions today, shepherd my family as we walk through this transition, use me to shepherd others towards you with my actions, etc.”  From here you would move on to the next phrase, “I shall not want.”  Here you would do the same thing, praying whatever it is that comes to mind.  You can still have a list of requests and even still have some sort of acrostic, but praying the Scriptures allows you to pray for things that you might never think of and it prevents you from saying the same old things about the same old things.

If we are going to find ourselves growing in godliness, prayer must be a vital part of the equation.  Because of the blood of Jesus Christ, we can now draw near to God with a true heart in full assurance of faith (Hebrews 10:22).  Plus, the Holy Spirit has been given to us and even intercedes for us in our prayers (Rom. 8:26).  And now we could even argue, that God has given to us the very words of His word that we can use in our prayers to him.  Let us then take advantage of the clear path that God has set before us to seek him in prayers, using the Scriptures as our guide.    

Serving Him with You,
Pastor Michael Nelson