Mitch Lewis

Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Ephesians 5:19-20

How to Pray as a Christian

How can I learn to pray? Like many other evangelicals, I've given this advice: just pray whatever is on your mind. There is no right or wrong in prayer. We don't please God or earn his favor by saying the right formula (or feeling the right emotion or having the right spiritual experience) and God is certainly tough enough to handle our honesty in prayer. That's all true enough, but by itself this advice is somewhat misleading and unlikely to help one grow much in Christian prayer.

Christians pray with words. They may pray in other ways as well, but Christian prayer is basically verbal. For the most part, prayer in the Bible has to do with words and ideas. While there are instances of non-verbal prayer in the scriptures (e.g., glossolalia in 1 Corinthians 14:14-15), the passages which might refer to non-verbal practices in prayer are few and far between.

So when it comes time to pray, what do you say? The problem is not that we have too much wrong stuff to say to God; it's that we don't have much to say at all. In extemporaneous prayer, one can become lost in one's own emptiness and crushed by one's own shallowness.

Praying the scriptures is one antidote to the lack of direction in prayer. And within the scriptures, one section is stands out as the "prayer book of the Bible" - the book of Psalms. The Psalms are prayers. The proper response to the word of God in the Psalms is not just "what should I believe" but "what should I pray?"

What should I say, then, when I pray? The words of the Psalms are one answer to that question. Yet, when most Christians begin to pray the Psalms, they quickly come to Psalms that they know they cannot pray. It's easy to pray Psalm 23. It's much harder to pray the Psalms that claim innocence before God, that ask for the destruction of one's enemies, that cry out to God from a place of unparalleled suffering and so forth.

The secret to praying the Psalms is that you do not pray them alone. Only one man in all of history has been worthy to pray the Psalms. He lives and reigns at God's right hand and dwells in his people by the power of the Holy Spirit. When we pray the Psalms, we pray them with Jesus Christ.

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Matthew 6:5-13

Pray It - Say It

How should we use the Lord's Prayer (also known as the "Our Father" or the "Pater Noster")? The first thing we should do with the Lord's Prayer is to pray it frequently. By that, I mean we should repeat it verbatim - alone or with other believers - aloud or silently - as one continuous recitation, or pausing between phrases to meditate or offer related petitions to God. We should frequently pray the words that Jesus taught us to pray.

We know that early Christians believed Jesus intended them to recite the Lord's Prayer verbatim. Written sometime between 50 and 120 C.E., the Didache (8:3) tells new Christians to pray the Lord's Prayer three times daily. This shouldn't be too surprising, seeing that three prayer times existed within the Jewish liturgical framework that the early church inherited. Early Christians simply inserted the Lord's Prayer into the daily liturgy or substituted it for existing prayers. The Didache is the oldest Christian writing not included in the New Testament, and in it we have clear evidence that early Christians used the Lord's Prayer as a liturgical prayer.

Privately and With Others

That Jesus intended for his followers to pray privately is evident in Matthew 6:6. Jesus said, "When you pray, go into your room and shut the door." That Jesus also intended his prayer to be used by groups is clear from the frequency of the first person plural: our Father, give us, forgive us, lead us, deliver us.

Vain Repetitions

What about Jesus' warnings again vain repetitions (Matthew 6:7 KJV), as the King James Version puts it? Doesn't repeating the Lord's Prayer verbatim lead to the kind of thing Jesus prohibited?

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