Does Your Prayer Life Point to the Beauty of Christ?

Fresh out of college, I worked for a children’s ministry. I planned and orchestrated kids’ events, taught a lot of Bible lessons and memory verses, but my first great love was teacher training.

I loved taking the teachers into the cultural ideas that were shaping the worldviews of the kids they were teaching. I loved diving into the biblical texts with them before they taught so their own hearts were being fed by the Word as they poured out to the kids.

Looking back on that season of growth, I see a huge disconnect between my “use” of the Bible and its role in my everyday life. If one of the teachers in my classes had asked me about it, I would have said the Bible was the most important book in my life. But I was barely reading it. I would have said that my relationship with Christ was the most important relationship in my life, but I was barely talking to him.

Fast forward a few years: I left full-time ministry, got a “regular job,” got married, quit my job, and began my life at home with kids. It wasn’t until I had spit up all over my clothes, had no time to read the Bible, and no privacy for prayer that I really began to commune with God through His Word and prayer. It was a matter of coming under conviction and responding in repentance. My life just changed.

I realized that the Bible and prayer and Christianity weren’t about “try hard to be like this person,” or “don’t be like this person.” All of scripture points to Christ. Prayer is the heart’s response to the beauty, sufficiency, and necessity of Christ. I needed to go back to Kindergarten.

Prayer is the heart’s response to the beauty, sufficiency, and necessity of Christ.

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Praying the Words of God

Prayer continues to be the most difficult of all the spiritual disciplines for me. 

Prayer is hard. Maybe you’ve had the same thought: “I don’t like to talk about this, but it’s really hard for me to pray. It’s awkward, and I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to do it.”

I teach a three-session conference series on prayer based on the Lord’s Prayer, and, as usual, the reason I wanted to do that deep dive on those few verses in Matthew 6 is that I needed the teaching myself.

When it comes to prayer, we’re all beginners, walking with Christ and saying, “Teach us to pray” because it’s about relationship, and some of us are just not good at relationships. 

I’m heavily indebted to Eugene Peterson for the realization that prayer and scripture go together. And the more closely we keep our prayer practice to our reading of scripture, the more meaningful both will be.

Have your Bible open when you pray. We totally separate those things: 
I’m going to go study the Bible, read what it says, and try to understand it. Now I’m going to set that aside and pray. I’m going to talk about what concerns me, the things I think are important. 

Don’t we hate that kind of conversation when it happens to us? We’re discussing a very important topic, and we feel that the person we’re talking to isn’t truly listening, but rather waiting for us to stop talking so they can share what’s on their mind and what’s important to them. I wonder if sometimes this is what we do in our communing relationship with God. We read His Word. “Now, I’m fine, thank you very much. Now I’m going to talk to you about what’s really important.” 

It helps me to keep open to the Bible passage I’ve been reading and turn the words of scripture into words of prayer. If the passage is already a prayer, plug your name or the name of a loved one into the text, but what about narrative accounts? Doctrinal passages? Prophecy or poetry? Here are a few thoughts to get you started:

1. For narrative passages, ask yourself first what God is doing. (He’s the main character.) Is he affirming or condemning behavior? Ask for strength to persevere in faithfulness or confess any known sin the Spirit puts His finger on.
   What attributes of God are being revealed in the story? Turn your theological observations into praise!
2. Our reading of doctrinal passages comes alive when we are doing theology in the second person rather than the third. Instead of using what we know about God to talk about God, it changes everything when we do theology with God by talking to God. This subtle adjustment in perspective shifts my focus away from data points and toward relationship—which is the whole point of our wrestling with the truth. Like Moses, we stand in the cleft of the rock that scripture provides and lean into the paradox of our invitation to “be still and know” the unknowable God.
3. Prophetic or poetic sections of scripture invite us to respond with our emotions as well as our minds. Put yourself in the shoes of the biblical writer, and ask yourself how your own context, frustrations, joys, or sorrows align with the words of the text.

Almost ten years ago, I wrote a prayerful response HERE to  Psalm 142. The epigraph in the ESV reads:  “A contemplation of David.  A prayer when he was in the cave.” For reasons described in the post, I was sitting in company with David as he mourned in his cave, but soon realized that we had been joined all along by a third Presence who alone can shine true light in every dark place.

Let’s have an honest conversation about prayer.
What do you find most difficult about prayer, and what keeps you persevering?
Do you routinely incorporate your Bible reading into your prayer life?

Holding You in the Light,

When it comes to prayer, we’re all beginners, walking with Christ and saying, “Teach us to pray” because it’s about relationship, and some of us are just not good at relationships. 

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