Word & Prayer

If there’s anything I can emphasize to encourage you in your spiritual life as we all get our bearings to begin 2024, it would be to keep your Bible reading and prayer connected.

The main way the Lord awakens in us an impulse to pray is through his Word.  If you intend to pray, you must be in Scripture.  Think of it:  prayer is talking to God, and the Bible is God talking to us—to people made in his image.  How presumptuous would it be if we tried to carry on a “conversation” with God in which we talk and talk and talk to him, but we fail to listen to what he has to say?  And what’s more, since God is the Creator and we’re his dependent creatures, isn’t it fitting that he should speak first? In other words, let the Bible set the agenda for your conversation with God; allow Scripture to identify the key topics of conversation to have with the Lord.

I also recommended Kevin DeYoung’s simple rule for “praying the Word,” that is, for how to move from Bible reading into prayer:  use the 3 R’s—rejoice, repent, request. (see also this page).  He explains, “With every verse in the Bible we can do one (or more likely, all three) of these things.  We can rejoice and thank God for his character and blessings.  We can repent of our mistakes and sins.  We can request new mercies and help…  Obviously, some verses lend themselves to prayer more easily than others.  The Psalms are particularly prayer-worthy”—a great place to start.

We’d do well to follow George Müller’s wise, helpful method for dealing with prayer paralysis (you know, when you intend to pray but your mind and heart just seem stuck):  “The first thing I did (early in the morning)… was to begin to meditate on the Word of God, searching, as it were, into every verse, to get blessing out of it; not for the sake of preach­ing on what I had meditated upon; but for the sake of obtaining food for my soul.  The result I have found to be almost invariably this, that after a few minutes my soul has been led to confession, or to thanks­giving, or to intercession, or to supplication; so that, though I did not, as it were, give myself to prayer, but to meditation, yet it turned almost immediately more or less into prayer” (Roger Steer, Delighted in God, p. 103).

For our 2024-2025 Bible Reading Plan, click here (and see other reading plans on this page, scroll to the bottom).

For our January 2024 "31 Days of Prayer," click here.