Praying the Bible
by Donald S. Whitney
– Many times we, as Christians, don’t pray enough… we don’t pray enough because we don’t feel like it; we do not feel like it because we really don’t know what to pray.
– We get bored in prayer and run out of things or not sure what to say. The problem is not our lack of spirituality but our method. – When you pray the same thing it becomes a repetition, and Christ did not want us to pray vain repetitions (Matthew 6:7).
– The problem is not praying about the same things but praying the same words.
– If God commands Christians everywhere to pray, then prayer cannot be as difficult as we make it out to be. It is a lot more simple than we make it.
– There’s a simple solution to making prayer easier: pray through a passage of Scripture.
– Robert Murray McShane said to use the Bible as a prayerbook. This is certainly good advice.
– The book of Psalms is a prayer book, meant to be sung back to God. It is a beautiful book to start and sing back or pray back to God.
– Read a Psalm a day and pray it back to God.
– If you pray through different passages, no matter what book, you will never again pray the same old words and things over and over.
– One of the beautiful things about praying the Bible is that you’re not only reading it but now meditating on it.
– When you read the Bible, many times you don’t even remember what you read a couple of hours later, but when you pray the Bible you will likely remember what a verse or portion you read a day later.
– By praying the Bible you will never run out of things to pray about. You’re letting God initiate the conversation.