Since then, I set out to try praying prayers of lament.  My timing turned out to be pretty good, given events in the world.  And events in my own life.

In the process, I really found myself lamenting on two different levels.

Big Picture Lament

The first level of lament involved the bigger picture.  This bigger picture includes world events.  Events like civil wars, natural disasters, and economic downturns.  This bigger picture also includes systemic issues.  Issues of injustice, inequality, racism, and the like.

The crucial common thread in these bigger picture problems is that all of them are completely out of our individual control.  There is no decision we can make by ourselves that can fix these problems.  Our individual choices might be able to reduce our contribution to the issue.  Or, our choices might serve to alleviate some of the suffering involved.  But in the end, we cannot solve the problem all by ourselves.

Two bigger picture issues weighed particularly heavy on my heart the last few weeks.  The first is the Florida school shooting.  It is always a tragedy when this happens.  This time, I particularly hurt for the parents.  I had always thought primarily of the students, but this time I was particularly burdened for the parents.  Seventeen parents didn’t see their kids come home that day.  That breaks the heart.  And I cannot do anything to undo that day.   But I can lament.

The events in Syria also weight heavy upon my heart.  News coverage spills a lot of electronic ink debating who bombed who and telling us what the UN is trying to do.  Yet human suffering is occurring on unprecedented levels.  BBC news recently did a story that featured a little Syrian girl.  Her picture was at the top and she was quoted as saying, “At least in heaven there is food.”  True Despair.  Again, I cannot stop the fighting in Syria.  So, I lament.

Small Picture Lament

I found as I explored lament, another dimension of it emerged.  This is what I would call small picture lament.  This level of lament consists of all the hurt, pain and suffering that happens in our own lives.  In our own little worlds.  This is pain found close to home.  This is local.

Ironically, in small picture lament, we still don’t have much control.  This time the cancer strikes a family member.  This time the economic downturn causes our loved one to lose their job.  The tsunami strikes our hometown.  The effects of this suffering are felt nearby, and deeply.  And often we have no more control over these events that happen in our lives than we do the big picture events, like Syria.

Perhaps in the ultimate demonstration of God’s timing, within a week of putting up our post on lament I received some bad news.  Some events happened that could spell the end of my small business.  Nothing I did caused these events to happen.  Nothing I could have done could have prevented them.  And it is looking like there is little I can do to fix it.  Talk about hitting home.  This is time for lament.

Both Levels of Lament are Important

It is important that we as followers of Christ, lament on both levels.

Value of Big Picture Lament

Our social justice minded brothers and sisters in Christ helpfully remind us that as believers it is imperative that we know what is going on around us.  The Bible commands us to love and serve our neighbors.  Yet, if we are blissfully unaware of their needs – or even their existence – we can never fulfill the Biblical command.

One reason we avoid awareness of others, and in particular their hurts and struggles, is that we are afraid to enter their pain.  It hurts us to fully recognize others’ pain.  Especially if we are powerless to affect change.  We do not like to hurt.  We don’t want to hurt, so we tune out others who hurt.

Lament turns this thinking on its’ head.  Before lament entered the prayer tool box, we had nowhere to go with others’ suffering.  Through lament, we now have a place to take the suffering of others.  We can take it to God and process it with him.  Then we can act in whatever ways we can.

Small Picture Lament Vital Too

Like any thinking, this can be taken too far.  Some will teach we must be so concerned with others that we must never think about our own problems.  Or, that we are to utterly diminish our own problems in light of the ‘real’ struggles of others.  They will say, “How can you think about your problems like that, so many others have it worse.”

This is wrong thinking.  It is not wrong to acknowledge our emotion and feelings of powerlessness.  Even Jesus wept in front of Lazarus’ tomb.  It is wrong, however, to allow our feelings to become all consuming, to allow them to become central to our identity.  To allow them to rule.

Lament is a powerful two-sided coin when it comes to small picture hurts.  First, lament is powerful because it creates a context where we can express hurt and frustration.  We can let the emotion out, and we can be raw with God.  Peruse a few of Job’s laments, we might be surprised by what we read.

Second, lament also puts bounds on the expressed emotion.  As soon as we express the hurt and despair, we immediately shine the light of God on it.  We ask God to act.  Some else is invited to help.  A person who we openly acknowledge is loving enough, powerful enough, and wise enough to actually do something about the trouble.

We get the hurt out there but quickly fence it in.  Calls to God for help and reminders of God’s character put boundaries to the emotion.  The emotion is never allowed to overrun our lives or take over our hearts.

In the end, lament acts as a bridge from being emotionally and relationaly healthy to fully serving God.

It’s (NOT) About Time . . .

Time was a big question mark as I began my first few attempts at lament.  I knew lament was different than other forms of prayer.  Lament is not like Praise, or thanksgiving, or prayer walking.  These and many other forms of prayer are easy to put the clock to.  “I will prayer walk for 30 minutes.”  Simple and done.  But lament is more of an expression of emotion.  Thus, I was careful to not set unrealistic time goals for this type of prayer.  What I found was a very flexible way to pray.

Some Lament Was Short

I found some of my prayers of lament to be short.  That is okay.  Psalm 13 is a prayer of lament, and that Psalm contains only six verses!  King David was bothered by his circumstances, yet he found he was able to fully express his lament in six verses.  Lament does not need to be long to be helpful.

Not knowing how long I would need to lament, I planned to start my prayer block with lament, and with any time left, transition into my usual outline.  The outline presented in our post on how to pray.

I started with bigger picture issues that were weighing on my heart.  I opened my time with God and began to lament.  I explored and expressed to God my anguish over these situations in Florida and Syria.  Then I asked God to help.  I offered a few – weak – suggestions as to how he might intervene, but really I just begged him to do something.  Then I turned to recognizing his ability to do something.  I ended by praising God, which was the perfect segue to my usual outline of prayer that begins with praising God.

My first few tries at lament took only a few minutes.  Those few minutes we enough, however, to clear my mind and my heart enough to have a focused time of sitting in God’s presence conversing with him.

Sometimes We Have to Go Long

Sometimes pain hits closer to home.  At times, the suffering digs a little deeper into our being.

Like it did a few days after my first attempts at lament.  The day I heard the news I mentioned earlier.  The news that could spell the end of my business.  It only makes sense that when the bad news happens to us, the orders of hurt and frustration are many magnitudes higher.

Deeper emotion reasonably leads to longer lament.  Psalm 22 records for us a lament that is 31 verses long.  Job’ laments can run even longer.  Unsure what to expect, I sat down the day after getting this news to pray as I had before.  I planned to open my time with lament and then transition to my normal prayer habits.

This time however, the lament was different.  I really embraced the process.  I was compelled to really dig into each step of the process of lament.  I gave it to God.  I begged him to act in any one of numerous ways.  Or in ways I had not imagined.  I recognized and celebrated his attributes.

To my surprise, as I was lamenting, I suddenly heard my timer sounding.  I had spent my entire block of prayer in lament.  I was surprised I could lament that long, but that was how long it took to lift the weight that was resting on me.

Something More Important than Minutes . . .

It is important to not get caught up in how long we lament.  We learned that the length of a lament does not determine how meaningful it is.  The examples from the Scriptures teach us this, as does our experience.  Just lament as long as we need to.

What is more important to lament is honesty.  Lament cannot be meaningful if we are not honest.

The purpose of lament is to acknowledge reality, request help from God, and then be encouraged.  Encouraged because God is in control and is on the job.

If we are not honest with God, we short circuit lament.

First, dishonestly affects the quality of our relationship with God.  If we are untrue with our feelings, we are not being known by God.  We are hiding a part of ourselves.  No joy comes from fake relationships.

The second short circuit of lament is a byproduct of a fake relationship.  It is the sad fact that when presented with a difficult situation, many Christians see an opportunity to impress God with their strength or their faith, instead of seeing the situation as a time to seek help and encouragement from a loving father.  By seeing things this way, and by avoiding honesty, so many people miss out on the encouragement, hope and help to be found in God through lament.

Plants need good soil, plenty of light and water to grow.  If we want a plant to thrive, put it outside in the sun and give it some water.  Negative emotions are exactly the opposite however.  They thrive in the dark and in solitude.  When we are dishonest with God, when we hide these feelings in the closet, these feelings just grow.  They thrive.  And they eventually take over.  Being honest with God in lament puts these emotions in the light, his light.  And they are put in their proper place:  acknowledged but not in control.

We have a lot to gain by praying prayers of lament.

The post Tried It – Lament appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

At the beginning, I wanted to see what would happen if I set aside thirty minutes every day, and took that time to pray.  We are now about three months in, one quarter of the way.

What I have learned or gained so far?

A More Tangible Sense of God’s Presence

A sense of the presence of God is such a subjective, intangible thing.  Many Christians fear such discussions.  We tend to prefer a God we can neatly define and categorize.  A God whose works we can neatly label.  But when we start to talk about feeling God’s presence or God’s speaking to people, we quickly grow uncomfortable.

I would often include myself in that category.  Determining the authenticity of such experiences is vital, and requires much discernment.  To simplify things, the church in large part has dismissed such experiences.  Years ago, reading medieval mystics forced me to wrestle with the reality of a tangible sense of God.  Mystics like Bernard of Clairvaux or St Theresa of Avila would describe ecstatic experiences of God.  St Theresa wrote of the time when God’s presence was so real to her, and the joy so great, that she wept for hours.  My Western, logic driven mind struggled to comprehend such an experience.

But such experiences are real.  I read the mystics’ experience.  I personally know Godly people who find great comfort in God’s presence.  And, as a new believer in junior high, I will admit I had a sense of the presence of God.  But with time, the ups and downs of life, and the sinking deeper into Christian culture – that feeling faded.

That has changed recently.  In the last few weeks, as I pray, I have started to become aware of God’s presence in a very real way.  Like Darth Vader on the Death Star when Ben Kenobi shows up, “I sense a presence . . .”

I know in my head, theologically, that God is omnipresent.  Psalm 139:7-10 clearly teaches that God is everywhere all the time when it says, “’Where shall I go from your Spirit?  Or where shall I flee from your presence?  If I ascend to heaven, you are there!  If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!  If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.”  (ESV)

So to be clear, my prayer did not cause an absent God to return to my location.  What happened is that my consistent prayer has made my heart sensitive to his presence.

I won’t mince words, this sense of God’s presence is pretty awesome.  As mentioned before, new-Christian me had a sense of God’s presence.  Over time, and life, that sense faded.  One of the things I had hoped to gain from this prayer experiment was a renewed sense of God’s presence.  And with a twinge of joy in my heart I am glad to report that it has returned.  Not that I like to agree with dastardly villains, but I am right there with Darth Vader when he finishes his sentence, “I sense a presence that I have not felt in a long time.”

More Tools In the Prayer Toolbox

Going through this year long experiment, new tools are constantly being placed in my prayer tool box.  I have discovered forms of prayer that are new to me.  Forms of prayer that have existed for many, many years – but I am only now learning about.  Forms of prayer like lament.  I am also greatly deepening my understanding of more familiar forms of prayer – like praise.

Thanks to this experiment, my prayer tool box has both new tools, and old tools that have been sharpened and tuned.

More Tools = More Flexibility

Before starting this experiment, I had one way to pray.  It was an outline taught to me years ago when I was a young Christian.  This outline is solid.  It is simple to use, easy to remember, and keeps prayer reasonably balanced.

But it was the only way I knew how to pray.  When life’s troubles were about to overwhelm me, I sat down and prayed my outline.  Learning new facts about God’s character from studying the Bible, joy welling up inside, I prayed my familiar outline.  God times or bad times, I had one basic way to pray. 

In our relationships with others, we intuitively know that different circumstances require different ways of communicating.  The way a manager will talk to an under-performing employee will differ from the way a preschool teacher will talk to his student.  The way my college football coach talked to me on the field greatly differed from how my mother spoke to me as a child.  It makes sense that different moments require different approaches.

Yet our prayer lives are often founded upon a single form of prayer – like mine has been.  By adding new forms of prayer to my experience, by adding new tools to the prayer tool box, I can now approach my conversations with God the same way most of us approach our conversations with others.  I use an outline for most of my times in prayer, the one we learned about it in our post on How to Pray, but there are times when just slogging through an outline is not the way to talk to God.  Let me give you a recent example from my own life.

A few weeks ago, I experienced a serious set back at work.  Bad enough to bring into question the continued survival of my business.  Sitting down to pray the next day, with so much pent up frustration and emotion, working through an outline was not going to happen.  Instead of stuffing the emotion and praying the outline, or skipping prayer altogether that day (and embracing the ensuing guilt), I realized this was the perfect opportunity to lament.  I spent the majority of my prayer time lamenting my situation, asking God to rescue, and praising him.  Praying a prayer of lament in that moment really set my heart right.

The next day, I was still a little bothered by my situation, but I did not want to dwell on the problems.  I decided a “praise binge” was in order.  One of my experiments was to only praise God for my entire prayer time.  This day was a great day to do that.  I just wanted to remind myself, and celebrate, how amazing God is.  So, I opened up a Psalm and prayed through it.  It was super encouraging.  It was just what I needed.

On the third day, with fear and hurt no longer swirling around inside of me, I was ready to return to my usual prayer habits.   I returned to my regular methods of daily prayer and settled back into my usual outline for regular prayer.

As we can see, it was great for me to have the tools of lament and of praise in my tool box.  Situations arose where certain forms of prayer where more fitting than others.  Knowing about these forms of prayer allowed me to use them – and have the right kind of conversation at the right time.

More Tools = More Authentic

These newfound tools have also made my prayer life feel more authentic.

Every single one of us has endured a shallow, fake relationship.  A relationship where people act like they know and care for each other, but the reality is that the relationship is shallow.  Words are exchanged, but no meaningful communication is occurring.  No one is known, and no one is being known.

These relationships live everywhere.  With our barista at the coffee shop, or with our coworkers.  Sometimes even at home.  I will even admit to them being rather common at the churches many of us attend.

The sad reality is that for many of us, our prayer life is the same way.  When we sit quietly before God, we are not interested in being honest with him, we are interested in impressing him.

When times are tough, we fell the need to impress God with our strength, or our faith.  “Everything is fine,” they tell God.  We put on our stiff upper lip.  At other times, we want to make requests to God, but instead of asking for what we actually want, we ask for what we feel we should want.  Or we ask him for what we think he will give us, since, “He would never actually give me what I wanted.”

Our time in prayer, for many of us, is our time to impress.

It should not be that way.  And putting more tools in my prayer tool box makes it easier for me to be authentic with God.  When I hurt, I lament.  When I am happy at seeing God’s hand at work, I praise him.  After recognizing his work in my life, I offer thanksgiving.  New tools make it easier to be real with God.

The post The One Year Prayer Experiment – Three Months In appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

Fears Going In – Mostly My Needs!

One of my trepidations when I decided to try this mode of prayer was the lost opportunity to make requests to God.

There are a lot of needs in the world.  I have a lot of needs, real and imagined.  We all have places in our lives we need God to work in.  In light of those, we do not want to completely stop asking God to work in and around us.  Yet, we desire to learn how to – and how to get proficient at – offering praise to God.  This becomes a matter of faith.

Is God all-knowing?  Yes!

Is God all-powerful?  Yes, he is!

Is God loving and kind?  Indeed!

If I believe God is all of these, then I must be able to believe that God can take care of me for one week without me telling him how to do it.  So, to acknowledge both my continued need for his help, and my faith in his oversight, I began each prayer time with these lines:

“Lord, you know everything, including all of my needs.  You are also all-powerful.  You can easily take care of everyone of those needs.  So, for the next few days I am going to trust you to know what I need and to take care of it while I just praise you.”

And then I would praise God and thank him for his work.

What I Experienced Only Praising God

As one might expect, the removal of any requests from my planned time of prayer led to a very different experience of prayer.  This new experience of prayer manifested itself in three main ways.

Sense of Giving to God

It felt different to only offer praise to God for one week.  So often in my time with prayer, I feel like I am trying to get God to do something.  Or I am trying to get God to give me something.  It is right to make requests of God.  Philippians 4:6 tells us, “do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” (ESV) However, I see now in my own heart, how prayer was – in a subtle way – my time to “get mine.”  I had an agenda – right or wrong – I was after something.  And that something was not always joy in the presence of the Lord.

That sense was flipped on its head when I offered only praise and thanksgiving to God.  No longer did I come to God each day seeking something material.  No more did I enter his presence hoping to leave with something I did not arrive with.  Now, instead, I came to God to give him something.  To give him something valuable, to offer him something he treasures.  I entered God’s presence just to give – and it felt good.

I was not expending effort trying to convince God I needed something.  And, I was not stressed about receiving what I wanted.  In God’s presence, I just gave to him.

I found the comparison between my old and new ways to pray was similar to comparing the experience of Christmas as a child versus as an adult.  As children, despite our folks’ best efforts, we spent a lot of time worrying about our Christmas list.  We wrote it out.  It was edited frequently, often after new TV spots appeared.  We made sure it was communicated to Santa and to our folks.  Christmas was about getting what we wanted.

Like little Ralphie and his Red Ryder BB gun from The Christmas Story.  Ralphie’s desire was clear, and it was pervasive.  Christmas for Ralphie was all about getting that BB gun.Years go by, and now as a parent, I have enough stuff.  What I want most is to give my kids presents that they will love and enjoy.  As I move from kid to parent, Christmas moves from stress about what I want to the joy of giving.

Limiting my prayer to praise and thanksgiving had a similar affect on my experience of prayer.

Praise is Uplifting

Only offering praise and thanks to God for a week turned out to be uplifting.  In order to truly praise God for who he is, it was necessary that I spend a fair amount of time understanding and contemplating God’s character and attributes.

It was uplifting to me to be reminded of how awesome God really is.  It was encouraging to remember that this person I spend all of this time praying to is so powerful, caring, holy, wise, kind and so on and on.

Refocused by Praise

Along with the emotional uplift, I found a refocusing occurring in my heart.  As I spent so much time contemplating God’s amazing attributes –  I felt encouraged and uplifted as I said – but I also began to think more about God.  I began to focus more on how able he was to act and about how willing he was to act in our behalf.  To think more about these, in turn, led me to think less about all the things I wanted, all my requests.

It reminded me of a story Tim Keller tells about a woman in his church.  He preached a sermon on the Lord’s prayer and advised his people to praise God before they make their requests.  A few weeks later a woman came to him and relayed how praising first had affected her:

“”Before,” she said, “I would run right to my prayer list and the more I went through all the problems and needs, the more anxious and burdened I would get.  Now I’ve started spending time thinking about how good and wise he is, and how many prayers he’s answered of mine in the past.  And when I get to my own needs – now I find I can put them in his hands and I can feel the burden coming off me rather than on me.”” (Keller, Prayer, 190)

My sentiments exactly.  Placing focus on the greatness of the provider shrunk the size of the needs.  And the corresponding levels of concern.

Limited Time Only

In practicing only praise and thanksgiving for one week, I gained a lot.  I took on the knowledge of how to really praise God.  I also became comfortable with the process.  And, I gained the aforementioned joy of giving, the uplifting, and refocusing.

The practice did seem to have a shelf life however.  For me, after five days things began to change a little.  I still enjoyed praising God.  But I was beginning to miss the other forms of interaction.  Whereas most people who pray are imbalanced away from praise, I could feel the imbalance moving into the direction of praise.  I continued on for the full week, but the best results came in the first five days.

If you want to try this, I would recommend planning to do it for only 3-5 days.  Long enough to actually learn something and to be changed by it; yet not long enough to dig a new rut.  Inserting a single day of praise and thanksgiving into your prayer routine could also be beneficial.

Going Forward

The skills I learned have their place in my normal prayer routine as well.  After completing my week of praise only, I returned to the outline that Jesus taught.  We learned this outline in an earlier post.  That outline opens with praise.  Now when I open with praise, I open the Word.  I read a few verses about God’s attributes, or I read through a Psalm.  As I read I keep the eyes of my heart open to God revealing himself – and I respond in praise.  Then I continue to move through Jesus’ outline of prayer.

I am considering future “Praise Binges” of 3-5 days.  Single days of praise only are also on my radar.  I think they would really have their place on days when I am particularly discouraged or anxious.  When the problems are overwhelming and threating to overrun us, putting all our attention on love and power of God seems a new best-practice.

Praise Only – A Great Place to Restart the Prayer Life

Many have tried prayer in the past.  For whatever reason it did not work out.  We did not receive what we wanted.  What we begged for.  What we sought for over YEARS.  And so, we gave up on prayer.

Yet, now, the desire to pray returns.  It won’t go away.  We want to come back, but we are afraid.  Afraid God will not come through.  Concerned we will once again not receive what we wanted – what we needed.  If we are feeling this draw to pray and at the same time feeling fearful, praise and thanks only is a great way to come back.

Praying in a way that is made up entirely of praise and thanksgiving is totally non-demand.  God can’t fail to receive praise.  He won’t drop the ball on accepting our thanks.  Praying this way transforms prayer from a test of God and his willingness or ability to act and turns it into a space where we can acknowledge the reality of his greatness.  In that space, over time, we can become comfortable in God’s presence again.  Over time, our hearts will refocus.  The focus will move away from the hurt to the felt need.  And over more time, it will hopefully shift from our felt needs, to the good Lord.

As we are focused more on God and his attributes by praising those traits, hopefully our spirits will be lifted and a spark of confidence will ignite.  A tiny little spark that will give us the confidence to once again ask God for something. However small a request it is.

The post Tried It – Only Praising and Thanking God When I Take Time to Pray appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

Praise.

We all have heard the word thrown around.  Often the first thing to come to a Christian’s mind is the time of praise and worship that most American church services open with.  This is a time of singing intended to prepare our hearts to hear the Word of God preached.  But this is not a blog about singing or leading worship.  This is a blog about prayer.

The outline for prayer that Jesus taught us to use opens with the command to praise the Father, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name . . .” (Matthew 6:9, ESV)  Jesus teaches us our experience of prayer should begin should begin with praise.  Yet for many of us, clear praise is absent from our time spent talking to God.  Or it is vastly outweighed by the time spent asking for things.

Offering praise to God brings joy, both to us, and our heavenly father.  It has many other benefits for us as well.  If we are going to learn how to incorporate praise into our prayer lives, we should start at the beginning.

Praise Defined

Before we can start to effectively praise our Father in heaven, we must understand what it means to praise God.  This is how we define praise:

Praise is recognizing God’s character and attributes and in response to them, offering glory and adoration to God.

Let’s work through this definition.

Praise begins with God’s character.  God reveals his attributes to humanity through his inspired Word, the Bible.  He tells us what he is like.  The Bible boldly declares attributes he manifests that we could never show – his incommunicable attributes.  God is all-knowing.  He is all-powerful.  God is present in all places at once.  The Bible also proudly displays other attributes of God that humans can demonstrate – his communicable attributes.  God is love.  The Lord is patient.  The Scriptures paint a clear picture of who God is and what he is like.

We must start with this picture the Bible paints.  Do not start with what we think God is like.  And do not start with what we want God to be like.  Psalm 145:18 says, “The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.”  (ESV)  If we call upon, or offer praise, to God in a way that does not line up with his true character – we lie to God and ourselves.  We waste our time.  No one benefits.  If we respond to God in line with the way he really is – God will be near.

The starting place for praise, then, is God’s true character.  The starting place is the Bible.  Crack open the Bible and read about who God is.  Then we respond. 

Recognizing an attribute about God is not enough.  Intellectual assent is insufficient, insufficient to bring about joy in our hearts or change our lives.  And it fails to fully glorify God.

Instead, we contemplate upon a trait of God and we respond to it from our head and our heart.  We start to respond with wonder and awe.  We realize how amazing it is that a being could be the way he is described.  Pausing, we are filled with wonder as we think about how big the universe really is, and that God sustains it all.  We are overcome with awe when we realize how powerful God really is – and how weak we are in comparison.

Our minds and hearts also respond with the offer of Glory to God.  The more we realize how different, and better, God is from any other being – the more we should be inspired to tell him how much better he is than anything else in all creation.

Ultimately, our response should turn to adoration.  Seeing all of the attributes that are true about God and knowing how superior he is to all things – and then finding out this God if for us . . . Love is an appropriate response.  Praise is an expression of that love and appreciation.

Praise vs Thanksgiving

A point of clarification is in order here.  Discussions of praise will always be incomplete if they do not in some way include thanksgiving.  Praise and thanksgiving are closely related, yet they are different.  There is some overlap in their application, yet they are distinct.

The crucial difference is this:  Praise is to glorify God for who he is.  Thanksgiving is to express gratitude for what he has done.

Praise is concerned with who God is.  God is celebrated because of his unique and perfect attributes.  “Lord, because you are truly omnipotent and in control of everything, you are worthy of fear and respect – you are far above all people!”  “Father, you are a generous God who gives willingly, freely and happily!”

Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with what God has done in our lives.  It is our expression of gratitude for the ways we have seen God’s hand at work in our lives.  “Thank you Lord, for providing the extra $1,000 we needed to pay the rent.”  “Thanks be to you Father, for giving me the right words to say at that important moment yesterday.”

Being closely related, praise and thanksgiving often blend together.  “God, you are so generous, thanks for being so generous to us and providing a job when we needed it.”  Both are vital.  Since both are vital, it is important that we clearly discern between the two so we can be sure to include them both in our prayer life.

Why We Need to Praise God

There are several good reasons for us to be careful to include the regular practice of praising God.

Praise is the Ultimate Expression of Our Purpose

The Bible is clear on what God’s purpose is.  The prophet Isaiah speaks for God when he says, “For my own sake, for my own sake I do it, for how should my name be profaned?  My glory I will not give to another.” (Isaiah 48:11, ESV)  God is telling his hearers that what he is doing, he is doing only for his sake.  Only for his own glory.  He is not doing it for their sake.  For his.  He will not share the credit, nor the recognition.  The prophet Ezekiel expresses similar words from God in chapter 20 of his book.  Three times in that chapter God says through him that “. . . I acted for the sake of my name . . .”  (Ezekiel 20:9,14,22, ESV)  God’s purpose is his the magnification of his name – his glory.

Everything God does, everything he allows to happen, he does in order to magnify and increase his glory.  John Piper says, “God governs the world with glory precisely that he might be admired, marveled at, exalted and praised.”  (Piper, Desiring God, 46)

If then, God’s purpose is his glory, and if he manages everything in such a way as to increase his glory – one of humanity’s main purposes must be the offering of praise to God.  Piper says, “The climax of his (God’s) happiness is the delight he takes in the echoes of his excellence in the praise of his saints.”  (Piper, Desiring God, 46)

The offer of praise to God fulfills the purpose of two parties.  It makes God happy.  It fulfills his purpose – he receives glory.  Praise also fulfills our purpose – as creatures made to praise the creator.

Praise Roots us in Reality

In our culture it is not that hard to get disconnected from reality.  Our pride, our hurts, our preconceptions and our ignorance – can all color the glasses we use to look at our world.  It is easy to carry inside of us a picture of reality that does not truly, or completely, line up with reality.  This is particularly true of spiritual reality.

The practice of praise forces us to recognize many realities we may me ignorant of, or realities we may be suppressing.  For example, as we recognize the fact that God is sovereign, we are forced to realize we are not king of our own lives.  We also are forced to acknowledge that we are dependent.  The more we rightly praise God, the more we know him rightly, and the more our sense of reality will conform to the actual reality.

Living life with a correct concept of reality will free us from many frustrations and false hopes.

Praise Completes Our Joy

We have made the point already that one of our main purposes is praise.  If we regularly practice praising God, then the joy and satisfaction that come with fulfilling our purpose will follow.  But there is more to it than this.

Think back to the last time we saw a movie in the theater that we thought was amazing.  A movie we loved.  What happened for the next few days?  We talked about the movie!  We asked our friends if they had seen it.  Excitedly we told them about it, about how entertaining it was, or how about how it moved us in a special way.  We eventually tell our friends they need to go see it.  And if a friend of ours has already seen it, together we extol the virtues of the film.

What is going on in this situation?  We watched a movie and enjoyed it very much.  But the experience of watching the movie was not enough.  Watching the movie again was not enough.  We are so full of excitement and joy that we have to tell someone about it.  Piper perfectly explains this phenomenon when he says, “We praise what we enjoy because the delight is incomplete until it is expressed in praise.”  (Piper, Desiring God, 49)  You see, praise completes joy.  We gain a great amount of pleasure from watching the movie, but we gain more satisfaction when we tell our friends how great the movie is.  And we gain even more when they go see it, enjoy it, come back and praise the movie with us.

This principle works exactly the same with our experience of God.  When we praise God, we experience God’s true self.  The response to such a joyful experience is to share it with someone.  The difference between the experience of God and of the movie is the direction of the praise.  When we glorify the movie, we aim the glory towards others.  The virtues of the movie are directed towards others.  With the experience of God, we express some of the glory towards other people, but primarily we offer the glory right back to the source:  God himself.

Learning who God is and what he is really like should thrill our hearts.  Responding to that by praising God completes that joy.

The Process of Praise

Recognizing the benefits of praise, both to God and to ourselves, the next question is obvious.  How do we effectively praise God?  We offer a simple process.

The first step is to open the Bible.  To praise God, we must know him as he reveals himself.  We have created a PDF that you can find on the PRAYER TOOLBOX PAGE that includes a list of God’s attributes and the verses where they are found.  You can download the guide to guide you on this step.

Second, as you read these verses, pick out one of God’s attributes to focus on.  Then meditate on it by asking yourself these questions as you pray:

1)       Lord, I realize you are ____________.

2)      Lord, because you are ____________ . . . I know . . . I feel . . . I can . . .

3)      Lord, if you were not ____________ . . . I would feel . . . I would think . . . I would do/not do . . .

Finally, because we want to be well rounded, include a time of thanksgiving.  Consider your life and circumstances, and think about specific ways God has expressed this attribute towards us.  Then tell him thank you.

Putting Praise into Practice

As Part of the One Year Prayer Experiment

When something becomes unbalanced, it is often necessary to shift some things around in order to restore balance.  Regardless of what the imbalance is in, be it physical weight, skill, or knowledge, one area must be built up to restore balance.  When the imbalance is found in our skill set, extra effort is often required to fill in the gaps and re-balance our skill set.

I think the practice of praise falls into this category for many of us.  If we started out day one praying like Jesus taught us Matthew 6 – which we talked about in a previous post – we would have a perfectly balanced prayer life.  Many of us, however, did not get off on the perfect first step.  I certainly did not.

Many of our prayer lives end up unbalanced.  The amount of time and effort we spend on offering praise to God pales in comparison to the time and effort we spend asking God for things.

So, we need to really work on praising God in order to build our skill and comfort with offering praise to God.  And, we may need to rebalance an out of whack prayer life.

To jump in with both feet, I am going to do something a little different.  I am going to spend one week spending my daily thirty-minute time of prayer only offering praise and thanksgiving to God.

A Word of Caution

I will not recommend praying this way as a long-term practice.  But to accelerate learning and to restore balance this could be a useful practice.  It also has a place for occasional short periods of just wanting to praise God.

With that said, try this method of prayer.  Just do not do it for more than a week.  Or else we will end up unbalanced in the opposite direction in which we started.

I will give it a try and LET YOU KNOW.

The post Offering Praise to God – A Primer appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

As Christians, we know we should pray.  From listening to sermons and from reading Bible, we have the sense that we should be taking time out to talk to God.  We look around us and we see a few people praying.  Pastors are always praying – but that is their job, right?  And we see the super-spiritual types praying, those people who seem much farther down the road than we are.

But we may not be a pastor.  We may not be one of those super-spiritual types.  Should we be praying too?  Should prayer be a regular habit?  Is prayer something that is required of Christians?  Is talking to God something that all Christians – not just the turbo ones – are commanded to do?

The Bible gives us a few intersecting lines to look at in regards to this question.

The Bible Models Prayer for Us

Old Testament Examples

It seems reasonable that if prayer is something vital to our spiritual health and joy, then Biblical characters would be people of prayer.  If talking to God is important, we will see it demonstrated by those characters so familiar to us.  Let start in the beginning of the Bible and take a look.

In Genesis 20, Abraham has lied to King Abimelech about his wife by saying she was her sister.  Abimelech takes her as a wife.  The whole issue gets sorted out after some angst, and the story ends with Abraham praying for Abimelech, “Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelech, and also healed his wife and female slaves so they bore children.  For the Lord had closed all the wombs of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.” (Genesis20:17-18, ESV) Shortly thereafter, Abraham’s son Isaac prayed, “And Isaac prayed to the LORD for his wife, because she was barren.  And the LORD granted his prayer, and Rebekah his wife conceived.”  (Genesis 25:21, ESV)

The great Moses, of the Red Sea fame, was no stranger to prayer.  Pharaoh, surrounded by the plague of flies, pleads with Moses to take them away.  “So Moses went out from Pharaoh and prayed to the LORD.” (Exodus 8:30, ESV) When the nation of Israel angered God yet again, Moses interceded, “Then the people cried out to Moses, and Moses prayed to the Lord, and the fire died down.”  (Numbers 11:2, ESV) Then take a look at Psalm 90. We are told in the opening notes that Moses wrote this Psalm.

Hannah was a woman deeply distressed by her inability to have children.  Not only a personal tragedy, but in that culture, a public humiliation.  Her response was a heartfelt pouring out to God of her feelings and desires, “She was deeply distressed and prayed to the LORD and wept bitterly.”  (1 Samuel 1:10, ESV)

King David, the man described as a man after God’s own heart, was certainly a man of prayer.  As the author of a great many of the Psalms, it is clear he knew how to pray.

The prophets were mouthpieces God used to communicate to his people.  As such, they were well versed in speaking on behalf of God.  Yet, they also spoke to him as well.  Surrounded by an army holding ill intent, “Then Elisha prayed and said, ‘O LORD, please open his (the opposing general’s) eyes that he may see.’  So the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.”  (2 Kings 6:17, ESV, parenthesis mine)

The prophet Nehemiah was in the presence of King Artaxerxes – his boss – and he was sad.  We all have had moments of sadness, but bringing such melancholy before this king was strictly verboten.  The king noticed, and confronted Nehemiah with it.  Nehemiah confesses he is bothered by the condition of Jerusalem, the home of his people.  Nehemiah relates what happens next when he says “. . . the king said to me, ‘What are you requesting?’  So I prayed to the God of heaven.” (Nehemiah 2:4, ESV) Nehemiah asks God for help in a moment of crisis and confrontation.

Daniel was in the habit of praying.  His friends knew it.  His enemies knew it.  He was so committed to his habit, and to his God, that his enemies convinced the king to ban prayer to anything except himself for thirty days.  “When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem.  He got down on his knees and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously.” (Daniel 6:10, ESV)

New Testament Examples

Our Lord and savior Jesus Christ was himself a man of prayer.  Luke tells us, “. . . he would withdraw to desolate places and pray.”  (Luke 5:16, ESV) Several times we are told of Jesus going up mountain to pray.  The night before he goes to the cross, he prays in Gethsemane.  Jesus talked often with his Father.

Like his mentor, Peter had picked up the habit of going off by himself to pray.  “The next day, as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the housetop about the sixth hour to pray.”  (Acts 10:9)

Paul was another person who conversed frequently with the Lord.  In many of his letters he speaks of his prayers for his readers.  He tells the Roman believers, “For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his son, that without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers . . .” (Romans 1:9-10a, ESV)  To the Ephesian church he writes, “. . . I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers  . . .” (Ephesians 1:16, ESV)  In a touching letter to his protégé Timothy, Paul tells him, “I thank God whom I serve, as did my ancestors, with a clear conscience, as I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day.” (2 Timothy 1:3, ESV)

We could speak of numerous other examples of believers praying to the heavenly Father.  This list is by no means exhaustive.  The Bible records in its pages many other characters who converse with God.

Looking at the example of all of these men and women, spanning thousands of years and throughout the story of the Bible, it is becoming clear that the example God’s people set for us is that God’s people pray.  If your bracelet says WWJD – What Would Jesus Do? – it is clear that at least one of the things he would do is pray.  If you had a bracelet that read WWMPBD – What Would Most People in the Bible Do? – the answer remains the same.

God’s people pray.

Example is not enough

The pages of scripture contain a great many examples of people who pray.  We have examined some of them.  But, some of us might advise caution.  An example cannot always be a command.  After all, for many of these characters, the Bible also records their major failures.  Failures which include adultery and murder.  No one looks at the presence of these actions in the Bible and construes a command.

This gets us down to brass tacks.  Does the Bible actually command believers to converse with God?

The Bible’s Commands to Pray

As it turns out, the Bible does command Christians to pray.

Paul closes his first letter to the Thessalonian church with a list of things they need to remember to do.  On that list is a short sentence on prayer, “. . . pray without ceasing . . .” (1 Thessalonians 5:17, ESV) This command is pretty clear.  Pray.  We must pray.  Occasional prayer is not enough.  Prayer during just times of crisis is insufficient.  We must pray without ceasing.  We must be constant and fervent in our prayer.  The God of the universe wants you talk to him – regularly.

Jesus also issues a directive to pray.  He prefaces one of his parables by saying, “And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.” (Luke 18:1, ESV) The parable he goes on to share helps people understand that they need to pray, and pray a lot.  He proceeds to tell the parable of the persistent widow.

The parable is the story of a widow who is being oppressed and appeals to a judge for justice.  This judge does not fear God or people.  He is not motivated by a love for God, and he does not care what other will think about him for ignoring the widow.  So, he ignores her at first.  But the widow keeps coming to him seeking justice.  He resists for a while, but ultimately gives in – only to get her to go away.  Jesus implies we need to be like the widow.  We must pray.  And we must pray frequently.  We should pray so much that God could identify with the judge.

For good measure, Paul adds a few more commands to pray.  To the Colossians he says, “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.” (Colossians 4:2, ESV) Clearly an imperative: pray.  Pray faithfully.  Be sure to be grateful and give thanks as well.

To the church in Philippi he pens one of the more familiar passages on prayer, “. . . do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”  (Philippians 4:6, ESV)  A word of encouragement to many.  Great hope comes from being told to not worry and ask God for your requests.  Make no mistake though, the word in the original Greek for “let your requests be made known” is in the imperative.  This is an encouragement, but also a command.

At a fundamental level then, prayer is a matter of obedience.  The Word of God commands us to pray.  We must strive to become people of prayer.

The Command is Paired with a Promise

For some people, reading the above may have just been a “bad news first” moment.  Already stretched by life’s demands, we are now adding something else to the to-do list.  We might feel like our burden just got a little heavier.

This is a normal response.  Theologian John Calvin knows this is a common response, and in his Institutes of the Christian Religion he points us to hope.  He acknowledges the command to pray.  He Calvin also points out that the command to pray is paired with promise.

Preaching his sermon on the mount, Jesus tells his disciples, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.  Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?  Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?  If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:7-11, ESV)

What an amazing promise.  Especially for someone who has just been ordered to pray.  Yes, we have to pray, but we are also promised that God will answer our prayers.  Prayer is not intended to be some empty ritual that we do simply because we must.  It is intended to be powerful experince.  And it is intended to be effective.  What we seek in God’s presence – we will find!  What we ask for – we will get!  Our time conversing with God will have meaning far beyond rote ritual.

Jesus’ promise is a broad overarching promise to make our prayer effective.  God’s Word reveals many other, more specific promises in regards to prayer.  In the Psalms, Asaph tells us of God’s promise to hear our prayers: “I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear me.” (Psalm 77:1, ESV)

The apostle Paul reminds the church in Philippi, “And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.”  (Philippians 4:19) This verse appears on a lot of coffee mugs, but it is still true.  God promises to meet our needs.

The pages of God’s word include other promise in regards to our prayer life.  One is God’s promise to guide us (Psalm 31:3).  Another is his promise to give us wisdom when we ask (James 1:5).  One of the most comforting to me is the promise to always forgive us when we confess our sins (1 John 1:9).

These promises change everything.

Promises and Lottery Tickets

Imagine I had the power to order people around.  Then imagine that I ordered people to purchase lottery tickets every day.  Most peoples’ response would be negative.  Why?  People’s response would be negative because they know they are not going to win.  The odds are too great.  Any normal person would be angered by a command to waste significant time, effort, and money pursuing something that would not benefit them in any way.

Many people think about prayer in the same way.

But imagine that along with the power to order people to purchase lottery tickets I also had the power to guarantee that you would win a large amount of money every time you played.  Purchasing our lottery tickets would jump straight to the top of our daily to-do list.  Why? – because we now expect the time, effort and money expended to be richly rewarded.

God’s promises in regards to prayer are just like the guarantee for the lottery tickets.  These promises mean that we will attain what we are seeking.  We will not be wasting our time or efforts – because God promises to hear and answer.

Exchange Our Lottery Tickets for Plane Tickets

These promises are great news to us who don’t have a consistent prayer life up and running.  This pairing of command and promise allows us change our whole conception of prayer.  Gone is the idea that we must endure drudgery and rote ritual.  In its place we have the idea of hopeful expectation.  Praying is not buying a lottery ticket.  It is buying a plane ticket.  We buy plane tickets with the expectation of getting somewhere.  We can now pray with the same expectation.

So, let’s embrace our responsibility to pray.  Embrace it with hope.  And start praying.  Or start again.

The post Do We Have to Pray? Is Prayer Recommended – or Commanded? appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

I like to be prepared.  My wife would say sometimes I like to be over prepared.  The words, “Just get on with it” have been launched my way more than once.  But before I launch out on this experiment I really want to get at least a few tracks to run on as to how to pray.  I know there are many techniques and strategies for prayer out there.  Where does one begin?

To anyone who knows me, they would not be surprised that I found the answer to this one in a book.  For a question this important, I went straight to the most important book on the subject:  the Bible.

In Matthew Chapter 6, Jesus instructs his disciples with the following words:

Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.  Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.  For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.  (Matthew 6:9-15, ESV)

This is the famous Lord’s Prayer.  Many people have heard it.  Many of us have prayed it.  I prayed it almost every night as a child.  It is familiar.  It is comforting.  But what many people don’t realize is that Jesus is not here giving us a prayer to recite, but a model for prayer.  The opening words clue us in to this.  Pray then like this.  Pray this way.  I like how the New International Version translates it as “This, then, is how you should pray . . .”  Jesus gives us, in the lines of this familiar prayer, an outline to guide us in our prayer.

The Essential Elements of a Healthy Prayer Life According to Jesus

Let’s work our way through this prayer, taking a look at each part and learning what our times of prayer need to include.

“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”

Hallowed is a word we don’t often use anymore.  As I think about it, the only time I have ever heard the word used was to refer to the hallowed halls of something or other.  The word was being used to indicate that this hall was special.  It was different from other halls.  Worthy of notice.

This usage is not far off from what Jesus is trying to teach us.  The word hallowed comes from a Greek word that means to make holy, or to set something apart as holy.  To recognize God as holy – or hallowed – is to recognize that He is something special.  To acknowledge that His name is distinct from and superior to all other names.

In prayer, this is simply praise to God.  To make hallowed his name is to praise him.  Lift him up.  Acknowledge his attributes.  Give glory to God.

Recognize however that praise is different from thanksgiving.  To give thanks to God is to express gratitude for what he has done.  “Thank you Lord for providing the money I needed to pay for the rent.”  To praise God is to extol him for who he is.  “God, you are a generous God who provides for his people exactly what they need.”

“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Jesus preached often about the Kingdom of God.  The Kingdom of God is the presence and rule of God.  In the kingdom, life is the way God intended it to be:  full of love, justice and peace.  The world clearly is not that way now.  This makes sense when we understand that the New Testament gives us a picture of the kingdom as one that has started, but has not yet been fully realized.  The kingdom of God has broken in to our world, but it does not yet encompass all.  The kingdom is present and it is growing.

Our prayers then need to be that the world will look increasingly like his kingdom.  We should pray that his people act more and more like citizens of this kingdom.  That his people do his will.  And we should pray that the world around us will see how we treat each other and join us in creating a place like the kingdom of God.

The prayer for the kingdom to come is where we pray for justice and unity.

“Give us this day our daily bread,”

Jesus tells us to ask for daily bread.  I need to eat to stay alive.  You probably do too.  Jesus acknowledges needs.  He knows we need food, water, heat, and shelter.  He knows we need money to pay the rent and buy medicine.  Jesus knows we have needs.  And he tells us to pray for them.  It is right to take our needs to God.

Ask God to supply what is needed.  Ask specifically.  If one needs $200 more to pay the rent, boldly pray for $200.  Pray confidently.  Wait patiently.

Before you start running through the want list with God though, we must make sure to discern between needs and wants.  A bigger TV is not a need.  Money to keep the heat on during an Upper Peninsula Michigan winter is a need.  Money to keep the cable TV going over those winter months is not.  Be discerning.  God promises to meet our needs.  He never promises to give us everything we want.  Remember, he is the sovereign God of the universe who is working out his plan.  He is not Santa Clause.

As we become practiced in praying, do not forget to recognize when God answers prayer.  I used to think God never answered many of my prayers.  Then I was given a challenge.  A mentor challenged me to write down what I prayed for and check the list every time I prayed.  Turns out, if I slowed down the rate of requests just enough to remember what I asked for, I started to see that God actually was answering prayers and working around me.  So, remember what you prayed for, and recognize the answered prayers.  Then express your gratitude.  Tell your generous Father in heaven “Thank You!”

“and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

Jesus tells us to ask God to forgive us our debts.  He is not telling us to ask God to get us out of financial trouble.  Nor is he telling us to ask him to make our credit card bills go away.  He is talking about the personal debts we owe to him.  These debts are the debts that accrue when we sin.

Every one of us has all sinned.  We can all think about something we should have done – but did not.  We can also probably remember something we should not have done – but did anyway.  This willful sin builds up a debt between us and our Heavenly Father.  This sin does not take away our salvation.  Our relationship with God is fixed and secure because of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.  Our fellowship with God, however, our ability to connect and enjoy our relationship with God, is disrupted by this sin.

The solution to this disruption is to ask God to forgive us our debts.  It is to confess to God our sins.  To confess our sin means to openly admit what we did and agree with God that is was wrong.  Then repent – commit to turn away from that sin.  After confessing any sin we are aware of, continue to commune with God with a clear conscience.

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

There is a war going on around us.  We cannot always see it.  Swirling around us is a violent conflict between Satan and his demons versus the Kingdom of God.  These enemies concentrate on wreaking havoc in the lives of believers.

Jesus tells us to pray for protection.  Pray that we will not be led into temptation.  Ask God for the wisdom to recognize a trap laid by the enemy.  Ask for the courage to walk away from the trap, regardless of how inviting it looks.  Pray that you don’t fall for the lies.

Jesus tells us also to pray for deliverance.  Our enemies will not only launch temptations at us, they may try to afflict us more directly.  Ask God to shield us from the assaults of the enemy.  Pray that God will keep the enemy at bay, at a great enough distance to not be able to harm you.

Be forewarned.  If you decide to embark on a prayer challenge of your own, if you decide to try to become a person of prayer, expect the attack to come.  Know the enemy does not want you to pray.  The enemy does not want us to feel close to or connected to God.  As we try to move closer to God, expect the enemy to try to move us apart.  So, make sure to pray for protection.

A Balanced Prayer Life

We are presented with the essential elements of a balanced prayer life in the Lord’s Prayer:  praise, justice and unity, personal requests, confession, and protection from the enemy. 

This understanding of prayer is so much more diverse and engaging than my early understanding of what prayer was.  Early on, I understood prayer as only making requests to God.  Honestly, I was dumbfounded when I heard about people who prayed for hours.  How could you spend hours just asking God for things?  It made no sense to me how anyone without an iron will would be able to that.  Or even desire to.  But expanding my understanding of prayer with all these different categories changes my expectations of prayer.  Praying like this can be a much more relational experience.  It can be a much more engaging experience.

As I look to renovate my prayer life, this outline presented by Jesus will serve as the tracks I run on.  I will strive to incorporate each of these components into my daily time of prayer.  And that 30 minutes figure seems a lot less daunting when I realize I only need to pray for six minutes in each one to reach my goal!

Go to our Tool Box page and download a simple one-page guide to praying the way Jesus showed us that you can print out and use to give you tracks to run on as you pray.

The post How to Pray | Jesus’ Guide to Prayer appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.