I have come to believe that the quality of my relationship with God, is tested in my experience of prayer. The degree to which I find spending time alone with God as easy or difficult, as a chore or a delight, says a lot about my heart’s closeness to him.
Prayer is the very heart of Christian spirituality. When we pray we step aside from daily routines and responsibilities and intentionally situate ourselves ‘face-to-face’ with God.
Everywhere, the Bible assumes that prayer – direct and intentional communication with God – is at the heart of the life of faith. Christians through the ages have understood this. The 18th Century spiritual writer William Law, for example, describes prayer as “the nearest approach to God, and the highest enjoyment of him, that we are capable of in this life’.
My early experience of prayer was that it was all about asking God for things: intercession equals prayer and prayer equals intercession. In the Christian tradition in which I was raised, prayer was always ‘made up on the spot’ (extemporary), and reading prayers from books was viewed as a very suspect activity (we knew that because it was what the Anglicans and even the Catholics did!).
It’s OK: I’ve got past that now!
In fact, using written forms of prayers has become very important to me. I’ve got a whole shelf of various forms of written prayers which from time to time form part of my prayer life. Reflecting on their value to me I can see that:
They give me a place to start
Prayer can be hard, but using a set form of prayer is, for me, a helpful way to feel my way into God’s presence. Of course, the risk is that written prayers become a meaningless rote saying of others’ words: words that bear no relation to my own heart-circumstances. (We’ve probably all had that experience of singing songs in church, the words of which bear little relation to how we are feeling at that moment.)
However, seeing a written prayer as a place to start, allows for the fact that I may deviate from those words as they begin to spark off my own honest words with God. William Law again:
“It seems right for every one to begin with a form of prayer; and if in the midst of his devotions, he finds his heart ready to break forth into new and higher strains off devotion, he should leave his form for a while, and follow those fervours of his heart, till it again wants the assistance of his usual devotions”.
Start with the outline, go with your heart – and when you find yourself wondering how many legs there are on a spider, go back to the outline!
They give me a roundedness
As I confessed above, I grew up with a very narrow view of prayer which was exclusively about asking God to do things. I now see ‘prayer’ as an ‘umbrella word’ describing various parts of my meeting with God. Prayer includes sitting silently with him; reflecting on the Bible with him; asking forgiveness from him; affirming my faith to him, asking him for help… and so on.
My own experience is that, left to myself, my prayer life narrows again to those things that I gravitate towards most naturally. For some that may be worship. For others asking. For others again, stillness.
That’s where I find a written prayer outline helps me. It takes me to encounters with God that I may not otherwise enjoy. In that sense it become a bit like a guidebook, which gives me a tour of ‘out of the way’ places – that turn out to be very interesting!
They expand my heart-language
Sometimes when reading the prayers of others, I hit on ways of expressing myself to God that just ‘fit’ what I want to say, but didn’t know how. Or maybe things I wanted to say, but didn’t know I was allowed to! The Psalms are great at that. Who might have dared to pray this way, were it not in the Bible’s prayer book:
Wake up, O Lord! Why do you sleep?
Get up! Do not reject us forever.
Why do you look the other way?
Why do you ignore our suffering and oppression? (Psalm 44:23,24)?
Or who has not been helped to to confess sin with the words of Psalm 51? Or found comfort in the words of Psalm 23?
When my words are too limited to express what is on my heart, often the words of others provide a vehicle for my own approach to God in prayer.
So, we are all different, and the important thing is that we are praying, not the way that we are doing so. But for me, various forms of written prayers (and I include many hymns and worship songs in that) are indispensable for helping me encounter God in spirit and in truth.
You may know that we have produced a prayer outline, based on the LifeWORKS themes. This can be found on the TBC website, as can other resources for prayer, which you will find in the ‘LifeSTREAMS’ ‘Prayer’ section online.
(By the way, William Law has a lot else to inspire prayer but his book will not be everyone’s cup of tea. The title, if you are interested, is ‘A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life’: I expect that alone has dampened any interest you may have had!)