Tools for Prayer

We are in the middle of a series where we are looking at the six core purposes we believe the Bible outlines for what a church should do and be.

This is a different series for us, but we feel like it is important for us to look at who God has called us to be and where we should be heading as a church as we are figuring out what life looks like now that we are largely on the other side of the pandemic.

While parts of our society have changed, God’s purposes for his church haven’t.

As we are going through, we are taking two weeks on each purpose. One week, we are looking at the Biblical foundation for that purpose and then the next, we are looking at practical tools to do that thing we are talking about.

This morning, we are looking at prayer.

Last week, we saw that the Bible teaches us to pay attention to the content of our prayer lives. That means we should take time for worship, aligning ourselves to God’s kingdom purposes, and asking him to help with our physical and spiritual needs.

We were challenged to pray bold, audacious prayers because we recognize both the size and goodness of our loving heavenly Father.

So this morning, then, we are going to go over a couple of practical tools to help you to pray like that.

This is definitely more of a lesson than it is a sermon, so but I want to give you tools you can use as you seek to grow in this area of prayer.

Let’s acknowledge one thing, though: prayer is a spiritual discipline.

That means it isn’t just about following a mental checklist. It involves engaging the mind, yes, but also our heart and soul.

Because of that, we can’t do this on our own. You may have experienced that before—you want to pray more, so you try hard, but you slip back into your old pattern and don’t carry through.

In his book Living a Prayerful Life, Andrew Murray talks about the solution to this kind of prayerlessness.

We often think it is up to us to try harder, but what we don’t realize is that a praying heart is a gracious gift of God.

He says this of those just beginning to understand this truth:

“I had not supposed that just as He will give all other grace in answer to prayer, so, first and most of all, He will bestow the grace of a praying heart. What folly to think that all other blessings must come from Him, but that prayer, on which everything else depends, must be obtained by personal effort!”

[1]

Before we give you any practical tools to use, I want you to realize that the best tools in the world can’t help you overcome prayerlessness.

The only solution to a prayerless heart is to ask God to give you the grace to pray and to rest in the fact that he is going to do that.

With your heart in the right place, we can start to look at these tools in their proper way.

They aren’t magic bullets, but they can help you with some of the mechanics about how to go about praying.

The first tool we are going to look at is one that I return to often. If you have been in our Wednesday evening prayer meetings, you have heard me talk about this before.

This material comes from a book by a man named Don Whitney, and the book is called “Praying the Bible”.

Here’s the problem he is trying to address with the work:

Have you ever gotten bored with prayer?

You end up saying the same thing about the same thing over and over again, and nothing seems to change, so you give up?

How can we avoid praying like that, even though there are some requests we will pray for daily for years?

Dr. Whitney encourages us to...

1) Pray the Bible

This is something you can do with any passage of Scripture, but the easiest passages are the Psalms.

In case you aren’t familiar with it, Psalms is a collection of songs that the ancient Israelites would sing in worship. A lot of them are prayers between the psalmist and God, so they give us some great insight into how to pray.

We are going to use the Psalms as our guides for this tool, so go ahead and open up to the book of Psalms.

Let’s start with a familiar one—Psalm 23.

This is where it gets a little different for some of us, especially those Bible teachers in the room.

Usually, we are really big on focusing on the context of the passage and making sure we are interpreting it and applying it exactly as the author would have intended it to be.

For this particular exercise, we are going to set that aside for a minute.

Don’t think I have lost my mind here. We aren’t going to be claiming promises out of context or trying to interpret the passage.

Instead, we are going to let the word of the passage jog our memory about the requests God has put on our heart.

Like a jazz musician who riffs off a melody, we are going to riff off the words of the passage to give us a different way of thinking about our requests.

This is best understood by doing it, so let’s walk through the first few phrases of Psalm 23 to get a feel for it...

Using this tool, then, you walk through the psalm and through your requests until you run out of time or have a sense you are done.

If you run out of psalm before you run out of requests, feel free to just keep going to the next psalm down or the next one on the list.

Every day, you can pick a psalm to use for your prayer time.

How do you know which one to pick?

Someone tell me: how many psalms are there in the book? 150.

How many days are in most months? 30.

So what that means is we have have 5 psalms we can pick from every day.

How so? Start with that day’s date and keep adding 30.

That sounds more confusing than it is. Let’s work through it together.

What is today?

October 9

Okay, so for today, that means what psalm could we start with?

Psalm 9, right?

Now, add 30 until we get to 150.

That means Psalm 9, 39, 69, 99, and 129 would be ones we could choose from today.

What about tomorrow? 10, 40, 70, 100, 130.

How do I know which of those five? Just flip through them and see if they resonate with you.

This isn’t really some mystical thing. You are just looking for something that can get your mind going so you aren’t always praying the same thing about the same thing.

You may settle on one of the five this month and a different one next month.

Ah, but what about October? What do you do when there are 31 days?

If you want, pick a section out of Psalm 119. It is the longest chapter of the Bible, so there are plenty of smaller sections to choose from that you didn’t use on the 29th, which is they day you might have used Psalm 119 as a part of your five for the day.

Let’s practice.

I have done a little work ahead of time, and it looks like Psalm 9 is a good candidate for us to work through together.

Before you turn over there, I want you to write down five requests that you would like to pray about.

Got them? Now, let’s turn over to Psalm 9 and take some time to pray through it. I will read a phrase or two, give you some time to pray, and then read another. We will go through the first six verses together.

Got it? Great! Again, this is a great way to break up your prayer routine. It also is a great way to get you into God’s Word and familiarizing yourself with the kinds of things the Bible talks about.

Remember, we aren’t using this to interpret Scripture or claim these promises for ourselves; we don’t just sit around and use this kind of “free association” when we do that.

Instead, this is just allowing God’s Word to be a guide for your prayer time.

Some of you may have a different challenge with your prayer life, though.

You may be pretty comfortable with the way you pray, but you wish you had a guide that could help you spend longer in prayer.

That is the second tool we want to talk about this morning, and it is a handout called...

2) How to Have a Holy Hour with God

This is a tool from a group called Life Action Revival Ministries.

Although they aren’t perfect, God used them in a big way in my life when I was younger, and this handout is one I have come back to repeatedly over the years.

For most of us, thinking of spending an hour in prayer or in our time with God seems daunting.

Beyond the sheer fact of carving out the block of time, you might find yourself asking, “Yeah, but what do I even do for an hour?”

That’s where this handout can come in handy.

In it, they have outlined twelve different stages to work through.

If you spend about five minutes on each one, you will find yourself spending almost an hour in prayer.

This isn’t supposed to be a legalistic ritual. You may spend more time in one area, you may skip one altogether.

The important part of this is not that you can check off the box that says, “I am a super Christian because I spent an hour with God.” Instead, the whole point of this is deepening your love for God and spending time with him.

This guide is just that—it is a guide, not a means of getting more grace or anything like that.

Let’s just walk quickly through the different stages:

First, we start with confession. We saw last week that this should be a critical part of our prayer life. We start with it here because that makes sure there is nothing in me that would keep me from being right with God that I haven’t dealt with.

Then, we move to praise, which we think of as that key part of worship—reflecting on and celebrating who he is. The focus is on God’s character, not what he has done.

The next stage is probably one of the harder and more unusual: waiting. This is where you take a few minutes to try to quiet the distractions and get your thoughts really tuned in to who God is.

From there, we turn to the Word. We read and study the Bible to hear from God as he has revealed himself in it.

Next we move into intercession/supplication. This is where we lift up requests for other people. Supplication is where our prayers are urgent and passionate and not just general requests.

We follow that with a time of petition where we ask God for the things we need personally, whether that is physical or spiritual provision.

Having asked God to work, we then take time for thanksgiving, where we look back and thank him for what he has already done.

For some, the next part is challenging, but you can incorporate singing in your own personal worship. If you like older music, you can grab a hymnal and sing. Youtube, Spotify, Apple Music, etc. are full of both classic hymns and newer choruses for you to take time to sing along with. You can even go back and listen to one of our services on Facebook or Youtube.

Then, we move to a time of meditation. This isn’t like Eastern meditation or mindfulness practices that people do now where you are focused on your breathing or things like this. This is where you actively run over the things you read in the Bible, steps of obedience you know God is calling you to do, etc.

From there, we get quiet again and listen for any instructions God may have for our day in light of all we have prayed about so far. This isn’t an audible voice; rather, it is letting God direct our thoughts as we think through the day.

We go back to the Bible to the book of Psalms and prayerfully walk through a psalm, echoing back the prayers the psalmists prayed.

Finally, we finish where we started with praise, recharging and getting ready to go for the day by praising God for who he is as we go about the remainder of our day.

Maybe this still feels too daunting for you—pick and choose. Shorten it to two minutes each instead of five.

The point is not adherence to a formal, external structure.

Instead, in the power and grace that only God can give, we want to spend time with him.

These tools are designed to help us slow down and focus when life would try to distract us.

Never lose sight of the purpose here: our goal is to spend time with God, talking with him, hearing from him, and letting him shape our thoughts and hearts while allowing us to take part in what he is doing in the world.

Why would we do this? Because he is the God who has taken the time for us.

Not only did he take time to create us, he took the time to come to us when we chose to push him away.

We chose to turn our backs on him, and he loved us so much that he came to rescue us.

It didn’t just require him to take time. That cost Jesus his own life as he died on the cross to save us from our sins.

He rose from the dead and now gives us new life spiritually in him.

He loves us so much that one day he is coming back to take us home to be with him forever.

Shouldn’t we want to spend time with someone who has done that for us?

Let’s do that as we seek to encounter God in prayer....

[1] Andrew Murray, Living a Prayerful Life, (Grand Rapids: Bethany House, 2002), 27.