On Prayer

1. How do you pray?

My point today is that our prayers should have consistency and variety, both.  Like any relationship, there are routines and running jokes that are familiar and comfortable.  There also need to be new insights and activities to rejuvenate things.  Prayer is the same way.  Routine consistency is good.  Like many who grew up in a religious home, I heard a similar prayer routinely given by a parent before dinner every night.  But if that’s ALL there is to your prayer life, it’s likely to grow dull soon.  Prayer grows out of an inner life alive to God.  Prayer books or routines are good road signs and guard rails, but they don’t push the engine forward.  Prayer is the canary in the coal mine, as they say, the acid test, of how your relationship with God is doing.  Imagine a marriage relationship where you only ever said the same 4 sentences to each other once or twice a day?  Or where you only read other people’s words to each other?  No, as the Westminster confession says, prayer is offering up our desires to God.  So, we need to talk with God as we would with a loving father, who cares for us, and has the power to give us what we need, and help us sort out our desires along the way.

2. Book review

Today is the Valley of Vision, one help in your prayer life.  It’s a collection of Puritan prayers, so they have a distinctive character.  The prayers are intensely introspective.  Some people criticize that as being too morbid.  That can be true, though the people who jump to that often could stand a little introspection themselves.  But skimming the topics covered, there is little focus on the world out there, in need, so I would not recommend this book as covering everything you need to pray about.  But the prayers that are here are excellent, instructive, convicting and comforting.