An Effective Way to Reenergize Your Prayer Life
Author: Donald S. Whitney
Praying the Bible is a simple, straight-forward book about a complicated, multi-faceted topic. While the Bible tells Christians to pray without ceasing, and some of the bastions of our faith seemed to do this effortlessly (like the Apostal Paul), the rest of us are left in a rut. We know we should be better. We should want to pray, and our prayers should be more dynamic than, as Whitney notes, “saying the same old things about the same old things,” but honestly, they’re not. Prayer is the proverbial elephant in the room, and most of us, in our honest moments, admit that it is more chore than joy.
So, what to do? We still want to and need to pray for our families and friends. The crises and occurrences of our lives, thankfully, follow a set pattern. Our needs, our daily bread as it were, is a repetitive ask. So, how do we come to the Father in a new way, like true children, and not just tenants paying the rent so that the lights stay on?
Whitney has a simple resolution – thus the shortness of a book that downright struggles to make it past 100 pages. That’s the delight of the answer though. It’s do-able. Whitney walks through dynamic prayer by using the Psalms and other parts of scripture in a synchronized way that still allows for creativity and situational awareness. It’s an easy concept. A five-minute-show-and-tell. In some ways, it goes against our human instinct. We, like Naaman in 2 Kings 5:1-19 want a complicated solution, although few of us ever have the follow-through.
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Image by u_7ni9fwz81b from Pixabay
At first, I was dubious. It’s simple, but did I want to do it? I’m not a fan of the Psalms honestly. Despite my degrees in English and Creative Writing and what-have you, I’ve never been smart enough to “get” poetry. Yet, when practicing Whitney’s example in a setting, on a day when I was tired and overstimulated no less, prayer suddenly came to me easily, my mind thought about new things in new ways, and I asked for deeper, more important spiritual items than I would normally have included in my route please-help-so-and-so requests. It was inspiring. In the ten minutes we all set aside for the exercise, I had a more in-depth, more fulfilling, more real conversation with God that I’d had for months, and I left revitalized.
Whitney’s walk-through of scripture as the inspiration for prayer is something that you can do to fit your timeframe as well. You can make it last as long or as short as you like. That’s the beauty of the scheme and as simple as it all sounds, it really does work. I will continue to use the book to for the Appendix, which is where the system of what psalms you can pray based on the day are laid out. Highly recommended.
– Frances Carden
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