Day 11 :: Learning To Pray (Excerpt taken and modified from Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life by Donald S. Whitney).
If you are discouraged by the command to pray because you feel like you don’t know how to pray well, the fact that prayer is learned should give you hope. That means that it’s okay to start the Christian life with little knowledge or experience of prayer. No matter how weak or strong your prayer life is right now, you can learn to grow even stronger. There is a sense in which prayer needs to be taught to a child of God no more than a baby needs to be taught to cry. But crying for basic needs is minimal communication, and we must soon grow beyond that infancy. The Bible says we must pray for the glory of God, in His will, in faith, in the name of Jesus, with persistence, and more. A child of God gradually learns to pray like this in the same way that a growing child learns to talk. To pray as expected, to pray as a maturing Christian, and to pray effectively, we must say with the disciples in Luke 11:1, “Lord, teach us to pray.”
By Meditating on Scripture
Here’s the simple, but extraordinarily powerful truth: Meditation is the missing link between Bible intake and prayer. Too often disjointed, the two should be united. Typically, we read the Bible, close it, and then try to shift gears into prayer. But many times it seems as if the gears between the two won’t mesh. In fact, after some forward progress during our time in the Word, shifting to prayer sometimes feels like suddenly slipping back into neutral or even reverse. Instead there should be a smooth, almost unnoticeable transition between Scripture input and prayer output so that we move even closer to God in those moments. This happens when we insert the link of meditation in between. At least two Scriptures teach this by example. David prayed in Psalm 5:1, “Give ear to my words, O LORD; consider my groaning.” The Hebrew word rendered as “groaning” may also be translated “meditation.” In fact, this same word is used with that meaning in another passage, Psalm 19:14: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.” Notice that both verses are prayers, pleas to God that consisted of David’s “words” (as we’d expect in prayer), but they also involve “meditation.” In each case meditation was a catalyst that catapulted David from considering the truth of God into talking with God. In 5:1 he had been meditating and then David asked the Lord to give ear to and to consider his meditation.
In Psalm 19 we find one of the best-known statements about Scripture written anywhere, beginning with the famous words of verse 7, “The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul.” This section continues through verse 11, and David formed his prayer in verse 14 as a result of these words and his meditation. The process works like this: After the input of a passage of Scripture, meditation allows us to take what God has said and think deeply on it, digest it, and then speak to God about it in meaningful prayer. As a result, we pray about what we’ve encountered in the Bible, now personalized through meditation. And not only do we have something substantial to say in prayer, as well as the confidence that we are praying God’s thoughts to Him, but we transition smoothly into prayer and with more passion for what we’re praying about. When enlivened by meditation, prayer becomes more like a real conversation with a real person—which is exactly what prayer is. God speaks to us in His Word, and we speak to Him in response to what He has said. Then, when we’ve finished, we listen to the other person speak again—just like in a real conversation—meaning that we look to the next words God has spoken in His Word. And so the process continues, each part guided by the ever-fresh words of Scripture and without the repetition of worn phrases from previous prayers, until we must close that time of prayer.
Consider ending your time of devotion by praying through Psalm 5 as outlined above.
