Introduction
Do you have difficulty praying for extended periods of time? Do you have trouble with making prayer a daily habit? Do you run out of things for which to thank and praise God? If your answer is “Yes” to these questions, then you are not alone. Even the apostles struggled with prayer in the early days of their ministry. No doubt, they felt like failures when they saw that Jesus could pray all night long (Luke 6:12) and yet they couldn’t even pray for one hour (Matt. 26:40). The heart cry of the apostles to Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1), is a cry that many Christians continue to have to this day. The way we learn to pray is the same way that those apostles learned to pray:
- By receiving the Holy Spirit from Jesus (John 20:22; Acts 1:8; 4:31; Rom. 8:26) so that we can “pray in the Spirit” (Eph. 6:18; Jude 20). If prayer is to get past the ceiling, we must have the Spirit praying from within us in an intercessory work that makes our prayers acceptable to the Father (Rom. 8:13-17,23,26-27). It is the Holy Spirit who links our prayers with the prayers of Christ (Rev. 8:4) in ways that move heaven and earth (vv. 5-7). It is His intercession that gives power to our intercession.
- By hanging around those who can pray with power and imitating them in prayer (Matt. 11:25-26; John 11:41-42; 17:1-26; etc.). There is no better way to learn how to pray than by going to prayer meetings where others who are more mature are praying powerfully.
- By reading the prayers of others and adopting them as your own heart cry. Reading prayers is not unspiritual. Jesus not only taught on prayer, but He also gave them prayers to recite on more than one occasion (Matt. 6:9-15; Luke 11:1-4). In doing this, He was continuing the long tradition of the church praying prayers composed by others – especially the Psalms.
Though this book is very inadequate in many ways, I offer it with the hope that it will accomplish four things:
- I pray that this book will give our congregation some creative ideas on how to improve their prayer life. While it is no substitute for your own prayers, hopefully it can be a stepping-stone to a fuller and richer prayer walk.
- I hope to expose our congregation to more kinds of prayers than the four involved in ACTS (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication).
- I hope to model how to ground your prayers in Scripture. Like our other prayer books, this one seeks to ground prayer in the ideas, promises, theology, and commands of Scripture, and to make our prayers consistent with God’s character and purposes for us.
- I hope to demonstrate that it is quite easy to pray for an hour. If you spend 5 minutes on each type of prayer that is outlined in this booklet, you will have spent an entire hour in meaningful prayer.
If you have any suggestions for making this inadequate booklet better, feel free to share your ideas. It is my heart’s desire that our church become a church that is saturated in prayer, and that each family become a praying family. May it be so, Lord Jesus. Amen.