Praying the Bible E-Book

Donald S. Whitney

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 109

Beschreibung

"This little book is explosive and powerful." R. Albert Mohler, Jr. When you pray, does it ever feel like you're just saying the same old things about the same old things? Offering us the encouragement and the practical advice we're all looking for, Donald S. Whitney, best-selling author of Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, outlines an easy-to-grasp method that has the power to transform our prayer life: praying the words of Scripture. Simple, yet profound, Praying the Bible will prove invaluable as you seek to commune with your heavenly Father in prayer each and every day. Download the Leader's Guide

Leseprobe

PRAYING THE BIBLE

DONALD S. WHITNEY

Praying the Bible

Copyright © 2015 by Donald S. Whitney

Published by Crossway 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Tim Green, Faceout Studio

Cover image: Shutterstock, iStock.com, Getty Images

First printing 2015

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-4784-3 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-4787-4 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-4785-0 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-4786-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Whitney, Donald S., (Professor)

Praying the Bible / Donald S. Whitney.

1 online resource.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  ISBN 978-1-4335-4785-0 (pdf) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4786-7 (mobi) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4787-4 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4784-3 (hc)

  1. Prayer—Christianity.  2. Bible—Devotional use. I. Title.

BV215

248.3'2—dc23             2015005486

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

For T. W. Hunt, the most prayerful man I’ve ever known. Thank you for decades of daily prayer for me.

And also for R. F. Gates, whom God used in ways neither of us could have ever imagined in that moment on March 1, 1985, when you held up the Bible and said, “When you pray, use the prayer book!”

And most of all, for my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

All this, indeed all of life, is for you and about you. After talking with you so many thousands of times, I can’t wait to see you.

Contents

CoverNewsletter Sign UpEndorsementsTitle PageCopyright PageDedication  1  The Problem  2  The Solution  3  The Method  4  More about the Method  5  Praying the Psalms  6  Praying Other Parts of the Bible  7  The Most Important Part of This Book  8  Evaluating the Experience  9  What Have We Learned?10  The Examples of George Mueller, Jesus on the Cross, and Christians in the Book of ActsAppendix 1:  “Psalms of the Day” ChartAppendix 2:  Praying the Bible with a GroupNotesGeneral IndexScripture IndexBack Cover

1

The Problem

If I try to pray for people or events without having the word in front of me guiding my prayers, then several negative things happen. One is that I tend to be very repetitive. . . . I just pray the same things all the time. Another negative thing is that my mind tendsto wander.

John Piper

Since prayer is talking with God, why don’t people pray more? Why don’t the people of God enjoy prayer more? I maintain that people—truly born-again, genuinely Christian people—often do not pray simply because they do not feel like it. And the reason they don’t feel like praying is that when they do pray, they tend to say the same old things about the same old things.

When you’ve said the same old things about the same old things about a thousand times, how do you feel about saying them again? Did you dare just think the “B” word? Yes, bored. We can be talking to the most fascinating Person in the universe about the most important things in our lives and be bored to death.

As a result, a great many Christians conclude, “It must be me. Something’s wrong with me. If I get bored in something as important as prayer, then I must be a second-rate Christian.”

Indeed, why would people become bored when talking with God, especially when talking about that which is most important to them? Is it because we don’t love God? Is it because, deep down, we really care nothing for the people or matters we pray about? No. Rather, if this mind-wandering boredom describes your experience in prayer, I would argue that if you are indwelled by the Holy Spirit—if you are born again—then the problem is not you; it is your method.

The Spirit’s Presence Prompts Prayer

Notice that very important condition—“if you are indwelled by the Holy Spirit”—for no method will enliven prayer for a person who isn’t indwelled by the Holy Spirit. Such a person has no sustained appetite for prayer, no long-term desire for it.

When God brings someone into a relationship with himself through Jesus Christ, he begins to live within that person by means of his Holy Spirit. As the apostle Paul writes to followers of Jesus in Ephesians 1:13, “In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.” In 1 Corinthians 6:19 Paul also reassures believers in Christ, “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God.”

Just as you bring your human nature with you whenever you enter any place, so whenever the Holy Spirit enters any person, he brings his holy nature with him. The result is that all those in whom the Spirit dwells have new holy hungers and holy loves they did not have prior to having his indwelling presence. They hunger for the holy Word of God, which they used to find boring or irrelevant (1 Pet. 2:2). They love fellowship with the people of God, finding it unimaginable to live apart from meaningful interaction with them (1 John 3:14). Hearts and minds in which the Holy Spirit dwells feel holy longings unknown to them previously. They long to live in a holy body without sin, yearn for a holy mind no longer subject to temptation, groan for a holy world filled with holy people, and earnestly desire to see at last the face of the one the angels call “Holy, holy, holy” (Rev. 4:8).

This is the spiritual heartbeat of 100 percent of the hearts where the Spirit of God lives. A person may be just nine years old, but if the Holy Spirit has come to him or her, then these hungers and desires are planted there (expressed in nine-year-old ways, of course, but they live there because he lives there). And a person may be ninety-nine with a heart encrusted by the traditions and experiences of the years, but pulsing underneath is the ever-fresh, evergreen work of the Holy Spirit manifested in every person in whom he dwells.

And according to the New Testament letters of both Romans and Galatians, another of the supernatural heart changes the Spirit creates in all Christians is to cause them to cry, “Abba! Father!” (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6).1 Thus when someone is born again, the Holy Spirit gives that person new Fatherward desires, a new heavenward orientation whereby we cry, “Abba, Father!” In other words, all those indwelled by the Holy Spirit really want to pray. The Holy Spirit causes all the children of God to believe that God is their Father and fills them with an undying desire to talk to him.

“Something Must Be Wrong with Me”

Nevertheless, while this Spirit-produced passion is pushing against one side of our soul, colliding with that is our experience. And our experience says, “But when I pray, frankly, it’s boring.” And when prayer is boring, we don’t feel like praying. And when we don’t feel like praying, it’s hard to make ourselves pray. Even five or six minutes of prayer can feel like an eternity. Our mind wanders half the time. We’ll suddenly come to ourselves and think, “Now where was I? I haven’t been thinking of God for the last several minutes.” And we’ll return to that mental script we’ve repeated countless times. But almost immediately our minds begin to wander again because we’ve said the same old things about the same old things so many times.

“It must be me,” we conclude. “Prayer isn’t supposed to be like this. I guess I’m just a second-rate Christian.”

No, the problem is almost certainly not you; it’s your method. If you have turned from living for yourself and your sin and have trusted Jesus Christ and his work to make you right with God, God has given you the Holy Spirit. And if you are seeking to live under the lordship of Jesus Christ and the authority of God’s Word (the Bible), confessing known sin and fighting the lifelong tendency to sin instead of excusing it, then the problem of boredom in prayer is not you; rather, it is your method.

And the method of most Christians in prayer is to say the same old things about the same old things. After forty years of experience in ministry, I am convinced that this problem is almost universal. Virtually from the beginning of their Christian life, it seems that nearly every believer suffers from this habit.

When prayer consists of the same spoken sentences on every occasion, naturally we wonder at the value of the practice. If our prayers bore us, do they also bore God? Does God really need to hear me say these things again? We can begin to feel like a little girl I heard about. Her parents had taught her the classic bedtime prayer for children that begins, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” One night she thought, “Why does God need to hear me say this again?” So she decided to record herself saying the prayer, and then she played the recording each night when she went to bed.

Perhaps you smile at her story, but you have prayer recordings in your head; they’re just a little longer or more sophisticated. Recorded in your memory are prayers—your own or the prayers of others—you can repeat mindlessly.

I pastored a church in the Chicago area for almost fifteen years. During the worship service one Sunday morning the ushers came forward to receive the offering, and one of the ushers was asked to pray. As the man was praying, I could hear someone else talking. I thought, Surely this person will stop in a moment. Then I realized it was a child, and I said to myself, Some adult will quiet this child any second now. But as the talking continued, I opened my eyes and saw in the second row the five-year-old son of the usher who was praying. Soon it became obvious that the little boy was praying the same words as his dad; not repeating after him but in unison with him. It was like when entire congregations pray the Lord’s Prayer in unison; instead this was a father and son praying “Dad’s prayer.” How could such a little boy do that? It was because every time his dad prayed, whether at the Lord’s Supper table at the church or the supper table at home, his dad prayed the same prayer. The boy had been in the world only sixty months, and he had already memorized everything his dad said when he prayed. He could say the words of the prayer, but most of what came out of his mouth was just a repetition of what were, to his five-year-old mind, empty phrases.

There may be people in your own family, or your church, or somewhere in your background who, when they were or are called upon to pray, you could give the prayer because you’ve heard it so many times. Our hearts don’t soar when we hear such praying; we just politely endure it.

One prayer does not a prayer life make. Prayers without variety eventually become words without meaning. Jesus said that to pray this way is to pray in vain, for in the Sermon on the Mount he warned, “When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words” (Matt. 6:7).

The tragedy is that too often that’s the way it is with our own prayers. We believe in prayer, and the Spirit of God prompts us to pray, but because we always say the same old things about the same old things, it can seem as though all we do in prayer is simply “heap up empty phrases.” Although this drains most of the motivation from talking with God, we’ll dutifully try to grind out another round of prayer; yet our minds constantly wander from the words, and we condemn ourselves as spiritual failures.

Praying about “the Same Old Things” Is Normal

Notice carefully—for this is very important—that the problem is not that we pray about the same old things. To routinely pray about the same people and situations is perfectly normal. It’s normal to pray about the same old things because our lives tend to consist of the same old things.