"Praying" the Bible

When I pray, I often struggle to form the right words. For some reason, I tend to view prayer like a high school essay exam. I worry about grammar and sentence structure. Upon those rare occasions when my prayer achieves King James-like elegance (in my mind!), I pat myself on the back and declare my prayer successful.

But God doesn't care about those superficial concerns; he cares about the state of our heart! As Paul writes (Romans 8:26, NLT),

We don't know what God wants us to pray for. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words.

The most important detail in prayer is that we align our will with God's. But our human minds, limited and sinful as they are, often fail to grasp his will.

Here's where the Bible can help. Scripture is chock full of prayers that clearly align with God's will, and, therefore, we should not be embarrassed about borrowing those prayers, even word-for-word, if we must! Again, this isn't a high school composition class; who cares if we plagiarize a prayer from the Bible, so long as we're using it to focus our hearts on God's will.

Here's a beautiful prayer from Psalm 80:19 (NLT),

Turn us again to yourself ... Make your face shine down upon us. Only then will we be saved.

Try praying this today, while reflecting on what it means. And don't be embarrassed that you didn't write it!