“Many pains come to the wicked, but the one who trusts in the Lord will have faithful love surrounding him.” – Psalm 32:10
Sometimes, I don’t know how to pray. I want to pray, but I just feel stuck and unsure of what to say. In the past, this used to frustrate me, and I would go weeks without a substantive experience of engaging with God. Often a crisis or a decision would drive me back to my knees. I remember thinking that there must be more to prayer than this, and I felt envious of those Christians for whom prayer seemed so easy, natural even.
Eventually, this would send me on a journey to learn more about prayer. Murray’s book, With Christ in the School of Prayer, would be especially helpful to me. Murray taught me that learning to pray is like learning to ride a bike. You don’t really learn how until you actually get on and ride! How might one learn to pray by actually doing prayer? That question led me to the Psalms, the prayer book of the Bible. In the Psalms, we have the unique advantage of God teaching us how to speak to Him. Now, when I’m unsure of what to pray, I turn to the Psalms.
A couple of years ago, I spent time using one psalm each day to guide my prayer for that day. I read the psalm and then turn it into a prayer of my own back to the Father. Often people or concerns would come to mind while I was praying a particular verse, and I would pause to pray that verse for that person or circumstance. Praying this way, I found that I rarely felt “stuck” in my prayer.
More often than not, I’m surprised by the experience of God’s presence and even guidance in my prayer. Every time, I pray things that I would never have thought to pray on my own.
Today, I pray Psalm 32 for you, that you will be among those who trust in the Lord and find yourself surrounded by His faithful love. There is no better place to be!
Think These Things 