How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

by Pete Greig

Having paused to be still at the start of a prayer time, the most natural and appropriate response to God’s presence is reverence.

In this section, we explore the extraordinary, miracle-working power of prayer, but also the questions we face when our prayers go unanswered.

With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply. Like this … (Matthew 6:9, MSG)

When one of our sons heard that I was writing a book about how to pray, he said, ‘Oh, but that’s easy. You just say, “Dear God”, chat to him for a bit, and then say Amen.’ In a way, he was right.

I must warn you, however, that none of these trails leads to God. That’s just not how it works. There’s no one superior way to pray. If you’re searching for the Holy Grail, go back to where you began.

Our English word ‘prayer’ derives from the Latin ‘precarius’. We pray because life is precarious.

‘Prayer is more than a lighted candle,’ insists the theologian George A. Buttrick. ‘It is the contagion of health. It is the pulse of Life.’23

After decades of night-and-day prayer, I have come to believe that 99 per cent of it is just showing up; making the effort to become consciously present to the God who is constantly present to us.

Wherever you find your chair, try to visit it daily. Let it become your thin place, a sacred space that helps you walk and talk with God through the many twists and turns of life.

Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home,

The best bit of advice I ever received about how to pray was this: keep it simple, keep it real, keep it up. You’ve got to keep it simple so that the most natural thing in the world doesn’t become complicated, weird and intense.

God wants to spend time with us even more than we want to spend time with him. This

The Bible is often way more honest than the Church. You’ve probably noticed how many of the Psalms (the Jewish prayer book) are not happy-clappy but cries of unresolved pain. Only this morning I read a great example as part of my regular prayer time: ‘Evening and morning and at noon, I will complain and murmur. And he will hear my voice’ (55:17, NASB). That’s a lot of complaining and murmuring!

But here is the great and inescapable truth, taught in Scripture, modelled by Christ and advocated without exception by all the heroes of our faith: you cannot grow in prayer without some measure of effort and discomfort, self-discipline and self-denial. Just as you cannot get physically fit without regular exercise and a healthy diet, so your spiritual growth will be determined, to a very significant extent, by the prayer exercises you choose (or do not choose) to establish and sustain.

real. Delight without discipline eventually, inevitably dissipates. It runs out of steam. But when delight and discipline learn to dance, relationships thrive.

A Christian who prays only when they feel like it may survive but they will never thrive. Their vast, innate potential will be stunted because grace needs a little space to take root between the cracks of a person’s life.

In this chapter I have set out three of the most basic building blocks in the Christian approach to prayer: simplicity, honesty and perseverance. I have also encouraged you to establish your own easy, enjoyable prayer routine, such as a daily quiet time.

Be still and know that I am God. (Ps. 46:10)

The best way to start praying, therefore, is actually to stop praying. To pause. To be still. To put down your prayer list and surrender your own personal agenda. To stop talking at God long enough to focus on the wonder of who he actually is. To ‘be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him’.

The word selah appears seventy-one times in the Psalms – the Hebrew prayer book. It may have been a technical note to the people reciting the Psalm, or to the musicians playing it, but no one really knows for sure what it originally meant or why it is there.

When you are stressed, your adrenal glands release the hormone cortisol, which impairs your capacity for clear thinking and healthy decision-making. But as you sit quietly, the cortisol subsides and things become clearer. The swirling sediment of life settles down quite quickly. You become more aware of your own presence in place and time, and of God’s gentle, subsuming presence around and within you too.

says that ‘Francis of Assisi returned to the gospel with such force that it shook the whole world.’

MOST PEOPLE’S BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH PRAYER IS GOD

The way we view God affects everything about everything, and the primary purpose of our lives, according to the very first statement of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, ‘is to glorify God and enjoy him forever’.

We have a notion of divine love devoid of divine sovereignty. Unwittingly we have unhallowed the Father’s name. And in losing the Godness of God we struggle with prayer because we fail to grasp the mind-blowing privilege of simply being in the presence of the living God. Familiarity breeds apathy until we can barely be bothered to try.

What could be more sacrificial than praising him when we don’t feel like it? It’s relatively easy to worship when we’re singing stirring songs with the saints on Sunday morning, but not so easy on a miserable Monday morning before work. I suspect that unemotional worship – the kind that feels a bit forced and fake – is precious to God precisely because it is so costly to us.

There was a season of my life when I just couldn’t face attending the kind of free-styling charismatic worship service my own church was serving up at that time. Sammy was incredibly unwell, and my heart was simply too vulnerable to run the gauntlet of spontaneity every week.

Prayer means many things to many people, but at its simplest and most obvious it means asking God for help.

Karl Barth, one of the greatest theologians of modern times, emphatically agrees: It is the fact that [a man] comes before God with his petition which makes him a praying man. Other theories of prayer may be richly and profoundly thought out and may sound very well, but they all suffer from a certain artificiality because they miss this simple and concrete fact, losing themselves in heights and depths where there is no place for the man who really prays, who is simply making a request.7

OUR PRIMARY PRIVILEGE AS GOD’S CHILDREN IS TO ASK AUDACIOUSLY AND REPEATEDLY FOR EVERYTHING WE NEED, EXPECTING HIM TO ANSWER, NATURALLY OR SUPERNATURALLY

God asks us to ask for at least three reasons. First, because the act of asking is relational in a way that mere wishing is not.

The second reason that asking is necessary is that it is vulnerable. To make a request is to admit to some area of personal need. It extends trust towards the person asked.

Third, asking is intentional. It involves the activation of our wills. We are not automatons: mindless bots pre-programmed and powerless to resist the Creator’s genetic coding.

The great French philosopher Blaise Pascal said that ‘God has instituted prayer to impart to his creatures the dignity of causality.’13

‘God does not act the same way whether we pray or not’, says Karl Barth. ‘Prayer exerts an influence upon God’s action, and even upon his existence.’

To pray in the name of Jesus means asking for things that are consistent with his character and aligned with his purpose.

Jesus needed his three best friends by his side in his darkest hour. He didn’t try to put on a brave face. He didn’t pretend to be OK.

petition is prayer at its simplest, and intercession is prayer at its most powerful, contemplation is prayer at its deepest and most personally transformational.

But it is the Bible that teaches us to do it. King David prays, ‘May the … meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight’ (Ps. 19:14), and elsewhere he declares, ‘For God alone my soul waits in silence’ (Ps. 62:1, ESV). The Lord himself invites us to ‘Be still, and know that I am God’ (Ps. 46:10).

Contemplative prayer reassures us that it’s OK to just show up in prayer. That there doesn’t have to be anything insincere about ‘going through the motions’ when those motions express something we cannot say in any other way.

A man prayed and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until he realised that prayer is listening. (Søren Kierkegaard)1

SOMETIMES GOD LISTENS TO OUR CASUAL CONVERSATIONS AND RECEIVES THEM AS PRAYERS

Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. (Acts 2:17)

I’M CONVINCED THAT THE MAIN GIFT GOD WANTS TO GIVE SOME CHRISTIANS IS COMMON SENSE

Of course, dreams, visions and prophecies are highly subjective, so we must weigh them against Scripture, apply common sense, and if they are directional we should also seek wise counsel. The

I’m convinced that the main gift God wants to give some Christians is common sense. It is no less spiritual to seek godly counsel than to receive a supernatural dream or an angelic visitation, and it may well be far more helpful.

night I like to take a few minutes before bed to replay and review the day with the Lord using my own version of the ancient prayer of Examen. It’s a very simple process – anyone can do it – and yet I’ve found it to be an extraordinarily powerful tool for confession, reconciliation and personal transformation.

Without forgiveness there is no future. (Desmond Tutu)

We must all practise violence and remember that he who prays is fighting against the devil and the flesh. Satan is opposed to the church … the best thing we can do, therefore, is to put our fists together and pray. (Martin Luther)8

I learned to look at the smiling Buddhas in their ornate shrines with their offerings of incense sticks and plates of oranges, and see that behind the cheap plastic ornaments lurked dark spiritual powers. It all seemed so clear to me in that context.