How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

by Pete Greig

Hallowing the Father’s name is the most important and enjoyable dimension of prayer. Linger here, rejoicing in God’s blessings before asking for any more. Like an eagle soaring, a horse galloping, or a salmon leaping, worship is the thing God designed you to do.

Prayer is more than you could ever imagine, because God is so much beyond what you can conceive. We are

surrounded with gods that are too small to be up to the task of holding our deepest personal longings, never mind the world’s most urgent problems. DAVID G. BENNER, OPENING

“Francis of Assisi returned to the gospel with such force that it shook the entire world.”[1]

Theirs was a revolution founded not on domination

but on adoration: the compelling simplicity of a fully surrendered life that cries out night and day, “My God and my all.”

When Jesus told his disciples to address God in this way, they would have been surprised, to

say the least. They knew that their Scriptures occasionally compared God to a father but never would have dared to address him directly in such familiar—and familial—terms before. Jesus was inviting his disciples to step into a level of intimacy with God that they had never imagined possible.

that the God to whom we pray is extravagantly kind, a father who comes running toward us with arms flung wide, whenever we approach him, wherever we’ve been, and whatever we’ve done.

identity as “dearly loved children,”[3] the greater our desire to spend time with our Father in prayer. We will start to tell him everything and dare to ask him anything because we now know that, as Jesus puts it elsewhere, “Your Father in heaven [loves to] give good gifts to those who ask him!”[4]

attentive to your needs, always pleased to see you, predisposed to answer the cries of your heart.[5]

Our Father in heaven doesn’t get distracted by our scribbled words and squiggled thoughts. He isn’t impressed by the dictionaries and lectionaries we hurl at the sky. Instead, he explores our hearts with infinite affection to discern the kind of day we’ve had, the way we are really feeling, and the weird little obsessions buzzing around our heads. “God’s ear hears the heart’s

voice,” said Augustine in his commentary on Psalm 148.[6] “It is the heart that prays,” said Father Jean-Nicolas Grou. “It is to the voice of the heart that God listens, and it is the heart that he answers.”[7] “We do not know what we ought to pray for,” admits the apostle Paul, “but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.

You may question the coherence of those scribbles and squiggles you present to God as prayer, you may doubt the strength of your own resolve and the sincerity of your faith, but at least try to trust that the

Spirit’s translation of your prayers stands a pretty good chance of getting through to the Father’s heart on your behalf!

Scan the narrative of Acts, reflect on the spontaneous doxologies of Paul or the apocalypse of John, and you quickly come to

the conclusion that their God was—frankly—bigger than ours. They knew how to kneel. They understood the “fear of the Lord,” the reverence he deserves, and even the “dreadful thing” it can sometimes be, as the writer of Hebrews says, “to fall into the hands of the living God.”[11]

There is no mystery, only certainty in our religion.

Life sometimes hurts, but I’ve discovered that deleting God from the equation doesn’t actually help. It merely removes all meaning and morality from the mess and all real hope from the future. And

so I’m sort of stuck with God, even when I don’t understand him. Even when I don’t completely like him. Turns out he is all I’ve got. And maybe this is where hallowing actually begins.

What’s the point of a divinity you can fit on a thumb drive, on a bumper sticker, or within a human skull? The God of the cosmos must surely be bigger than our capacity to understand!

have always found great comfort in the idea of God as my heavenly Father, an ever-present Dad

on call. The Spirit within sparks this beautiful cry “Abba” as deep unto deep.[13] We are prodigals loved. And yet, I am also increasingly finding comfort, and an unexpected intimacy, in God’s hiddenness—his otherness, the very fact that our Father is in heaven and not here on earth. I walk outsid...

and vast. I whisper my prayers beneath the silent star fields, sensing that I am reaching the divinity within all this mystery in a way that my loudest, most desperate and defiant shouts might not. God seems infinitely close, dangerous yet famil...

After being told again and again over the years how deeply God loves me,

“as if no one else existed,” and how powerfully he wants to use me, it comes as a considerable relief to finally discover that I’m actually not that big a deal: a bit-part actor—certainly not the lead—in the play of someone else’s life. I am, as the psalmist says, just dust. I am, as Isaiah says, like grass that grows, withers, and dies in a day.[14] I am a child who finally knows enough to know that I

don’t know much and that it’s perfectly possible to trust in things I don’t fully understand. Perhaps it’s better after all to have a little faith in a great big unshakable God than a great big un...

George MacDonald puts it in his

Diary of an Old Soul, “He who would be born again indeed, / Must wake his soul unnumbered times a day, / And urge himself to life with holy greed.”[15]

Psalms, I try to fill my day with music. Melody and harmony are God-given gifts that can stir the human soul more powerfully than any other external stimulus.

When it comes to worship, instrumental music has the added advantage of bypassing the left hemisphere of the brain’s central cortex, enabling our spirits to soar unencumbered by the constraints of language.

not just personally and spontaneously but liturgically in unison with millions of Christians around the world today, and in fellowship with the communion of saints stretching back to those first twelve apostles gathered around Christ as he gave them this prayer. We are not designed to hallow the Father’s name entirely on our own.

We all need the encouragement, the challenge, and the discomfort of active participation in a local worshiping community.

There was a season of my life when I just couldn’t face attending the kind of freestyling 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.

I was embarrassed to find myself sampling and even appreciating the kind of liturgy we had often denounced as “dead religion” or “vain repetition.”

And yet I kept returning for several months because I valued the way that every word of every service in this ancient building seemed to matter. Nothing was left to chance. When your soul is spent and you’ve run out of imagination and initiative, it’s a relief to be told what to say by someone you trust. I also appreciated the sense of being part of something very old—bigger than my

own chaotic predicament and stronger than my own brittle resolve. It was a relief to be sedated by the predictability of the lectionary, the serene c...

Authentic worship is anchored in biblical realities greater than our own mercurial temperaments. We see this in the life of Jesus, who paused conscientiously three times a day to recite the sh’ma

Hear O Israel . . .”) and to give thanks before meals.[18] His own book of fixed worship—the Psalms—was so deeply ingrained in his psyche that he even quoted it from the cross.[19]

Thoughtful prayers written by others, and especially those written in the Bible, can enable us to express things we find difficult and to address things we ...

to God about the things on my heart, I will very rarely remember, for instance, to obey Paul’s command to uphold our political leaders in prayer.[20] In the first chapter, I said that one of the great things about having a fixed place for prayer is that it gives you somewhere to show up even when y...

“There’s much to be said for Christianity as repetition,” says theologian Stanley Hauerwas. “Evangelicalism doesn’t have enough repetition in a way that will form Christians to survive in a world that constantly tempts us to always think we have to do something new.”[21] When we repeat fixed prayers, several thousand years of faith begin to shape us and pray through us, providing

solidarity (in every sense of that word) amid the subjectivity of our fragmenting culture, with all God’s people. Going through the motions, as every dancer knows, can be an important thing to do.

for T. S. Eliot, Annie Dillard, and R. S. Thomas,

Of course, you are wired to worship differently. Having encouraged you (in chapter 2) to discover your own distinctive ways of praying, I am now urging

you to do the same with adoration. The psalmist exhorts us on four separate occasions to “sing to the LORD a new song”[28] because he wants us to worship spontaneously, creatively, and from the heart. You are a new song that God has given to the world, a song that no one else can sing. The way you think, the way you see life, and the way you worship are utterly unique! Isn’t it

time you stepped out onto the street, threw back your head, and gave the world the weirdest, most...

But he is also “in heaven” and “hallowed”—sovereign, awesome, and mysterious, which means that we can trust him even when we don’t understand him. The invitation to adoration means greeting our heavenly Father by name, meeting his smile with a smile, receiving him as the loved one he truly

is, and responding to his kindness with kindness, his presence with presence, and his love with our own. What joy we can bring to the Father’s heart!