How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

by Pete Greig

A middle-aged injured soldier called Nicolas Herman was staring at a tree in winter, its leaves stripped bare, reflecting that it was how he felt too. Remembering that though the tree looked dead, it would burst into new life in the spring, he experienced an overwhelming sense

“As often as I could,” he says, “I placed myself as a worshipper before him, fixing my mind upon his holy presence, recalling it when I found it wandering from him. This proved to be an exercise frequently painful, yet I persisted through all difficulties.”

It is not necessary for being with God to be always at church; we may make an oratory of our heart wherein to retire from time to time, to converse with him. . . . Everyone is capable of such familiar conversation with God. BROTHER LAWRENCE, THE PRACTICE OF THE PRESENCE OF GOD

My first objection was theological. God must surely be a bit too busy with Big World Problems (like the Middle East and wars and famines and stuff) to worry about optimizing the alfresco dining arrangements of posh people on yachts in the Adriatic.

My second objection was environmental. Mosquitoes—or midges, as we like to call them—are (presumably) part of God’s finely tuned ecological order, and Christians aren’t immune from the laws of nature. We don’t surrender our insect repellents at conversion. We don’t rise from the baptismal waters and keep rising, liberated from the laws of gravity.

My third objection was pastoral. Our kids were joining in with James’s prayer, and so when (not if) it didn’t work, tiny grains of doubt and disappointment would surely be sown within their impressionable minds, and they would surely grow up to become Satanists. And so, as everyone else prayed, rebuking the spirit of midgey-ness in the name of Jesus, I smiled stoically,

When you pray about the small things in life, you get to live with

greater gratitude. If you only ever pray about big, ugly, gnarly problems that seem onerous and serious enough to warrant divine intervention, you will only very occasionally experience miracles. But when you learn to pray about trivia—ridiculous incidentals like “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil midges,” and even inevitabilities (like “Give us this day our daily

bread” in a land that’s full of the stuff)—you start to notice how many minor miracles are scattered around in the course of an average day. As Archbishop William Temple famously said, “When I pray, coincidences happen...

is by asking more for lesser things that we rediscover how to live with the wide-...

By filling our days with tiny prayers, we relinquish our sense of entitlement and receive each detail as a blessing, each coincidence as a minor miracle, training our neural pathways to “rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all c...

One of the greatest theological questions of our time in the realm of petitionary prayer appears to be whether we should ask God for parking spaces. I’ve seen rooms light up with debate on this one thorny conundrum. It seems to me that the answer is clear: Yes, we should indeed ask God to give us parking spots. Why? Because when we pray for places to park, we become the kind of people

who worship God for a patch of concrete outside a supermarket on a rainy Saturday in January.

“Okay,” you say, “but would you have gotten that parking space if you hadn’t asked God for it? Did it only become available when you prayed?” My answer to your excellent question is that I honestly don’t know, and I h...

philosophers, and quantum physicists out there who can enlighten us, but while they’re tweaking their calculations and analyzing the original Greek manuscripts, I am trying to be less cynical, more pr...

explicit: “You do not have because you do not ask God.”[5] Cambridge professor H. H. Farmer says that “if prayer is the heart of religion, then petition is the heart of prayer,”[6]

Jesus softens the Kaddish’s concern with the vertical axis of God’s greatness and his impending Kingdom (“Our Father”) and then adds his own horizontal axis: a list of simple petitions for food, safety,

protection, and forgiveness. He surrounds the reverence and longing of the original prayer with relational language and practical requests regarding the everyday concerns of ordinary people.

but say very little about simply asking God for help and expecting him to answer.

Jesus was crucified in the body and resurrected as a walking, talking, huggable man who looked like a gardener and cooked fish on a fire on a beach.

we take Communion, we celebrate the supernatural intervention of God among the atoms, the systems, the actual physical stuff of our material world. We cannot with integrity jettison or domesticate our belief in the power of petitionary prayer and still lay claim to any form of Christian orthodoxy. Other aspects of prayer are wonderful, but our primary privilege as God’s children is to ask

audaciously and repeatedly for everything we need, expecting him to answer, naturally or supernaturally, ...

Suddenly, there was a banging at the door and the local baker entered carrying three huge trays of fresh bread, explaining that he’d been up since two o’clock that morning baking for them. The milkman appeared next, announcing that his cart had broken down outside and wondering

if they could use his load of fresh milk. Hundreds of children got their daily bread that morning, washed down with creamy milk. It was a breakfast they would surely remember for the rest of their lives whenever they prayed the Lord’s Prayer.[10]

The notion of “daily bread” harks back to the Old Testament when God fed his people in...

that only remained fresh for a day. There is a strong sense in this phrase, therefore, of asking for today’s nee...

If you may have everything by asking, and nothing without asking, I beg you to see how absolutely vital prayer is.[12]

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. Jesus is always more interested

If Bartimaeus had been healed in the crowd by the mere vapor of Christ’s passing, he would never have met Jesus, and we would never have come to learn from his beautiful story. 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 toward the person asked. This may be a minor act of faith—trusting

trusting a shopkeeper to supply a pound of potatoes—or it can be very costly—asking someone to marry you or asking a doctor to cure your disease. In all its forms, asking is an expression of faith, a way of opening our hearts to believe and our hands to receive from another person. Third, asking is intentional. It involves the activation of our wills. We are not automatons: mindless

bots preprogrammed and powerless to resist the Creator’s genetic coding. God respects us too much to ride roughshod over our free wills, and he loves us too much to force us to do his bidding. He comes wher...

Petitionary prayer is a logical and exciting consequence of human free will. It means that our fate is not set. Things can change. We are free to ask, activate, and advance God’s blessing in any given situation by aligning our wills with God’s will, praying “Let your will be done.” The great French philosopher Blaise Pascal said that “God has instituted prayer to impart to his creatures the

dignity of causality.”[14] We are God’s partners in the great project of creation, and we exercise this extraordinary privilege primarily through prayerful imagination, and secondarily through practical innovation.

divine nature is not to dominate, subjugate, and control but to serve, listen, and empower. We are free to do terrible things, as the news cycle reveals, but brilliantly wonderful things, too—imagining, inventing, and co-creating new realities in prayer.

That word influence is important. We can’t control God in prayer because he is God and we are not. But he does allow us to influence him. Neither can we overrule the sovereign choices of other people, however much we might like to force our friend to repent, or stop our sister from dating the sleazebag from college. But although we can’t override the free

will of others, we can influence their choices through prayer.

There are wonderful things that will only happen if we ask for them, and unspeakably terrible things that will prevail unless we harness our wills with God’s will to resist them in prayer. “We are not locked into a pre-set, deterministic future...

We are ‘co-labourers with God’ . . . working with God to determine the o...

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

Praying in the name of Jesus means wanting what God wants, aligning our wills with his will, our words with his Word, and our personal preferences with his eternal and universal purposes. It also speaks of family privilege.

To ask in the name of Jesus is to approach the Father in the company of his own dear Son.

This is a weird moment in world history to be thinking about faith. We are simultaneously both

cynical and gullible, fearful of missing out yet afraid of commitment too.

faith is no less available to you than it was to George Müller, first in the person of Christ, and second in the practice of trust.

Faith is found in the person of Christ.

If you want to trust Jesus more, get to know him more. Look at him more, listen to him more, spend more time with him. It really is that simple. The more you see Jesus, the more you will trust him, because he’s the most reliable, loving, and powerful person you will ever meet. Fix your eyes on Jesus, urges the writer of Hebrews, because he is “the

pioneer and perfecter of ...

His job is to perfect your imperfect faith. Yours is just to ...

his faithfulness that your faith quotient will rise. It’s by celebrating the small things that God has already done that you’ll find faith for the things he hasn’t done yet. Record answers to prayer and return to them regularly.

The second way to grow in faith is by practicing trust. I say practicing because that’s exactly what it takes: practice, repetition, neural realignment, accumulated muscle memory. Faith has often been described in precisely these terms: as