How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

by Pete Greig

also a man of faithfulness who endured discouragement and refused to stop asking.

“Keep on asking, and you will receive. . . . Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door

will be opened to you.”[25]

It’s impossible to grow in faith without growing in faithfulness, and it’s impossible to grow in faithfulness if all your prayers are answered right away.

But when we endure delays, disappointments, and discouragements without giving up or backing down—when we keep “beating on heaven’s door with bruised knuckles in the dark,”[26] as George

Buttrick described it—our faith expands int...

he carried a list of one hundred non-Christians for whom he prayed daily. Over the years, whenever one of them gave their life to Christ, Moody would cross their name off the list. By the time of his death, no fewer than 96 of those 100 people had become followers of Jesus. What an amazing testimony to the power

of perseverance. Even more remarkably, the remaining four surrendered their lives to Christ at Moody’s funeral.[27]

If an angel turned up tonight to say that your very next prayer will be

answered, I suspect that you’d be on your knees in a flash! But how would you respond if that same angel told you to pray daily, promising an answer on the 365th time of asking? Would you do it? Probably! The truth is that none of us knows how long it will take for a particular prayer to be answered. It might take the rest of our lives, as it did for the last four on Moody’s list. But this

we know for sure: Jesus has told us to persevere in prayer, not to abandon our cars at every yellow light; to keep revving the engine, faithfull...

Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire? CORNELIA “CORRIE” TEN BOOM

“If a care is too small to be turned into a prayer,” she said, “it is too small to be made into a burden.”[28]

How quickly I complain about life’s hardships while taking God’s manifold blessings entirely for granted.

His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often . . . the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.

Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him. I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or

charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give Your forgiveness. As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand, ...

sprang a love for this stranger that almost ...

And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He giv...

Richard Foster, “If we truly love people,

we will desire for them far more than it is within our power to give them, and this will lead us to prayer. Intercession is a way of loving others.”[1]

That’s why, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus doesn’t just instruct us to pray personally for daily bread but also for regime change: the coming of

God’s Kingdom on earth.

To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world. KARL BARTH, AS HEARD BY JAN MILIč LOCHMAN

To intercede is to “mind the gap” between heaven and earth.

pleading with God on behalf of people, and with people on behalf of God.

Where once we could ignore the problems of others, we begin caring deeply.

We are sensitized to the world’s brokenness. We yearn for our friends to know Jesus. Our lives take the shape of a single prayer: “Your kingdom come.”

It is an unspeakable honor, yet we are often too busy, too disbelieving, or too insecure to accept the greatest invitation of our lives. As Oswald Chambers says, “The real business of your life as a saved soul is intercessory prayer. . . . Prayer does not fit us for the greater works; prayer is the greater work.”[14]

That which God abundantly makes the subject of his promises,

God’s people should abundantly make the subject of their prayers. JONATHAN EDWARDS, “MOTIVES TO A COMPLIANCE WITH A CALL TO EXTRAORDINARY PRAYER”

And then instead of telling God what you think he should do for them, you can just

join in with his prayers, which is way easier and more effective.”

For me, this was a radically new way of viewing things. It reminded me of a Bible verse: “No matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ. And so through him the ‘Amen’ is spoken by us to the glory of God.”[16] What might happen if I stopped trying to get God to say “Amen” to my

agenda for our boys in prayer and started using my prayer times to say a big, fat “Amen” to his promises for their lives instead? And so I decided to spend some time asking God what he wanted, instead of telling him what I wanted.

just how powerful it is when you stop praying your own prayers based on your own inclinations and start praying God’s prayers based on his plans instead! By identifying relevant promises in God’s Word and focusing them on a particular person, place, or situation, you can be sure that you are interceding for them in line with God’s purposes and therefore in the name of Jesus.

Intercessory prayer is spiritual defiance of what is in the way of what God has promised. WALTER WINK

There’s a strange thing that can happen when you really lay hold of God’s promises and begin to see his intended future for a contested person or place: You start feeling indignant about the ways in which his purposes are currently

being undermined and resisted. It seems outrageous! You move beyond the saying of nice prayers to a place of spiritual contention, like Moses with his hands held aloft for hours on en...

One of the most surprising secrets of the Lord’s Prayer is that its original Greek renders every verb—hallow, come, be...

in the imperative mood, which can be a forceful, assertive, commanding tone of entreaty.[17] Bible scholar Darrell Johnson concludes that “to pray the Lord’s Prayer is to command—not to ask—but to command.”[18] We are to pray authoritatively, not as tim...

tempered with reverence appropriate to us as sons a...

When Martin Luther’s friend Philipp Melanchthon fell gravely ill, Luther prayed to God with surprising audacity: “I attacked him with his own weapons, quoting from Scripture all the promises I could remember, that prayers shoul...

henceforth to put faith in his promises.”[19] Luther’s tone is shocking, yet the Fa...

“Lose the habit of wrestling and the hope of prevailing with God, make it mere walking with God in friendly talk; and, precious as that is, yet you tend to lose the reality of prayer at last. In

principle you make it mere conversation instead of the soul’s great action.”[20]

they were testifying to that aspect of intercession that is militant, passionate, and defiant.

They understood that there is a time and a place to pray through tears, to groan with the Holy Spirit, to plead with

God until your voice gives out, to lay hold of his promises and insist on their fulfillment, to go without food, to vent righteous anger, to dig your heels into a particular situation of injustice and cry out with clenched fists...

“when they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God.” As a result, “The place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.”[21]