How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

by Pete Greig

Churchill heralded “a miracle of deliverance.”

“The whole place represented truly a visible habitation of God among men.”[24]

Herrnhut would partner with a family who promised to intercede for them and to support them financially. In this very practical way, intercession and mission worked hand in hand with extraordinary effect.

I have one passion. It is He, only He. COUNT ZINZENDORF

Jesus prayed for us: “that they may be brought to complete unity.”[5] But clearly, tragically, we remain bitterly divided. It’s an extraordinary thought that Jesus himself sits at the right hand of the Father today, carrying the pain of unanswered prayer. Surely we can be honest, therefore, about our own frustrations and disappointments with God?

As C. S. Lewis says, “That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behaviour of matter and produce what we call

miracles, is part of Christian faith.” He adds, however, that “the very conception of a common,

and therefore stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extr...

Some Christians are called to endure a disproportionate amount of suffering. Such Christians are a spectacle of grace in the church,

like flaming bushes unconsumed, and cause us to ask, like Moses: “Why is the bush not burned?” The strength and stability of these believers can be explained only by the miracle of God’s sustaining grace. The God who sustains Christians in unceasing pain is the same God—with the same grace—who sustains me in my smaller sufferings. We

marvel at God’s persevering grace and grow in our confidence in him as he...

And so, in all these ways, it’s by surrendering to God that we overcome, by emptying ourselves

that we are filled, and by yielding our lives in prayer that our lives themselves become a prayer—the Lord’s Prayer—in the end.

You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. T. S. ELIOT, “LITTLE GIDDING”

point of night-and-day prayer was that it equaled the maximum amount of praying you could possibly do. This was the dial turned up to eleven, the secret sauce our mediocrity required.

“No. I think the way to address the world’s problems is presence.”

“What if the hour you spend in the prayer room is when you refocus on Jesus so that you can carry his

presence with you into the other twenty-three hours of the day with a heightened awareness that he is with you, he is for you, that he likes you, that he hears your thoughts? You start to pray in real time. You instinctively lift situations to the Lord in the actual moment that you experience them—while yo...

deferring all your prayers to some later, holier moment, because your whole life is bec...

If petition is prayer at its simplest, and

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

“May the . . . meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight.”[5] Elsewhere, he declares, “For God alone my soul waits in silence.”[6]

himself invites us to “be still, and know that I am God.”[7]

also subconsciously by practicing God’s presence when we’re distracted or thinking about other things (right side).

Charles Wesley’s lovely phrase, “lost in wonder, love, and praise.”[14]

maybe you’ve sometimes been sitting alone quietly in prayer or been walking outside, and God’s peace has gently enveloped you in a way that made words seem unnecessary and even inappropriate. Perhaps you’ve been filled with the Holy Spirit and received the gift of tongues, and this has introduced you to the reality of a spirituality

That some of the most beautiful prayers in the world are children’s

pictures, the sighs of weary mothers, music that is unfettered by words.

My mother taught me to pray; she taught me the prayer her mother taught her. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the

Lord my soul to keep. At nightfall, I knelt before my little bed as she stood, with her ever-present cigarette, listening as I recited after her. I wished nothing more than to say my prayers. . . . It pleased me to imagine a presence above us, in continual motion, like liquid stars.

Not contented with my child’s prayer, I soon petitioned my mother to let me make my own. I was relieved when I no longer had to repeat the words If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take and could say instead what was in my heart. Thus freed, I would lie in my be...

of a sleeper and I must have vexed him with my endless vows, visions, and schemes. But as time passed I came to experience a different kind of prayer, a silent ...

My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my ...

imagination. . . . Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souve...

“No other habit,” says pastor Rick Warren, “can do more to transform your life and make you more like

Jesus than daily reflections on Scripture.”[18]

“only the film.” The story will have transported you into a place that seems more real than reality.

Such all-consuming experiences and the overwhelming human desire for them—in art, in sex, in nature, in moments

sporting euphoria, in deep conversations with friends—are rumors of another world. They whisper that we are made for eternity, wired to worship, happiest whenever we abandon ourselves to something ...

“You are . . . a mashup of what you choose to let into your life,” says Austin Kleon in his bestselling book, Steal Like an Artist.[24] If you mostly contemplate your phone, your neural pathways will realign to reflect that reality. If you fill your mind with pornographic imagery, you will become more (not

less) sexually frustrated and lustful. Numerous scientific surveys have shown that if you surround yourself with people who are kind and speak positively, you will become more encouraging and optimistic. Children naturally and subconsciously pick up the accent and the mannerisms of their primary caregiver. And so, when we meditate regularly on God’s goodness and saturate our

consciousness in his love, we become like him. In the words of Paul: “We all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory.”[25] The more we gaze on God’s face in prayer as Moses did on the mountain, the ...

But when I pray contemplatively, I have to show up, shut up, and look up.

let go of my relevant self—the self that can do things, show

reclaim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love

I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing

to offer but his or her vulne...

from becoming strangers to our own and God’s heart.

From living so long out of the inner sanctuary, he gave off a peace, a serene sense of self-possession and a hospitality of heart that caused cynical young men and defeated old men to gravitate toward him like bacon toward eggs. His simple witness lay in accepting others as they were without questions and allowing them to make themselves at