Perpetual Felicities's Reviews > How to Pray

This Little book on prayer was life changing. Torrey was succinct, inspiring, and unapologetic. There are no excuses for not living a prayer filled life. The whole book feels like an urgent plea for help. Torrey was asking his generation, no begging, them to fill their lives with prayer. Again and again he pointed out the importance of pairing prayer with reading the word of God. Even in sections such as having confidence in prayer and being able to ask God for requests, he always brought it back to the Word. You cannot do these things unless you are following the will of God and you can only follow the will of God if you are immersed in his word. And yet he believed in the absolute power of prayer. The power not to change God's mind, but to be part of what God is doing.

Word of caution: This book was written in the late 1800s. Society has changed quite a bit. He mentions a couple of times his very negative views of dancing, theaters, and drinking. I personally have a more modern outlook on entertainment. But I think it is convicting not that we should necessarily give up those things, but we should constantly be checking how much we are consumed by those things. And he didn't even have social media in his day! Don't even get me started on how much time I can easily waste on Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. Those things aren't necessarily bad and of the devil, But they often take the place of prayer in my life. I should always be checking and balancing how I am spending my free time.

Audience: This book is a bit old-fashioned. I feel like it's still understandable to the average person, but there are a few words that are a little archaic. I even had to look up "surfeiting". I think he's still understandable to the modern reader but possibly not as inspiring to some as he will be to others. If you know you don't like old things, this book is probably not for you.

Setting: This could totally work for a small group. A group could read anywhere from 1 to 3 chapters a week depending on how much time they wanted to spend with it. The chapters are short and succinct and the book is small. There are also a lot of opportunities for discussion and prayer time inspired by each chapter. I read the Moody classics version by Moody publishers And there were a few reflection questions at the end of the book.