How to Make Prayer More Interesting – But Not Much Easier

Prayer, as C. S. Lewis put it, is irksome. “An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome. When it is over, this casts a feeling of relief and holiday over the rest of the day. We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish. While we are at prayer, but not while we are reading a novel or solving a cross-word puzzle, any trifle is enough to distract us”

He goes on to point out that our reluctance and difficulty with prayer is a sign of our fallenness. “If we were perfected, prayer would not be a duty, it would be delight. Some day, please God, it will be.” In the meantime, “I must say my prayers today whether I feel devout or not.”

We may not be able to make prayer much easier this side of Heaven. But it is possible to make it more interesting, which is part of making it more like delight than duty. How shall we do this?

1. Turn your meditation into prayer. George Muller famously recommended beginning with Scripture, and allowing your meditation to turn into adoration, repentance, and intercession. Tim Keller recommended meditating on how a Scripture revealed God, how it revealed sin or shortfall in your life, and turning that into praise for God, repentance for sin, and consecration and requests for growth. Richard Baxter, and Jonathan Edwards, spoke of how meditation should become “soliloquy,” where you preach to your own heart and then turn that into speaking to God.
2. Festoon the famous biblical prayers. To festoon means to decorate, and the idea is to add, enlarge, and personalise the words of prayers we have memorised. As we pray each line of the Lord’s Prayer, we turn it into prayers for ourselves, our country, our church, our families. Martin Luther recommended turning into prayer what we have memorised: the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, or the Apostles’ Creed.
3. Pray through the Psalms. Many of the psalms are prayers, and using the previous two methods, they can be profitably turned into prayer.
4. Sometimes, begin where you are. The Psalms of lament do not always begin with a set form of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, etc. They begin with a cry of wavering faith. When a great trial, a besetting sin, a paralysing problem seems to overwhelm our thoughts, we had best begin there, and work our way into the other forms of prayer, rather than trying to force our distracted thoughts away. Lewis said, “We must lay before him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”
5. Train your body to pray. Our body can be the seat of sin, and also the seat of virtue, depending on how we habituate it. A restless – or passively motionless – body makes for distracted and difficult prayer. Training your body to pray includes changing posture for at least some of our prayers or some of the time: kneeling (if you can), standing, pacing, and walking. It may include alternating eyes open and eyes closed, writing out requests, quietly (or not-so-quietly) verbalising our prayers, and sometimes fasting.
6. Use prayer cards. I adopted Paul Miller’s prayer cards and found it more profitable than lists on pages (though I’ve used those too). One card for one person or theme or topic or group, with Scriptures, requests, and answers. A stack of cards can be prayed right through rapidly, or partially, and it feels like you are bringing your whole life to God.
7. Pray according to need and desire, not to meet a certain time goal. Scripture, and Jesus Himself, commend shorter prayers (Matt. 6:7). Rather pray sincerely and succinctly than try to artificially lengthen your prayers. This only leads to artificiality, boredom, and fatigue. The Rule of Benedict (ch. 20) says that prayer should be “short and pure,” unless grace draws it out. Bunyan said that “In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”
8. Borrow other’s prayers. The Valley of Vision, Prayers Ancient and Modern, my own 31 Days of Worship with Charles Spurgeon, Be Thou My Vision (by Jonathan Gibson) Book of Common Prayer, and many others give you some crutches, springboards, or trellises upon which to lean, leap or grow your own prayers.