I have been writing about prayer since the earliest days of this site, and all those years of writing have led me to one settled conviction: I have yet to meet the Christian who has mastered prayer. In fact, I have yet to meet the Christian who feels like much more than a beginner in the school of prayer. I count myself among the beginners, and I expect I always will.
This page gathers the best of what I’ve written on prayer into one place—prayer when it is sweet and prayer when it is a struggle, prayer on your own and prayer with your church. Whether your prayer life is thriving or languishing, I hope it will serve you well.
It’s Okay To Just Pray
Let’s begin with the truth I find most freeing of all. Prayer is a mystery, and none of us will solve it on this side of eternity. But as I wrote in It’s Okay To Just Pray, we don’t need to:
I am thankful that we do not need to understand prayer in order to pray. At least, we do not need to exhaustively understand prayer in order to pray. We do not need to have an answer to every question or a resolution to every mystery. The biblical command is not to figure out prayer or iron out every dilemma of prayer, but simply to pray.
There is even a bookish version of this temptation—studying prayer as a substitute for praying. I confessed it in The School of Prayer:
I love reading books on prayer, but sometimes I wonder if I like reading books on prayer more than I like praying. Reading comes naturally to me, prayer does not. Reading is easy to understand, prayer is not. Finishing a good book and looking back on all the parts I have highlighted gives a sense of accomplishment that prayer does not. Reading books on prayer too easily becomes a substitute for praying.
The books are a blessing, but they cannot do the praying for you. “If I want to know how to pray, I just need to pray.” Ultimately, “prayer itself is the classroom.”
Prayer as Duty and Delight
Why pray at all? Because prayer matters. God delights to hear his children and to answer them. But I do not always pray like I believe that. In Prayer as Duty and Delight I admitted the gap between my theology and my praying:
And yet so often I pray like it doesn’t really matter. I make it a habit to try to pray for every person in our church every week. Far too often I pray these prayers like I am praying to someone who is not eager to hear the prayers and is not eager to answer them. I pray like I am asking difficult things of a reluctant ruler. I pray like I need to beg God that he will bless these saints, like he is uninterested in hearing my requests that these people will apply to their lives the Word they heard on Sunday or that they will come to church eager to enjoy communion with him. I pray like prayer is a duty, not a delight.
The remedy I landed on was itself a prayer: “God, help me to have confidence that my prayers matter.” The essay ends where every prayer life must begin: “Prayer matters–my prayers matter. I fight to keep this in my mind and I fight to keep it in my heart.” Even the smallest prayers—the ones we pray before a meal or a meeting—are declarations of our dependence on God, as I wrote in 3 Reasons We Need to Pray.
When Your Soul Is Bone Dry
There are seasons when even opening your mouth to pray feels impossible. I wrote How To Pray When Your Soul Is Bone Dry for those seasons, and its first counsel is the simplest:
Perhaps the hardest thing to do in those times is to even make the effort to pray. Just pray. It is always the right thing to do. Pray short if you need to. Tell God you are struggling to pray. But somehow just pray.
The rest of that essay gathers Scripture to pray when you have no words of your own: prayers of the gospel, prayers for wisdom, prayers for peace. And in A Powerful Practice for Prayer I shared the single practice that has helped me most, a rule I picked up from men far wiser than myself:
Never resist the least urge to pray. What if you lived that way? What if we all lived that way? Our lives and our churches would be bathed in prayer. I believe we would be living in much greater faithfulness to God’s command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).
When God Seems Silent
What about the prayers that seem to go unanswered? The best way I know to answer is to point to the cross. In Unanswered Prayer I considered the disciples in the awful silence between Friday and Sunday:
What Jesus would accomplish made little sense to them when he described it in advance; what he was accomplishing made little sense while he endured it; what he had accomplished became clear only when they could look back on it. They just needed to wait. It all became clear in time.
So keep praying. In Pleading With God in Prayer I answered a father who feared it might be wrong to bring the same desperate request to God day after day: “Don’t lose heart, and don’t feel guilty about praying again and again, even in the same way for the same thing.” God is your Father, so “plead with him as a son pleads with a father.” And when should you finally stop asking? In When Should You Stop Praying? I answered that question with the help of an old story about Sir Walter Raleigh and his exasperated queen:
This means that the time for you to quit lifting your petitions is the time when God tells you that he will no longer listen. The day to give up praying is the day when God tells you that he has closed his ears and become deaf to your voice. The moment to stop pleading is the moment when God speaks to assure you that his heart is now hardened and his hand, once opened to supply your needs, is now closed to cut them off. Until that day—a day that will never come—continue to pray, trusting that God continues to listen and to provide.
And remember what God has actually promised. On his final night, Jesus prayed that his people would be kept, but not from suffering. As I wrote in What Jesus Does Not Pray: “We can have no confidence that we will be kept from sorrows, but every confidence that we will be kept from Satan.”
So Who Was Praying?
“I am utterly confident that prayer works, but am far less certain about how prayer works.” That is how I began So Who Was Praying?, an essay about the story I return to whenever I am tempted to doubt that God hears. My wife Aileen was raised in an entirely non-religious home. She had never read a Bible, never set foot in a church, never heard anyone pray. Then my mother took her out for breakfast and shared the gospel with her, and she believed it immediately, confidently, and irrevocably—the only Christian, still, in her whole family:
This is a wondrous thing that makes sense only in the context of prayer. Someone must have been praying for her! How else can we explain it? Why else would God have so suddenly and unexpectedly plucked her out for himself? It must have been prayer.
Much of her family emigrated from Scotland, a nation that in better days “counted among its citizens a great many believers—believers who prayed”:
And I just can’t help but wonder if her salvation was the long answer to one or many of those prayers. I just can’t help but wonder if many, many years ago a Scottish family pleaded with God to extend his salvation to their children and to their children’s children. And maybe, just maybe, God answered that prayer in her salvation.
I don’t know how it all works, and I don’t need to. “I just need to know that I ought to pray and that it is God’s joy to answer prayer.”
Praying for Others
Every Christian carries people to God in prayer, and especially people who do not yet know the Lord. In 18 Prayers to Pray for Unbelievers I gathered biblical language for those prayers, along with this caution: “Our temptation is to grow discouraged in prayer, to pray for a while and, when we see no visible results, to give up. But God calls us to persevere in prayer.” For those who have prayed long years for the salvation of someone they love, Praying for the Impossible and the Simple offers this encouragement:
It is also no harder for God to save another person than it was for him to save you. Like the person you are praying for, you too were once dead. Perhaps you had some privileges or opportunities that the other person did not have. But there was nothing in you that was more alive, more earnest, or more inclined to the Lord. Dead is dead! And just as it did not strain God’s abilities to save you, it will not strain his abilities to save the one you are praying for.
Praying for others is never passive. In Being the Answer to Prayer I argue that we should never pray a petition we are unwilling to act upon:
One way to guard ourselves against flippancy is to ensure we do not pray any petition for which we are unwilling to act. True faith and true submission are not praying and wishing, not praying and hoping, not praying and sitting, but rather, praying and acting. We must be willing to labor toward the granting of the requests we have brought before God, whenever it is possible for us to do so. Always we must be willing and eager for God to use us in the answer to our own prayers.
Sometimes, in fact, you are the answer to prayers you knew nothing about. In The Breakthrough Prayer I considered those moments of sudden spiritual resolve: “What you think is your own resolve is actually the result of their resolve and their labor in prayer.” And because none of us can pray for everything, there is freedom in focus. In No, I Won’t Pray For You I explained why I have learned to gently decline some requests: “I feel the freedom not to pray because I cannot pray for everyone and everything. God has given me spheres of responsibility and a finite amount of time.”
Praying With the Church
Prayer is personal, but was never meant to be merely private. In 7 Ways to Ruin a Prayer Meeting I wrote about what I have learned from leading our church’s weekly meeting:
I love a church that prays. I love being a part of a church that prays. Every Wednesday night we gather—often a packed-out room full of us—to bring all our petitions and all our praise before the Lord. Far more often than not it is a sweet time of seeking the Lord together.
The counsel in that essay is practical: prepare well, embrace the silence, be thankful, and make sure a prayer meeting is actually given to prayer. But the prayer meeting is also contested ground. From a round-table discussion with fellow pastors, recorded in Persevere in Prayer!: “If prayer is the means through which God works, Satan will inevitably make it an area of concentrated attack.” And again: “Satan knows he can undermine a church’s effectiveness by undermining a church’s prayer life.” Persevere in the face of his attacks! The prayer meeting is also where we learn. As I said above, “You can learn about prayer in a sermon, but it’s in a prayer meeting that you really learn to pray.” And for those who lead the church in worship, Prayers To Pray While You Preach, Lead, and Sing offers petitions to pray even in the very act of leading.
Organizing Your Prayer Life
Prayer thrives with a measure of structure. In 4 Methods To Organize Your Prayer Life I describe several systems—praying in concentric circles, prayer apps, prayer cards—and the principle beneath them all: “A healthy prayer life consists not only of prayer, but also of preparation.” After all, “Vague ideas of prayer promote vague prayers. Disorganized methods of prayer promote disorganized prayers. Methods for prayer promote meaningful prayers.” In Random Thoughts and Tips on Prayer I collected a lifetime of smaller counsel: pray through your church’s directory, pray for the people whose houses you walk past, pray with your husband or wife every day, and parents, remember that “teaching your children to pray is both a responsibility and a privilege.” But do not fret over the polish of your prayers:
Don’t worry about praying eloquent prayers any more than you concern yourself with wowing your earthly father with eloquence when you chat with him. Be more concerned about baring your heart and expressing it to the Lord. God loves to hear you pray.
One caution as you build your habits: beware any technique that promises to unlock God’s favor, a subject I took up in Don’t Pray in Circles! “Prayer techniques come and go; prayer books come and go; our God remains the same, still willing to hear, still eager to listen, still thrilled to grant what we ask in Christ’s name.”
Start Here: Essays on Prayer
- It’s Okay To Just Pray. Permission to pray without first solving prayer’s mysteries.
- The School of Prayer. Why prayer itself is the classroom and no book can replace learning on your knees.
- So Who Was Praying? My wife’s conversion and the generations of prayers that may lie behind it.
- How To Pray When Your Soul Is Bone Dry. Scripture to pray when you have no words of your own.
- A Powerful Practice for Prayer. Never resist the least urge to pray.
- Pleading With God in Prayer. For those who bring the same desperate request to God again and again.
- Unanswered Prayer. Why we look to the cross when God seems silent.
- When Should You Stop Praying? Sir Walter Raleigh, an exasperated queen, and the God who never wearies of giving.
- What Jesus Does Not Pray. Kept from Satan, though not from sorrow.
- 18 Prayers to Pray for Unbelievers. Biblical language for praying toward the salvation of people you love.
- Praying for the Impossible and the Simple. It is no harder for God to save them than it was for him to save you.
- Being the Answer to Prayer. Pray, and then labor to see the prayer answered.
- 7 Ways to Ruin a Prayer Meeting. Lessons from leading a church in corporate prayer.
- 4 Methods To Organize Your Prayer Life. Concentric circles, prayer apps, and prayer cards.
You can browse everything I’ve written on the subject in the prayer topic archive.
The Book
In recent years my own praying has been enriched by the poetic prayers of past generations. That practice grew into a book: Pilgrim Prayers: Devotional Poems That Awaken Your Heart to the Goodness, Greatness, and Glory of God. It is a curated collection of devotional poems written as prayers to the Lord, each accompanied by a brief reflection, related Scriptures, and a question for application. I introduced the idea and shared a few example poems in Have You Ever Tried Praying Poetically? If this page has been useful to you, the book is a natural next step.
Explore More
Looking for a full book on prayer? My Book Recommendations: Prayer page gathers the books on prayer I most often recommend, and my Book Recommendations pages cover more than forty other subjects besides.
This guide is one of a series. You can find them all on my guides page.
