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The Power of Prayer
by Eugene PetersonYou’ve read the text. You’ve spent time thinking. Now comes prayer. The kind of prayer we’re talking about goes beyond merely asking for things – although there’s time for that, and God even tells us to do that often. But in the process of lectio divina, there’s a time when you need to acknowledge what God is saying to you. Did God reveal something new about who he is? Did he reveal something about who you are in his eyes? Is he asking you to think about someone in a different light? Talk to God about it. Ask God to show you more about what you’ve just read: "Help me to understand these things inside and outs so I can ponder your miracle-wonders” (Psalm 119). Don’t just read through the Bible and breeze through the prayer part. Go beyond the usual “thanks for this or that, help me to be a better person” routine. Have a conversation with God. He wants to do that with you.
These conversational prayers that flow out of what you read may be less about you and more about God. Your focus may shift away from yourself and toward your creator.
Don’t be afraid to pray about a passage more than once – in fact, that’s a good thing. You may want to pray with a different focus at different times – talking to God about what you’re learning, thanking him for the truth in the passage, asking God questions, asking him to show you how to make the words real in your life, asking forgiveness for what you see in yourself after reading, just listening… there are a lot of ways to go about prayer.
As you continue on in this process, trying it several times, you may be thinking, “Praying over the same part of Scripture seems pretty redundant. I’m doing the same thing over and over and over again” – and you’d be right. The point of all this is not to be doing something new at each step. The point is to focus more intentionally on God and what he’s communicating to you through this process.
Think about it this way: If you have a friend who constantly asks you for things but never really wants to listen to you, how deep will your relationship go? Sometimes we forget that God has a personality and want to engage us at a deeper level. Let prayer be a time that you can come to savour and look forward to. Allow this to be a time in which God speaks to you and you actively seek him. An audible voice may not come booming out of the clouds, but many things will be revealed to you through this process – about God, about reality, and about you.
Conversation with God
The Practice of Spiritual Reading
The Power of Spiritual Thinking
Living It Out
Text taken from the Introduction to THE MESSAGE REMIX: The Bible in Contemporary Language. Copyright 2003 by Eugene Peterson. All rights reserved. Used with permission of NavPress, a division of The Navigators. www.navpress.com