Until recently, I have preferred not to use other people’s written prayers to aid my own. It seemed stilted and inauthentic. One class I took in seminary had us use a collection of written prayers in our devotions. It was part of an assignment, so of course I had to do it, and it was then that I started to reconsider. As we discussed our experience with these prayers in class, my professor explained that using these prayers was like entering into a dialogue. In reading and contemplating the words of another, we were forced out of our regular habits and learned new prayer vocabulary.
We all have a prayer vocabulary, a set of words and phrases and a kind of rhythm that we all fall into. My dad has prayed the same table blessing ever since I can remember. Many of us recite the Lord’s prayer or the blessing from Numbers 6 on certain occasions. Where has your prayer vocabulary come from? Some years ago, I was introduced to a short book by D.A. Carson which discussed every prayer of Paul in his New Testament letters. I’ve adopted his practice of using those prayers to expand my own prayer vocabulary. Adopting Paul’s prayers seemed like a good idea obviously – they’re Scripture! – but using other people’s prayers still felt uncomfortable.
Earlier this year, I made my way through an excellent book of collected prayers edited and written by Douglas Sean O’Donnell called the Daily Liturgy Devotional. He has laid out a 40-day journey through various prayers culled from Scripture, the church fathers, the Book of Common Prayer, and other resources, to guide you through eight different emphases: the Gospel, Faith, Love, Hope, Wisdom, Holiness, Perseverance, and Witness. I made my way slowly through it, taking a lot more than 40 days, but it helped me in ways I hadn’t considered and convinced me that written prayers can be a helpful aid in our devotional lives.
Focus
Who doesn’t struggle with distraction in prayer? There may be times when we should confess this kind of distraction as sin, especially if our wayward thoughts are tempting us in that direction, but I’m learning that the more common distractions – thinking about what’s for dinner, if you remembered to email someone – shouldn’t cause us shame but act as clues to where our heart is (read more about this in Kyle Strobel and John Coe’s excellent book, Where Prayer Becomes Real).
But back to these written prayers. What is so helpful about the way O’Donnell has organized them is that day after day you start experiencing a regular rhythm of moving through adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, and illumination. Many find this kind of regularity stifling and inauthentic. The argument goes like this, “Prayer is most real when I just open myself up to God and pour out my heart.” But I think we’ve set up a false dichotomy here, as if there was only one kind of genuine prayer. If you read through the whole Bible, you find examples of both. (See Nehemiah 1 for example.) I found the rhythm in O’Donnell’s book to be a helpful tool to focus me as I turned to the Lord in prayer.
Fellowship
My professor’s comments about seeing written prayers as entering into a dialogue was expanded as I traveled through O’Donnell’s 40 days. He introduced me to new prayer “partners” if you will, men and women from other periods of church history who expressed themselves with different vocabulary and approached God from different perspectives. One of the temptations of modernity is a kind of recency bias that believes only what’s new is valuable. It thumbs its nose at people who lived hundreds and even thousands of years ago, thinking there is nothing to learn from them. C.S. Lewis called it chronological snobbery. The Bible calls it conceit, refusing to count others as more significant than ourselves (Phil. 2:3). The church throughout history is the one body of Christ being remade into his image. It would be a shame not to listen to our brothers and sisters of old and learn how they prayed. They may have lived in a completely different place and time in history, but this means they have a unique perspective that influenced how they prayed.
The truth is, throughout church history, most believers followed a liturgical rhythm that included written out creeds, confessions, and prayers. This is helpful for us as weak and needy sinners, prone to wander and forget. The prayers of others that have been passed down through generations are time tested and can act as tutors and guardrails. So let’s not set up this false dichotomy that says one is better than the other. They’re both beneficial. Psalm 62 exhorts us to pour our hearts out to the Lord. But Jesus also gave us the Lord’s prayer to help guide us in how to pray.
