How to Pray the Scriptures

Praying the Scriptures means using the biblical text itself as the content and language of prayer. You read a passage slowly and return it to God as praise, confession, petition or thanks.

It is not reciting verses as a formula. It is letting the text teach you what to ask for and how to ask — because spontaneous prayer, left to itself, tends to circle the same five concerns.

Why prayer needs vocabulary

Anyone who prays only off the cuff discovers, after a while, that they pray almost always the same thing: health, work, family, travel, exams. There is nothing wrong with those requests. The problem is what gets left out.

Compare that with what Paul asks for the churches: enlightened understanding, knowledge of the hope of their calling, strengthening in the inner person, capacity to grasp the breadth and length of Christ’s love, discernment to approve what is excellent. Almost none of that shows up on an ordinary prayer list.

Praying the Scriptures is the most direct way to widen the agenda.

How to do it, in practice

1. 1

   Choose a short passage

   A psalm, a paragraph from a letter, a biblical prayer. Too long and you read without praying.
2. 2

   Read slowly, twice

   On the second reading, stop where something holds your attention. Do not force it: some phrase will.
3. 3

   Convert it line by line

   Each line becomes a prayer. The text supplies the content; you supply the names, situations and circumstances.
4. 4

   Personalize without distorting

   Swapping "they" for "I" is legitimate. Swapping the text’s meaning so it fits what you wanted to ask is not.
5. 5

   End in silence

   One minute without speaking. Prayer does not have to be all transmission.

Where to start: the Psalms

The Psalms are the obvious starting point, because they already are prayers. The Psalter was the prayer book of Israel and of the early church, and the language it offers is permissive in a way that polite prayer is not: there is lament, confusion, outrage, joy and accusation.

Five to begin with:

• Psalm 23 — trust in provision and presence
• Psalm 51 — confession, after the best-known fall in the Old Testament
• Psalm 63 — thirst for God, written in the wilderness
• Psalm 103 — structured gratitude, "forget not all his benefits"
• Psalm 139 — being fully known, and still upheld

Example: praying Psalm 23:1

Text: "Yahweh is my shepherd; I shall lack nothing."

A possible prayer: "Lord, you are my shepherd — not a distant advisor, but the one who leads. I confess that today I act as though something were lacking: I worried about [concrete situation] as if there were no shepherd. Teach me to recognize you as shepherd in that specific area."

The text supplied the assertion; you brought the situation. That is praying Scripture.

Paul’s prayers

After the Psalms, the prayers recorded in Paul’s letters are the most useful material — especially for praying for other people.

A simple practice: choose one of these prayers and pray it for one specific person for a week, replacing "you" with their name. In seven days you will have asked for that person things you would never have thought to ask.

The prayer Jesus taught

The Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13) was not given only to be recited, but as a structural model. Each line opens a space to be filled:

• "Hallowed be your name" — where does God’s name need to be honored today, in my life and in the world?
• "Your Kingdom come" — which concrete situations do I want to see under God’s rule?
• "Your will be done" — where am I resisting his will?
• "Our daily bread" — what is an actual need today, not for the whole month?
• "Forgive us our debts" — what do I need to confess? And whom do I need to forgive?
• "Bring us not into temptation" — what is my specific vulnerability this week?

Working the six lines with your own content takes ten minutes and covers ground that improvised prayer rarely reaches.

The difficult psalms

An honest question comes up early: how do you pray the imprecatory psalms, the ones asking judgment on enemies?

Three observations help.

First, the psalmist is handing judgment over to God, not carrying out revenge. It was precisely by bringing his anger to God that he did not discharge it with his own hands. That is the opposite of violence: it is the renunciation of retaliation.

Second, many of these psalms cry out for justice in the face of real oppression — violence, exploitation, lies. Reading them from comfort is not the same as reading them from persecution.

Third, in light of the New Testament these psalms become prayer for God’s final judgment on evil, accompanied by the explicit command to love the actual enemy:

Both things coexist: the confidence that God will do justice, and the command that I not do it myself.

What changes after a while

Those who pray the Scriptures for a few months usually notice three changes.

Prayer becomes less anxious, because the text insists on recalling who God is before arriving at the request. It becomes less repetitive, because the Bible’s agenda is larger than ours. And it becomes more honest, because the Psalms authorize saying things polite prayer keeps quiet.

Keep going

Praying the text fits naturally inside a routine: how to keep a consistent daily devotional shows where this practice belongs. And if you want those texts available from memory, how to memorize Bible verses covers the methods that work.