Praying Scripture, or Out of Scripture
Learning to pray from the Bible
When Jesus’ disciples asked him to teach them to pray, like J the B did with his disciples, he gave them a simple template:
Pray for God’s interests first (His glory, kingdom and will), and only then
Pray for our own interests second (your daily needs, forgiveness and leading)
Now, there are two ways to apply this, and both are right, and both have their place.
The first is simply “praying Scripture.” That is, we follow the words of a particular passage very closely, perhaps word-for-word. This is especially helpful when you run across Paul’s prayers in Scripture. They are all outgrowths of Jesus’ primary template above, and we do well to simply imitate how he prays. That alone will provide us a spiritual chiropractic adjustment.
But the second way is “praying out of Scripture.” I’ve only added two words, but the difference is important. By “praying out of Scripture” I mean taking any particular passage and using it as a springboard into any number of paths of prayer, all of them shaped by 1) God’s interests first, 2) then ours.
For instance, today in my Bible reading I read about Josiah’s reforms, in 2 Chronicles 34. Check: to call them “reforms” is true but also shortchanging it. Josiah, at age 20, was inspired by the Lord to wipe the land clean of the idols that proliferated under his predecessor Manasseh. The text records that he
Purged the land of idols (3)
Ground them down and desecrated the graves of those who worshiped them with their dust (4)
Burned the bones of their priests and scattered the dust on the residual bases of their idols (5)
And he did this everywhere under his realm, not just where it was obvious, geographically-convenient or easy (6-7)
Now, the question is, “How to pray out of this text?” Obviously the text is about idolatry. Do we have idols that we harbor in our hearts? Does our family, church and land? Yes and yes, yes, yes. So there is the need for repentance. But why? Here is where Jesus’ template checks us. Our need for repentance is first not about us, but about God. The first and most important thing is His glory, not our holiness. Our prayer for holiness is not about making ourselves better before His face, but seeing His face seen more clearly in us, and in our world.
That kneejerk concern for self is itself the wellspring of all our idolatry. So yes, we are to pray for repentance from idols, but not first for ourselves, but for God. For the sake of the hallowing of His name, in here and out there. This is humbling, and the humbling must go further. There are idols that we know are there, but the reason they remain is that we are more like Manasseh than we think. Our idols have made us sluggish. We don’t want what we should want; we tolerate them because we like them. Thus the next step of the prayer is that God would give us an ambition to tear them all down; to do the hard work that it takes to dig them out, topple them over and grind them up.
And lastly, that He would enable us - not “help” but “enable” - to topple and grind them up everywhere they are present. In the unseen corners of ourselves, our family and our church, but also in the community. Paul got into one of his greatest presentations of the gospel because he was “moved” by all the idols of Athens. The reason our society is the way it is today is because of evil men; yes, that much is true. But it is just as much because good men are too lethargic or disinterested to do anything about it. We are too self-centered with maintaining our comfy lives to care.
To pray “out of Scripture” means praying for God’s glory, in me and in my world, by changing our hearts to possess a holy ambition to see idolatry eliminated, wherever it is found. The post-cross method of idol-elimination is by the preaching of the gospel, starting to ourselves. As one famous sermon put it, when a greater love enters the heart and the world, it leaves no room for and expels the old loves. May God give us a holy, youthful ambition to see it happen.