Learn How to Pray

Speaking to God in the Language He Gives Us

One of the beautiful yet oft-overlooked works from Bonhoeffer is his short little book called Psalms: The Prayerbook of the Bible. Of course, given Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor, the idea of a prayerbook was central to his understanding of the work of prayer. In many traditions, prayerbooks are vital; in other traditions, prayer is more of a free-flowing, spontaneous utterance rather than a stylized or routinized recitation. It is easy to see that both traditions come with their strengths and their limitations – one is not “more right” than the other. That said, I do want to make a case for using Scripture in prayer more than we typically do, and by Scripture I mean specifically the Lord’s Prayer and the Psalms.

The early Christian communities were, at first, Jews who encountered the Messiah. Their worship had already been shaped by their ancestors, specifically Moses and David. Fixed-hours of prayer along with commonly repeated prayers from memory – such as The Shema and others – were routine practices. This is what is happening, for instance, in Acts 3 where the man at the gate Beautiful is healed. Peter and John, being devout Jews, are going up “at the hour of prayer,” and their prayers would have been the utterances handed down to them from Israel’s fathers. For Christians, we have the same access to Israel’s prayerbook, along with the prayer that Jesus himself gave us – the Lord’s Prayer, also known as the “Our Father.”

Here’s a short quote from Bonhoeffer’s Psalms to help us begin thinking about praying rightly:

“Lord, teach us to pray!” So spoke the disciples to Jesus. In doing so, they were acknowledging that they were not able to pray on their own; they had to learn. “To learn to pray” sounds contradictory to us. Either the heart is so overflowing that it begins to pray by itself, we say, or it will never learn to pray. But this is a dangerous error, which is certainly very widespread among Christians today, to imagine that it is natural for the heart to pray. We then confuse wishing, hoping, sighing, lamenting, rejoicing – all of which the heart can certainly do on its own – with praying. But in doing so we confuse earth and heaven, human beings and God. Praying certainly does not mean simply pouring out one’s heart. It means, rather, finding the way to and speaking with God, whether the heart is full or empty. No one can do that on one’s own. For that one needs Jesus Christ.

Continuing, he gives a crucial insight into his prayer logic:

Therefore, we must learn to pray. The child learns to speak because the parent speaks to the child. The child learns the language of the parent. So we learn to speak to God because God has spoken and speaks to us. In the language of the Father in heaven God’s children learn to speak with God. Repeating God’s own words, we begin to pray to God. We ought to speak to God and God wishes to hear us, not in the false and confused language of our heart but in the clear and pure language that God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ.

God’s speech in Jesus Christ meets us in the Holy Scriptures. If we want to pray with assurance and joy, then the word of Holy Scripture must be the firm foundation of our prayer. Here we know that Jesus Christ, the Word of God, teaches us to pray. The words that come from God will be the steps on which we find our way to God.

Bonhoeffer succinctly makes his case for praying the Scriptures. Like children, we learn to speak rightly by listening to the voice of our parents. So it is with prayer. To become “good” at praying, we learn to speak rightly by listening closely to the language the Father has given to us – the language specifically of the Psalms and the Lord’s Prayer.

Bonhoeffer goes on:

Now there is in the Holy Scriptures one book that differs from all other books of the Bible in that it contains only prayers. That book is the Psalms. At first it is something very astonishing that there is a prayerbook in the Bible. The Holy Scriptures are, to be sure God’s Word to us. But prayers are human words. How then do they come to be in the Bible?

And then, Bonhoeffer answers:

We grasp it only when we consider that we can learn true prayer only from Jesus Christ… Jesus Christ has brought before God every need, every joy, every thanksgiving, and every hope of humankind. In Jesus’ mouth the human word becomes God’s Word. When we pray along with the prayer of Christ, God’s Word becomes again a human word. Thus all prayers of the Bible are such prayers, which we pray together with Jesus Christ… If we want to read and to pray the prayers of the Bible, and especially the Psalms, we must not, therefore, first ask what they have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ… Thus is does not matter whether the Psalms express exactly what we feel in our heart at the moment we pray. Perhaps it is precisely the case that we must pray against our own heart in order to pray rightly… [It is] not the poverty of our heart, but the richness of God’s word, [that] ought to determine our prayer.

And finally, the Lord’s Prayer:

At the request of the disciples, Jesus gave them the Lord’s Prayer. In it every prayer is contained. Whatever enters into the petitions of the Lord’s prayer is prayed aright; whatever has no place in it, is no prayer at all. All the prayers of the Holy Scriptures are summed up in the Lord’s Prayer and are taken up into its immeasurable breadth. They are, therefore, not made superfluous by the Lord’ Prayer, but are rather the inexhaustible riches of the Lord’s Prayer, just as the Lord’s Prayer is their crown and unity. Luther says of the Psalter: ‘It runs through the Lord’s Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer runs through it, so that it is possible to understand one on the basis of the other and to bring them into joyous harmony.’ The Lord’s Prayer thus become the touchstone for whether we pray in the name of Jesus Christ or in our own name. It makes good sense, then, that the Psalter is very often bound together with the New Testament. It is the prayer of the church of Jesus Christ. It belongs to the Lord’s Prayer.

For early Christians, the Lord’s Prayer was so central that the Didache instructs followers of Jesus to pray it at least three times a day. A prayer life anchored in the Psalms and the Our Father is sure to be effectual, fervent, and availing.

As we all know, prayer has many dimensions, deeper levels, and ever-enriching streams. Neither I (nor Bonhoeffer) think that all prayer should be restricted simply to Scripture recitation. What I (and Bonhoeffer) would argue is that Scripture must be at the very foundation of our prayer. It is our roots. It must give our prayer language its shape and trajectory. James is clear – we can pray amiss. Scripture shows us what right praying looks like.

I’ve often heard there is no “manual” on how to pray. I would politely disagree. There is a profound manual of prayer, filled with the petitions and intercessions of untold numbers of the faithful who have prayed them for millennia. Let’s enter into their historic voice, the voice of the Church.

Let’s pray in the language our Father gave us, the language of Jesus Christ.