Ben Pearce: Personal Topic 2 Post 4

Sacred Communication when Prayer is Boring

Student Topic

A Future Prayer Endeavor

            There is not a single Christian who has not felt inadequate during their prayer, both public and private. Believers tend to use the same words and the same style each time. I cannot count how many times I have grown tired of saying things like, “God you are good, please provide for me, please keep me from sin, and please let me be in your will”. While this kind of prayer is not bad to pray, it begins to sound dull, and we start to lose the joy in our prayer lives. We also start feeling irritated at other’s prayers in public because they sound so similar.  Eventually, these words we have once used lose all their meaning, and we recite them in a zombie-like trance. The problem with this is that mindlessly saying the same thing is not prayer; prayer is a conversation between a believer and the Almighty. When it comes to zombifying our prayers, we lose confidence in devotion to Christ. One thing that I believe has helped me is memorizing scripture and then praying it back to God with any passage relevant to your message:

“Have mercy on me, O God,
    according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
    and cleanse me from my sin!”

Psalm 51:1-2

 “[Let me] rejoice in [my] sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put [me] to shame, because God's love has been poured into [my] heart through the Holy Spirit who has been given to [me]”.

Romans 5:3-5

The possibilities are any combination of exactly 31,102 verses. This allows us to read God’s own words to us back to him, and the language allows us to pray to God in a manner similar to how his apostles and prophets prayed to him. This makes the sacred communication of prayer to God more diverse and exciting.