Prayer As Scripture Describes It

Nobody taught you how to pray. This book does.

Most of us were handed the theology and left to guess at the practice. Somebody taught us that we should pray, that God hears, and that it matters. Nobody taught us what to say, what is supposed to be happening in our heads while we say it, whether to speak out loud or think it, how long it ought to take, what to do when the mind wanders off in the middle, or how to know when we are finished.

Prayer as Scripture Describes It is a plain, practical guide to exactly those things - what prayer is, what it isn't, and how to do it - taken from the Bible, not from anyone's system.

Part One - What Prayer Is. What is actually happening when a person prays. Why we ask a God who already knows. Who we are talking to: the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. And what prayer does and does not promise.

Part Two - How a Prayer Is Made. The parts of a prayer. How to begin, when the first word is the hardest part. What turns a thought into a prayer - the single most useful thing in the book. Out loud or silent. Where, when, and how long. What to do with a mind that will not stay put. And how you know you are done.

Part Three - What to Say. Five things you can always say. Why borrowed words - the Lord's Prayer, the Psalms, a prayer someone else wrote down - are real prayer. Asking for ordinary things. Saying you are sorry. And what Scripture says to the person who does not know what to pray for at all.

A closing chapter, "What If Nothing Comes?", speaks to the reader who has read every page and still sits in silence. It does not scold, and it does not promise a feeling.

At the back is a collection of nearly forty prayers written out in full - for every day, for when something is wrong, for other people, for praying out loud in front of others, and prayers borrowed straight from the Bible. Grace at a table. A hospital room. A graveside. The night you cannot sleep. The moment someone asks you to pray with no warning.
Each chapter ends with questions for reflection and a brief prayer.

This is not a book of techniques. Nothing in it will make God more likely to say yes, and it says so plainly. There are no quotas, no required posture, no minimum length. What there is instead is the Bible's own description of prayer, laid out one piece at a time by a layman writing for ordinary believers - faithful to the historic Christian confession that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone, as revealed in Scripture alone.

You are not talking to a stranger.