My home group is working through Graeme Goldsworthy’s Prayer and the Knowledge of God these days. It’s a great book, and if you haven’t read it you should—especially if you’re someone who believes with all your heart that God is sovereign in everything.

We had a great discussion last night about prayer, one that made me think about the public prayers in our church services. Why don’t our public prayers have more Scripture in them? Why don’t people stand up and just pray a Psalm, for example, word for word? Or one of Paul’s prayers? I don’t know the answer to the question “Why not,” but I’m convinced that churches ought to do that more.

Most of us think of prayer as a sort of billiards game: We pray, our prayers impact God, and God therefore acts in the world. In fact, if we can get enough people firing prayers off to God about the same thing, the impact on Him will be greater, and He will be more likely to act in the way we want Him to act. The biblical conception of prayer, though, is entirely different. It starts not with our desires, but with God’s revelation of His will. God tells us what He is going to do, He makes promises, and then our prayers are a matter of bringing our hearts into conformity with what He has revealed as His will.

I don’t want to do a whole theology of prayer here (unpacking the fact that our prayers are a means of God accomplishing his will in the world, for example). What I want to point out is that everything else aside, it is simply a fact that it is good and right to pray God’s own promises back to Him—which means taking a passage of Scripture and praying it back to God in the form of requests or praises.

If you listen to the public prayers that are prayed in most churches, most of them are made up of non-scriptural phrases. I don’t mean by that “unscriptural.” I just mean that the words we use to make requests of God are not those God has used to make promises to us. Where, for example, is “lead, guide and direct” in Scripture? Where are “traveling mercies?” I’m not saying that those things are wrong; I think something, at least, like all of them can be found in Scripture. But I am also convinced that our public prayers could be much more powerful if we filled them with promises God has already made to us. There are lots of reasons I say that: Scriptural prayers are filled with the massive meaning that is inherent inspired language.  They are energized by the assurance that God has already determined to do the things we're asking Him to do.  They are effective in molding the hearts of God’s people as we both hear and pray the words of Scripture.

You don’t have to limit your Scriptural prayers to the parts of Scripture that are actually prayers, either. You can turn just about any passage of Scripture into a prayer. Imagine a service where someone stood to lead the congregation in prayer, and instead of stringing together whatever phrases came to mind, opened his Bible and said something like this:
 

God our Savior, we praise you this morning because you have united us to your Son. We praise you because our old self has been crucified with him in order that our body of sin might be brought to nothing and that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. We have died with Christ, O God, and so we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him, for the death he died, he died to sin once for all, and the life he lives, he lives to You!

God help us, therefore, to consider ourselves, in this same way, dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Give us grace not to let sin reign in our mortal bodies. Help us not to obey sin’s passions. Strengthen us, Lord, so that we do not present our members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but give us grace to present our whole selves to You as those who have been brought from death to life, and to present the members of our bodies to You as instruments for righteousness. For sin has no dominion over us, because you have made us to live not under law, but under your grace. For that we thank you, and we pray all this in the name of our Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen!

We are a people, we say, who read the Scripture, preach the Scripture, sing the Scripture, and pray the Scripture. Being more deliberate about all that would be a very good thing.