Growing in Personal Prayer

I am weak in prayer. I long to be more effective and, in some way, more attuned to God's heart and mind when I pray. Praying the Lord’s Prayer, the Psalms, and the Prayers of the Apostles in their letters is a safe guide, and these passages lend us the language we so desperately need for communion with God. 

Yet, when it comes to our daily and sometimes highly specific requests we offer to God, our coming before him to ask great things of our great God, I know my heart is never completely moved by pure motives, my mind doesn’t come close to understanding what I should ask for, and my attention too often strays. That reality makes me very thankful Paul wrote, “We don’t know how to pray as we should…” (Romans 8:26). If he knew that ancient Christians didn’t know how to pray, then at least I am in good company. 

It’s also true that prayer - communion with God the Father mediated through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit - is the oxygen of faithfulness. Even so, prayer can feel like a struggle for many of us - something we know we should do but often find difficult to sustain. Here’s the good news: just as we can grow in any spiritual discipline, we can also grow in the grace of personal prayer. We can nurture a vibrant, life-giving prayerful relationship with God by learning from wise guides and taking practical steps.

Wisdom from Experienced Guides

Andrew Murray, the renowned 19th-century pastor and author, emphasized the need for perseverance in prayer. Writing about Jesus’ word that we must "pray and not faint,” Murray observed that persistent prayer is essential to seeing God's greatest blessings in our lives. Too often, we simply give up too easily and too quickly.

Joni Eareckson Tada, who has spent decades as a quadriplegic, has modeled this unwavering prayer life. Despite relentless pain and limitation, she wrote, "Prayer is the most important thing I do each day.” That daily dimension of prayer is undoubtedly central to perseverance in prayer - and life itself!

Growing in prayer isn’t just about perseverance—it's also about nurturing a spirit of humility and dependence on God. John Calvin taught that prayer should flow from a humble heart that recognizes its need for God's grace and provision. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, he wrote that prayer is rooted in humble repentance: “One of the requisites of legitimate prayer is repentance.”

We do need humility in our praying (“we don’t know how to pray…”), but private prayer is itself a mark of humility, and its absence is a telltale sign of our self-sufficiency. As we approach God's throne in prayer, we come emptied of self-reliance and filled with a posture of weakness that allows God's strength to be made perfect in our frailties. True prayer isn’t a parade of our self-righteousness but a confession of our brokenness and weakness.

Growing in prayer also means learning to respond to God's Word. In his book "A Praying Life," Paul Miller encourages believers to use the Scriptures as a blueprint for their prayers, allowing the truth of God's Word to shape their requests and praises. Ann Voskamp agrees, writing, "The way we word the words of our prayers matters...God's words first shape the wording of our words." Again, let the Psalms and the prayers of the Apostles, together with the Lord’s prayer, do the heavy lifting here. Praying our way into and through Psalm 139 or Ephesians 1:15-23 over our churches is a great way to begin. 

The late Tim Keller highlights that true wisdom, which should guide our prayers, is found in Christ himself. Keller noted that "the life and teachings of Jesus Christ are the ultimate source of wisdom, offering comfort and insight." As we pray with the wisdom embodied in Christ, our prayers are shaped by humility, truth, and an understanding of God's will for our lives, families, and those we serve. It’s why Keller also observed that when we trust God as we pray, we can leave the outcome to him. He frequently said of prayer that believers can rest in the assurance that God will either give us what we asked for or what we most truly needed if we had known what to ask for to begin with, a knowledge we often don’t and can’t possess. 

Practical Steps

Practically speaking, growing in personal prayer requires developing habits and routines. If prayer is a “first thing” (not all moms of young children can make it that!), it has to mean NOT doing a few things. We should avoid turning to our cell phones or computers as the first activity in our day; make every effort to avoid them. If you use them for prayer or listening to the Bible being read to you (all good!), stay away from email, scrolling, and other distractions before you begin to pray. If you dive straight into work or entertainment, prayer will definitely get pushed out.

Setting aside a dedicated time each day for prayer, finding a quiet place free from distractions, using a prayer journal or app to guide your thoughts, or joining a prayer group for support and encouragement is helpful. The specifics aren't as important as simply taking steps to make prayer a non-negotiable priority. John Calvin wrote, "We are liable through the greater part of the day to the distracting influence of a variety of business, from the hurry of which, without laying some sort of bridle on our minds, we cannot escape. It is, therefore, useful to have certain hours set apart for prayer, not that we should restrict ourselves to hours, but that we may be prevented from neglecting prayer, which ought to be viewed by us as of more importance than all the cares of life."

I’d also commend recognizing prayer in our breathing, quietly lifting up others by name, or sighing our desires to God as we move through the day. It can begin with a simple sentence. I start the day saying the words of the prodigal. My feet hit the floor, and my heart confesses, “I will arise and go to my Father.” My feet also move quickly to the coffee pot, but that’s so the rest of my praying doesn’t immediately lead to sleep! 

It might mean offering a line of Scripture that stood out in a daily reading or Sunday message as prayer. We might read and be struck by, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” and turn that into a prayer for all who grieve significant loss and suffer deep wounds, including ourselves. 

Offering very simple but powerful words is another way to pray. The “Jesus Prayer” in the Orthodox tradition is a great example: “Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me.” That’s a wonderful prayer to raise for oneself; it’s also a good prayer for others, especially when we have no idea how to pray for them. We all need God’s mercy, and he will meet us with his lovingkindness in whatever form is most needed. 

Collecting and praying the prayers of Christians over the centuries and learning from their example the language of praise and petition is profoundly helpful to our own praying. Thomas Cranmer's prayers in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer are an excellent place to begin building such a treasure. 

Above all else, start by praying the Psalms. Read them as Christ saying them and praying them over you. Pray them as his desire for you and those you love, for his Church, and for all who don’t yet know him. In the Psalms, we don't just speak to God; we listen to Him speaking to us, guiding us step by step through the landscape of grace. The Psalms become a mirror to our souls, reflecting our deepest needs and desires back to us as prayer lifted by us to God. St. Augustine wrote that by “Praising God in the words of the Psalms, we can come to know Him better. Knowing Him better, we love Him better; loving Him better, we find our happiness in Him.” This is the great end of prayer and of our whole life.

Don’t Give Up

Growing in prayer is about nurturing our communion with the Triune God. We learn to pray to the Father through the mediation of Jesus’ Name in the power of the Spirit. It's about coming to know God more deeply, resting in his promise more securely, and aligning our hearts more entirely with His will. As we persevere in prayer with humility, grounding our requests in God's Word and the wisdom of Christ, we open doors for the Lord to transform us and grow our trust in and dependence on his ever-new mercies. 

The journey of growing in prayer is a lifelong education filled with mountaintop experiences, the mundane, and even seasons of spiritual dryness and struggle. But as we lean into God's promises and the wisdom of those who have gone before us, we can have confidence that our faithful God will meet us, speak to us by what he has spoken in Scripture, and change us as we pray. Prayer isn’t our effort to pry from God’s unwilling hand the supply he alone can give; it’s our trusting communion with the Father who loves us and longs to hear our voice more than we love to raise it to him. 

When Paul wrote, “We don’t know how to pray as we should,” he followed it immediately with, “But the Spirit helps us…” That’s our constant encouragement in prayer. Do I know how to pray? Not really. Are my prayers fruitful and effective? Not like I wish they were. But the Holy Spirit is working in my praying, despite my many weaknesses, and he knows what’s needed even when I don’t. He is interceding, and in the end, it is his intercession underneath, all around, and filling our often frail and mixed-up prayers that will make them pleasing to God and acceptable before his throne but powerful instruments in his mighty hands.

Let us pray.