Some Practical Tips for Your Prayer (and Listening) Life

Recently I offered a friend some advice on praying and listening.  I am reproducing some of the material here in an edited version in hope that it is beneficial.  These tips grow out of my own walk with God but I hope they prove helpful to you also.

The question about listening to God is a common one.  Wandering minds are as much of a hindrance to prayer and listening as are wicked minds.  The devil really doesn’t care what we set our mind on as long as it isn’t God and His Word.  Our common mistake is to treat prayer and listening as two distinct things and they are really two dimensions of the same thing – communion with God.  All real communication is twofold.  There is speaking and feedback.  Dividing up our time with God into neat compartments like “prayer” when God hears me and “listening” when I hear Him isn’t the stuff of relationships; it’s the stuff of religious jargon.  My time with the Lord must always be speaking and hearing at every point.  To state it more correctly, it must be hearing and speaking.  Our best prayers are off-base without the Spirit’s tutelage.  If I don’t hear from God at the outset, the onset and throughout my time with Him it won’t be time with Him.  It will be time with myself I pass off as time with Him.  Hurry is the death of prayer but if I sit long enough before the Lord he will speak volumes and a great deal of what He has to say I am disinclined to hear.

Here are some practical tips I have learned through the years:

1.       Whatever I wake up thinking about in the morning I assume to be the appropriate place to start my conversation with God.  God doesn’t slumber or sleep and I expect Him to direct my thoughts appropriately at an hour I may be incapable of truly focusing them.

2.       Certainly specific aspects of prayer (praise, thanksgiving, confession, intercession and petition) should be included in our praying but resist the temptation of believing that the same order must be duplicated everyday and on every occasion.  The psalmists certainly did not do that.  Be free enough to respond to what God is saying through your spirit, His Spirit and His Word.

3.       The greatest prayer warriors (and listeners) have been people who incessantly prayed Scripture.  The only way  I can be sure I‘m praying a perfect prayer is to pray perfect Scripture back to God.  George Muller, arguably the greatest man of faith since apostolic times, said he never had success in prayer until He learned to pray Scripture.  When I pray what God has already spoken He speaks again and with clarity and authority.

4.       Trust me, when I pray Scripture, either from memory or from the Bible before me God has more to say than I can possibly absorb.

5.       The apostles gave themselves to the ministry of prayer and the Word.  The two are forever wed.  Prayer without the Word becomes fanaticism, emotionalism and/or mysticism.  The Word without prayer becomes intellectualism and formalism.  The two hold each other in balance at any and all points of the divine communication process.

6.       Sufficient is the evil of the day.  Manna should be gathered daily.  We pray for and receive our daily bread.  God’s mercies are renewed each new day.  God sometimes gives long-range plans but most of what He says is for the moment.  If I obey Him today He has something more to say tomorrow.

7.       The most significant things God says are not new but reinforcements of truths we thought we already understood.

It's on my mind and from my heart!