Pray for One Another
We are encouraged in Scripture to “pray for one another.” I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get stuck in a rut. I find myself praying repetitively something akin to “Lord, bless so-and-so.” Unless that person has given me a specific prayer request, I find myself at a loss for what to pray. Learning the art of praying the Scriptures has helped me tremendously in overcoming this barrier to praying more effectively.
Praying the Scriptures is simply taking what the Bible exhorts, commands, condemns, or promises and turning it into a topic for prayer. In other words, when you are praying the Scriptures, you are praying about the things that God’s Spirit has revealed to be God’s will. You are echoing God’s word back to him in the form of a prayer.
Some things are better caught than taught, and this might be one of them. Here is an example of this kind of praying from Anselm, once the Archbishop of Canterbury. In part, this prayer is a meditation on Galatians 5:22 which is a listing of the fruit of the Spirit, but it also incorporates a bit of our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount:
O merciful God, fill our hearts, we pray you, with the graces of your Holy Spirit, with love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. Teach us to love those who hate us; to pray for those who despitefully use us; that we may be the children of you, our Father, who makes your sun to shine on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
Amen.
