I’m not a huge fan of following instructions. Assembly instructions that is. I don’t know what it is, but when I buy something that needs to be put together, I rarely go to the user manual first. No, instead I fumble my way through putting the item together for hours before I finally hit a roadblock and I’m forced to open up the manual that would have told me how to do it in the first place.
I’m not sure what it is about me and so many men that make me despise being told how to put something together. We’d rather just figure it out on our own and stumble our way through.
That’s not always a bad thing. You tend to learn a lot more when you figure things out on your own, but you also run the risk of breaking something in the process (I’ve done that a couple of times trying to assemble my kid's toys when they were younger).
For years I did the same with prayer. I stumbled through it, not really knowing what I was doing and where I was going with it. Obviously, spending any time in prayer is a good thing. Spending time with the Lord will always be beneficial, but for me, not really knowing what I was doing led to frustration with prayer over time and then eventually to giving up on it altogether. I needed some “training wheels” and some direction to help me with prayer.
It wasn’t until I realized that there is so much prayer in scripture that God gave us that we can simply pray back to Him, that my prayer life (which I’m still working on) began to mature. Scripture provides a scaffolding or a “framework” for our prayers that we can build on during our time of prayer. At first, my prayer time simply consisted of reading prayers found in Scripture out loud, such as many of the Psalms. Over time, however, as prayer became more natural, I found myself interweaving my own prayer and songs of praise.
I humbly admit that my prayer life is probably not where it needs to be, but I’m thankful that the Lord gave us his Word, which is Holy and pleasing to God and totally appropriate for use as a basis for prayer. For someone who struggles sometimes with coming up with the right words, I’m so thankful that I can lean on scripture as a basis of my prayer. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that when I use Scripture as my basis of prayer, my time with the Lord is so much more encouraging and meaningful.
Your word is a lamp to guide my feet and a light for my path – Psalm 119:105
“Lord, thank you for the gift of scripture, and for the gift of prayer. Thank you that the two are not mutually exclusive but you gave them to us to work in harmony with each other so that we could know you. Thank you that you don’t expect us to have perfect prayers and that it’s OK to simply pray the very words you gave us, back to you. Lord, I pray for me and for GENESIS that at the end of these 21 days that our prayers would not sound more eloquent, or be a little longer, or sound a little more polished but rather that our prayers would be soaked with scripture and simply reflect how much we adore you and your truth.”
