Do you ever find yourself rushing into God’s presence with a whole collection of jumbled ideas? We do, in common with many other leaders. Of course there are times when we just want to say as little as a single word to God like ‘help’ or ‘why?’ but we also find there are occasions when we want to record the traffic of our souls more carefully in order to communicate at a deeper level with our heavenly Father. It is in times like these that we turn to scripted praying.
The essence of this type of praying is writing a text or a script that says what we want to say more clearly or precisely that our every-day rattling through a prayer outline. This is for the special occasions, the key moments, the watersheds of life and there is a sound biblical precedent for it.
In Ecclesiastes the preacher said
“Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.”
While at first this sounds as if he’s telling us not to say too much to God, in reality he is drawing a useful contrast. Much of our praying is routine commonplace verbiage so the preacher urges us to be a little less careless with our words when we pray and to choose then more accurately. Our experience is that this catapults our praying to a higher level of communication with God. This goes against the grain for some Christians, particularly those of us brought up in a free evangelical milieu where spontaneity is prized so highly. So how do we go about scripted praying? It normally takes on a shape which involves these steps
settle on what you’re praying about
Our scripted prayers have been written yearly for our children, at special anniversaries, when we are anticipating major change in our lives or when life has been particularly tough.
take some time out to choose your words carefully
Neither of us are great wordsmiths so we find we need to think more carefully about what we want to say to our heavenly father. These prayers are not intended to be great works of literature, they are simply the outpouring of our souls to God who in his grace hears and responds to the joy or the yearnings of his children. We find Paul’s word in Romans 8 very reassuring in this respect
The holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. (Romans 8:26)
So even, after thinking so carefully about the content of our prayer, we can’t find the words to accurately say wha we wish we could say our heavenly father interprets the longings of our hearts by the Spirit.
select a time and place to pray your prayer.
We usually select a place that is relevant to the matter we’re praying about. When, for example, we wrote a prayer to thank God for thirty years of marriage we prayed it at the end of the special holiday we’d splashed out on as a celebration. When we prayed about our daughter’s death we chose the one place on the planet where I would love to have baptised her and as we wept buckets over losing her we had a deep assurance that our heavenly Father was meeting with us in a time of pain.
Keep it in a special place
We find we return to these prayers. They become special things that bring back to us the goodness of God and the depth of our feelings at the time.
A good example of this in the Bible is Nehemiah. In Nehemiah 1 we read his prayer for the tumble=down city of Jerusalem. By comparing the dates in the first and second chapters of his book we discover that his prayer was the consistent traffic of his soul over a period of three months. The prayer we have recorded was the digest of that praying over that time. No wonder God answered!
A personal example
‘Heaven Day’ is our prayer in which we thank the Lord for our daughter Esther. It took us several weeks to complete and there were many tears along the way but we want you to share our gratitude to God for such a precious daughter.
Some friends who live in Grand Cayman invited us to stay with them and we knew we would pray our prayer there. The location was to be Smith Cove (yep, the one in the picture) where they perform their baptisms. This place was significant to us because, although she was ready to be baptised, Esther never took that step for some highly principled reasons. It would have been her dad’s great delight to have baptised her in this cove which I regard as one of the most exquisite baptismal pools in the world.
Bluff Cove, near Georgetown, Grand Cayman
So we prayed it for the first time on the day which would have been her 23rd birthday. So many people have asked to see it that we’ve agreed to it being published here. Although it will never touch your soul in the same way it touched ours, we hope you will meet with God as you read it and catch a glimpse of the person we loved for 22 years.
