1. Read several chapters or verses before and after the passage to ensure you understand what the passage is about.
2. RELATIVE PASSAGES BY THE HOLY SPIRIT Some parts of a passage will be more useful for your own prayer than others. Consider, for example, David’s prayer in; 1 Chronicles 17:16-27. We’re not kings over Israel, yet like David we can say, “Who am I, LORD God, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far?” and “There is no one like you, LORD, and there is no God but you, as we have heard with our own ears” (verses 16,20).
3. PRAY FROM YOUR PERSPECTIVES When we pray for a passage, the perspective might differ from that of the original speaker or writer. For instance, David prayed, “You, my God, have revealed to your servant that you will build a house for him” 1 Chronicles 17:25). While God has not promised to build us a house like David’s, He has promised that in His own house are many rooms and that He is preparing a place for us (John 14:1-4). We have to be careful about twisting the texts in a way that transforms their meaning. But when we pray the Scripture, we can include our own context in a Biblical way.
4. WE CAN PERSONALIZE OUR PRAYERS One of the best uses of praying Scripture is to expand our methods for praising God. By personalizing a passage, we can make almost any passage of Biblical adoration our own.
5. PRAYING THE PSALMS IN OUR PRAYERS One of the most obvious ways to pray for Scripture is to pray for the prayers found in Scripture. The Psalms, the prayer book of the Bible, are worthy of particular attention. When it comes to prayer, a primary stumbling block is the idea that when speaking to God we should be original and impromptu, that our prayers should be spoken “from the heart” and done without preparation. But when we look in the Bible, we find Christians praying the Psalms. For example, in Acts 4:24-26 all the believers pray Psalm 2. Even Jesus himself prayed using the Psalms: His dying prayer on the cross was a quotation of Psalm 2. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34).
Ben Patterson recommends an approach to praying the Psalms that can work for other Bible passages: Rejoice, Repent, Request.
To pray using Scripture, ask the following three questions:
1. What about a passage that gives you reason to rejoice, to give thanks and praise?
2. Is there something about this passage that reveals sin in my own life that should lead me to repentance?
3. Does the passage lead me to make a request of God for myself or others?
Prayer: Father God, I want to pray based on your words which represent your will. I want to pray to remember your word to be quoted while praying to make sure I am in accordance with your word that I may not pray away from your instructions. May your word continue to inspire my prayer life, in Jesus’s name Amen.
Continue reading the next section “Examples of Prayers in the Epistles.“