Learning to Pray

For several months, I’ve appreciated the daily liturgical guides by Jonathan Gibson. Crossway has published a slew of these kinds of guides in recent years, like this one, this one, and this one.  While I’ve been a late adopter, the part of these guides that I’ve enjoyed the most are the excerpts of ancient prayers. 

Prayer is something we learn, as Dan Brendsel reminds us: 

Learning to pray is the single most important life skill worth acquiring, a starting point of sorts for lives that honor Christ and flourish in God-intended ways. (Answering Speech, 89)

These prayers, similar to The Valley of Vision, provide something like a grammar for how we address God. This is because they draw from Scripture itself and model for us how to do the same. 

Case in point, consider the prayer below, found in Gibson’s volume Be Thou My Vision. I’m afraid I’d rob the prayer of its beauty if I interjected my comments throughout, so I’ll note a couple of things as a prologue.

First, notice how the prayer begins with praise. The Christian is recounting to God who he is and what he has done. This one begins with a recognition of God’s utter sovereignty.

Second, the prayer then humbly moves into bold petition. The Christian “implores” our Father for wisdom, discernment, and contentment. And then he locates these petitions in the midst of these circumstances — adversity, clouds, weariness, temptations to vanity and short-sightedness. It’s beautiful, powerful, and deliberate, and it teaches us. We can pray this too:

The Prayer

O Almighty God, Father and Lord of all creatures, you have disposed all things and all chances so as may best glorify your wisdom, and serve the ends of your justice, and magnify your mercy, by secret and indiscernible ways bringing out of evil.

I most humbly implore you to give me wisdom from above, that I may adore you, and admire your ways and footsteps, which are in the great deep and not to be searched out.

Teach me to submit to your providence in all things, to be content in all changes of persons and condition; to be temperate in prosperity, and to read my duty in the lines of your mercy; and in adversity to be meek, patient, and resigned; and to look through the cloud, that I may wait for the consolation of the Lord, and the day of redemption … in the meantime doing my duty with an unwearied diligence and an undisturbed resolution, having no fondness for the vanities or possessions of this world, but laying up my hopes in heaven, and being strengthened with the spirit of the inner man, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.