by the Proverbs 31 Ministries Team
Pray without ceasing. That’s what God’s Word tells us to do in 1 Thessalonians 5:17. It’s one of the shortest, simplest verses in the Bible, but if we’re honest … doesn’t it seem kind of impossible?
What if your prayers feel like attempts to fill the silence in one-way conversations with a God who hears but seemingly never speaks?
What if you’re used to asking God for help in hard seasons, but you’re not sure what to talk to Him about the rest of the time?
What if you feel close to the Lord at church, but when you want to pray worshipful words on your own, it’s not the same?
But what if … prayer isn’t meant to be this complicated?
The book of Psalms in the Old Testament is filled with prayers God has graciously given us to show it is possible to pray without ceasing—but only if we let go of our impossible ideas about how we’re supposed to feel, what we’re supposed to say, and where we’re supposed to be when we come to Him.
As you study Psalms, you’ll be stunned by the writers’ freedom of expression: Some psalms are long and poetic, but others are shorter than a TV commercial. Some are prayers of joyful praise and gratitude, but others are miserable complaints—and many are both. Some prayers are directly connected to what the psalmists were experiencing, and other times the psalmists chose not to focus on their circumstances but instead looked to the transcendent. They talked to God about the past, and they talked to Him about the future, and they asked Him for strength and forgiveness and rescue and justice in the present.
Psalm 42:1 (ESV) says, “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.” And here’s the thing: Drinking water when we’re thirsty doesn’t feel like work. It isn’t exhausting, inconvenient or stressful, and we don’t need formal education or special skills to do it. Maybe prayer is the same way—it’s not just something we’re supposed to give to God but a way of receiving from Him everything we need. More than a continual challenge, prayer is a continual calling into deeper, sweeter, life-sustaining abiding with our heavenly Father.
What a relief!
1 John 5:14-15 (ESV) says, “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.”
Praying the psalms gives us a massive amount of words to pray when we can’t find words on our own. There is certainty when we pray the words of Scripture back to God. Praying in the Psalms can help you build a habit of daily praying “on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests” (Ephesians 6:18, NIV).
