7 Ways to PraySample

God’s Word to Us: Praying with the Bible

An experience that made me feel rejected when I was thirteen became an opportunity for God to open his Word to me. Although there were more guys than girls at camp that week, I was the lone girl not to be paired off. When one of the guy campers mocked my single status, I scurried back to my tent to hide in shame. My camp counselor tried to comfort me, but I pretended to be asleep. 

But a few days after I arrived home, the group leader wrote to encourage me. She included a reference to Philippians 1:3-6, which I looked up eagerly. When I read the apostle Paul’s words to the church he loved in Philippi, I felt for the first time that God was speaking to me. That indeed he had begun a “good work” in me and that he’d “carry it on to completion” (v. 6). I started to believe deep within that God cared for me.  

As I found in those formative years, God’s Spirit opens his Word to our hearts, helping us to grow in maturity. He sparks into life the words that he breathed into being so many centuries ago. As we pray with the Bible, God equips us for life in his Kingdom. 

Just as I learned to pray through the words of Scripture, so too can you use God’s Word as a prayer. I invite you to sit with the words of Paul to the Philippians, turning them over in your head and your heart. You could speak them out in your own words or fashion them into a prose poem. Know that God will carry on to completion the good work he has started—or longs to begin—in you.

Creator God, thank you for the gift of the Bible. Help me not only to study it but to use it to enrich and deepen my prayers. Speak to me through it, that I might receive your love, peace, and grace.