Engaging in prayer
Additional resources
Additional prayer practices
Alongside prayer are other additional practices that can help us to deepen our relationship with God such as silence, solitude, contemplation and fasting. Many have found these practices helpful in drawing close to God and sometimes as an aid to prayer.
Going on retreat can be a helpful practice in growing in our knowledge of God through an intensive and extended time in studying the Bible and prayer. Retreats often include practices of solitude and silence which can allow a stronger and clearer focus on our relationship with God. Taking a day or even a number of days to soak in God’s word, to reflect deeply and to respond can be powerful and even life changing, particularly when grappling with big issues.
Spending time in nature as part of solitude, silence and retreat can be a way to draw close to God. Appreciating and savouring beauty with wonder, awe, fascination and enchantment can be powerful ways of seeing and knowing God.
Worship is another practice that deepens our relationship with God. Worship includes many things. It includes prayer as we praise God for all that he is. It can be fuelled by what we learn of God in scripture. But it can also be fuelled by what see of God in nature.
Worship can be expressed in prayer but can also be expressed in prose or poetry or song. These can help us to worship and draw near to God and grow close. For one example of poems, visit: www.youtube.com/@xyangbridgingthegap/featured (subtitled in English and Chinese).
Singing alone or with others or listening to hymns and Christian songs can be an important part of engaging our hearts in worship. Consider building your own playlist of favourite songs that you can listen to as you walk, travel to work or just sit.
Additional prayer tools
Prayer methods
PRAY (Pause, Rejoice, Ask, Yield) www.navigators.org/resource/howtopray/
ACTS (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication)
Prayer tool
Prayermate app – provides easy recording of things and people to pray for including attaching pdfs and allows scheduling of different groups, eg church, family, work
Books
*Pete Greig, How to Pray
Richard J. Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home
Articles
Henri Nouwen, Bringing Solitude into Our Lives (Renovare website resources)
Quotes for reflection
Prayer
What do you think about these quotes about prayer? Are they helpful? Are they saying what the Bible says?
"The basic purpose of prayer is not to bend God's will to mine but to mould my will into his".
Timothy Keller, Christian theologian, pastor and author
“The primary purpose of prayer is to bring us into such a life of communion with the Father that we are conformed into the image of his son Jesus Christ. We are inwardly taken over, changed, transformed.”
"Simply put, prayer is all the ways in which we communicate and commune with God. The fundamental purpose of prayer is to deepen our intimacy with God. Early in the spiritual life we experience this intimacy primarily through the words we say to God, and there is deep satisfaction in it.”
"as God’s precious image-bearers, we’re hardwired for relationship with God. The primary means God has designed for nurturing that relationship is prayer."
Christopher Hall, A Different Way: Recentering the Christian Life Around Following Jesus
"The goal of spiritual practices like prayer, worship, scripture reading, and the like is to become properly formed as a being who bears the imago Dei—the image of God. Thus, the primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what we want God to do but to be properly formed—to become the person God created us to be."
Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes
“Prayer is communication with God about what He and I are doing together.”
“Prayer — secret, fervent, believing prayer — lies at the root of all personal godliness.”
“What if the hour you spend in the prayer room is when you refocus on Jesus so that you can carry his presence with you into the other twenty-three hours of the day with a heightened awareness that he is with you, he is for you, that he likes you, that he hears your thoughts?”
“The Spirit of prayer makes us so intimate with God that we scarcely pass through an experience before we speak to Him about it, either in supplication, in sighing, in pouring out our woes before Him, in fervent requests, or in thanksgiving and adoration.”
“Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. Solitude begins with a time and a place for God, and him alone. If we really believe not only that God exists but also that he is actively present in our lives — healing, teaching, and guiding — we need to set aside a time and a space to give him our undivided attention. Jesus says, Go to your private room and, when you have shut your door, pray to the Father who is in that secret place” (Matthew 6:6).
Henri Nouwen, article excerpted from Making All Things New, Renovare website