Watch out for the How To books, especially when it comes to the subject of prayer. Any manual designed to show you how to pray has the wrong designer for its author. A book or sermon’s objective should not be to show you how to pray, but rather to get you to pray. The real problem has always been to get God’s people to just pray. Whenever this happens, the rest will take care of itself. It then simply becomes a trial and error thing. We learn to pray by praying!
Following some book about how to pray with a slavish superstition will cause you to lose your spiritual sanity. Like children in an earthly family, God’s children are all different and talk to their Heavenly Father in various ways. There is something between each of the children and their Father that is not understood by the others. The best advice on prayer that I’ve heard thus far is, “Pray as you can and don’t pray as you can’t.” The only requirement is staying within Biblical guidelines.
A Scottish Pastor out for a stroll one morning heard the voice of a young boy behind a hedgerow reciting the alphabet. When he asked the lad, who was on his knees at the time, what he was doing, he replied, “Well sir, I just became a Christian and am trying to pray. But I don’t know the right words to say, so I thought by quoting the alphabet the Dear Lord would put together the words and know what I’m trying to say to Him.”
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