I was just thinking about prayer as I was riding to work on BART today. There are different ways that Christians organize their prayer lives. I tend to go with a somewhat formal, even liturgical, way of prayer at the start of the day and at the end of the day as well.
For example, I use this Morning Prayer and this Evening Prayer.
I use these sets of prayers as an aid in forming and keeping the habit of daily prayer, meditation and reading of God's word. There is no "law" about it at all of course and some days I miss one or the other or even both on rare occasions.
During the day I might say the Lord's Prayer, the most perfect prayer of all since it is given to us by the Lord for our use. But I also will pray extemporaneously throughout the day as the Holy Spirit moves me to pray or as I encounter difficulties or as I recognize a sin I have committed and need to repent of.
Naturally since this is the way that I do things I think it is a good way of doing them :-) The mix of formal written prayers and extemporaneous prayers throughout the day seems to work for me.
The use of prayers that others have written down and shared with us, like those found in hymnals, in the Psalms and in prayer books, gives us access to well thought out and carefully worded prayers that can express things we want to say far better than we ourselves can say them off the cuff.
There are also times when we don't know what to pray and our prayer books don't seem to have anything in them at all and we are without words. That is when I fall back on the Lord's prayer in particular, it contains all prayers within it I think.
Well this has gotten rather rambling so I'm going to shut up for now. Perhaps one day I'll write a coherent post about prayer :-)
For example, I use this Morning Prayer and this Evening Prayer.
I use these sets of prayers as an aid in forming and keeping the habit of daily prayer, meditation and reading of God's word. There is no "law" about it at all of course and some days I miss one or the other or even both on rare occasions.
During the day I might say the Lord's Prayer, the most perfect prayer of all since it is given to us by the Lord for our use. But I also will pray extemporaneously throughout the day as the Holy Spirit moves me to pray or as I encounter difficulties or as I recognize a sin I have committed and need to repent of.
Naturally since this is the way that I do things I think it is a good way of doing them :-) The mix of formal written prayers and extemporaneous prayers throughout the day seems to work for me.
The use of prayers that others have written down and shared with us, like those found in hymnals, in the Psalms and in prayer books, gives us access to well thought out and carefully worded prayers that can express things we want to say far better than we ourselves can say them off the cuff.
There are also times when we don't know what to pray and our prayer books don't seem to have anything in them at all and we are without words. That is when I fall back on the Lord's prayer in particular, it contains all prayers within it I think.
Well this has gotten rather rambling so I'm going to shut up for now. Perhaps one day I'll write a coherent post about prayer :-)
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