Praying Bible prayers

Bible Prayers: Praying for the glory of God

One of the most important aspects of a Christian writer's life is prayer, and I don't know about you, but sometimes I get tired of mine! Too many projects can overwhelm, and so can too few, but either starts an erosion process similar, I suppose, to ditch-digging, and I get in a rut.

For years I've turned to the Bible to enlarge my prayer life, and, well, get over myself. So, eventually, I researched everything the Bible presented on prayer and even had a book in mind to bring readers the scriptural references to Almost All the Prayers in the Bible. And then I discovered that Dr. Herbert Lockyer had been there and done that many decades ago in his "all" series, which, reportedly, brought Zondervan into the publishing business and off to a blessed start but didn't help my writing plans!

I tried revising the idea into a series of devotionals, which could work I guess, but I felt as though I were only repeating and, perhaps, updating Dr. Lockyer's work. So I gave up my idea.

And then the idea came.

With the Revised Lectionary getting Christians of all denominations to be, literally, on the same page, those daily Bible readings provided the source and impetus for praying Bible prayers that arise in the readings each week. Since I did not want to choose from the many fine translations available or bother with permission for usage of Holy Scripture, I began the habit of cutting/ pasting prayer-filled readings into my file (hmm, word scramble for life), looking up the passages in almost every English translation available, and then paraphrasing the prayers.

Often those prayer-a-phrases (as I've begun to call them) will come with a touch of poetry, which, come to find out, is the way about half of Holy Scripture originally came to the writers of the Bible – poetically! So all I can add is:

Glory be to God for potent prayers and poetry!

Glory be to God for the Bible’s timeless word to us as we look forward and toward the Word of The LORD, alive in our lives – and praying in, on, through, and all around us in Bible prayers.


© 2012 Mary Harwell Sayler, all rights reserved, but pass it on!

P.S. Eight years after writing the above, I had the joy of announcing the Book of Bible Prayers on Amazon!


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