How to Pray

A Simple Guide for Normal People

Pete Greig

2021 ECPA Award Finalist in the Christian Living Category "An instant spiritual classic." — Christianity Today Is prayer the most challenging area of your Christian journey? It doesn't have to be. Pete Greig, one of the founders of 24-7 Prayer International, is passionate about introducing people to simple, honest, relevant conversations with God. How to Pray is a raw, real, and relevant look at prayer for everyone—from the committed follower of Jesus to the skeptic and the scared. Full of biblically sound wisdom, How to Pray will offer honest encouragement and real-life methods to refresh your spirit and help you practice life-giving and lifechanging prayer. Revolutionize your prayer life by learning:

• How to start praying
• How to keep prayer simple
• How to ask God for things
• How to cope with unanswered prayer
• How to pray without words
• How to hear God

You will also be inspired by the power of prayer through the stories of Corrie Ten Boom, Joni Eareckson Tada, Saint Patrick, and many more. How to Pray is designed to be used with The Prayer Course (a free video curriculum), making it useful for personal, small group, or church-wide reading. "Pete Greig is a respected authority on exactly this kind of praying: simple, honest, straightforward, from the heart. How to Pray will get you started on a lifelong, and life-giving, practice." — Mark Batterson, New York Times bestselling author of Circle Maker "I'm so grateful for this book. Pete's passion and fervor for intercession is contagious. Get this book. Read this book. Live this book." — Brady Boyd, author and senior pastor at New Life Church "For everyone who's wondered how to move the experience of prayer from distant to personal and powerful, How to Pray provides a starting point for new and seasoned believers alike." — Nicole Unice, author of Help! My Bible is Alive! "Pete Grieg has written the prayer masterpiece for today. It is an easy-to-follow, easy-to-practice manifesto of prayer for everyday life." — Craig Springer, author and executive director of Alpha USA

STEP 1: PAUSE

SLOWING AND CENTERING

Be still, and know that I am God.

PSALM 46:10

To start we must stop. To move forward we must pause. This is the first step in a deeper prayer life: Put down your wish list and wait. Sit quietly. “Be still, and know that I am God.” Become fully present in place and time so that your scattered senses can recenter themselves on God’s eternal presence. Stillness and silence prepare your mind and prime your heart to pray from a place of greater peace, faith, and adoration. In fact, these are themselves important forms of prayer.

3: Slowing and Centering

HOW TO BE STILL BEFORE GOD

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

BLAISE PASCAL

THE HUMAN SOUL is wild and shy. The psalmist compares it to a deer panting for streams of water.[1] Celtic folklore depicted it as a stag, noble and coy. It hides away from the noise of life, refusing to come on command like some slavering, domesticated pet. But when we are still, it emerges, inquisitive and quiveringly alive.

In prayer, as in life, there is “a time to be silent and a time to speak.”[2] If we want to get better at hearing the one who speaks in “a still small voice,” we must befriend silence.[3] If we are to host the presence of the one who says, “Be still, and know that I am God,” we must ourselves become more present.[4] We expect his voice to boom like thunder, but mostly, he whispers. We expect him to wear hobnailed boots, but he tiptoes and hides in the crowd. We expect him to be strange, but he “comes to us disguised as our life.”[5]

The best way to start praying, therefore, is actually to stop praying. To pause. To be still. To put down your prayer list and surrender your own personal agenda. To stop talking at God long enough to focus on the wonder of who he actually is. To “be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him.”[6]

• • •

When our sons were quite little, I would sometimes walk through the door after several days away to be greeted by one of them yelling, “Dad, have you got anything nice for me?” or “Dad, my brother’s not sharing,” or even, “Dad, what’s for dinner?”

“Well, I’m so glad you’ve missed me!” I would call upstairs. “Any chance of a hug down here?” I wanted them to acknowledge my presence properly before bombarding me with requests. To look me in the eyes and say very simply, “Welcome home, Daddy!”

In a way, this is what Jesus models in the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer. Before we launch into a long list of all the stuff we need —daily bread, forgiveness of sins, deliverance from evil —he tells us to pause, to address God affectionately (“Our Father”) and respectfully (“hallowed be your name”).

Prayer can easily become a frenetic extension of the manic way I live too much of my life. Distracted and driven, I step into the courts of the King without modulation, without introduction, without slowing my pace or lifting my face to meet his gaze. But the sages teach us that true prayer is not so much something we say, nor is it something we do: It is something we become. It is not transactional but relational. And it begins, therefore, with an appropriate awareness of the one to whom we come.

The Parable of the Deranged Greyhound and the Wild, Dog-Eating Chair

The tranquility of Guildford’s picturesque cobbled High Street was shattered one sunny morning by the yelping of a dog and a strange metallic clattering.

Suddenly, a crazed greyhound came scrabbling around the corner with its whippet tail between its wild legs, weaving between shouting shoppers. Frantic with fear, the dog was being hotly pursued by one of those cheap chrome bistro chairs attached to the other end of the dog’s leash. The chair seemed alive, like a dancing snake weaving and flailing, striking and biting at that terrified animal’s rear.

Perhaps the dog’s owner was unaware of the pet’s plight, innocently waiting for coffee at some nearby shop. A movement must have made that chair twitch, which had made the dog jump, which had made the chair leap, which had made the dog scamper, which had made the chair pounce, which had made the dog yelp, which had made shoppers shout, which had made the dog run even more frantically, pursued all the while by this terrifying piece of metal and these crowds of screaming, grabbing strangers. The faster the dog ran, the wilder the chair’s pursuit became —the higher it bounced, the harder it pounced, the louder it banged and clanged and zinged on the cobbles. For all I know, that dog is running still.

We can all live our lives a lot like that demented greyhound —driven and disoriented by irrational fears, pursued by entire packs of bloodthirsty bistro chairs, too scared to simply stop. And so God speaks firmly into the cacophony of human activity. The Master commands the creature to “Sit!” Jesus rebukes the storm. “He makes me lie down,” as the famous psalm puts it.[7]

Of course, we find it intensely difficult to obey, but as we do so, perspective is restored. Terrors turn back into bistro chairs.

Why is it that so many people today find themselves drawn to the simplicity of marathon running, long-distance cycling, and fishing (still Britain’s most popular pastime), to practices of mindfulness, yoga, and the cult of “decluttering” (ironically now all multimillion-dollar industries)? Why do we binge mindlessly on Netflix at night and gaze like monks before icons at our smartphones on our morning commutes? We seem to be increasingly attracted to activities that put the world’s relentless demands on hold, forcing us to focus for a few eternal moments on a single, simple thing. Hot yoga? Tetris? A lakeside in the pouring rain? Anything to assuage those pesky bistro chairs.

God understands our deep need for stillness, order, and freedom from ultimate responsibility, because he has designed us to live humbly, seasonally, and at peace. He himself rested and established a Sabbath, inviting each one of us to press pause regularly, saying, “Be still, and know that I am God.”[8] The Latin for being still here is vacate —the very word we use to describe vacating a place or taking a vacation. In other words, God is inviting us to take a holiday, to be leisurely or free, because this is the context in which his presence is known. Perhaps we might paraphrase this verse: “Why don’t you take a vacation from being god and let me be God instead for a change?”

Eugene Peterson says that “life’s basic decision is rarely, if ever, whether to believe in God or not, but whether to worship or compete with him.”[9] One of the main differences between you and God is that God doesn’t think he’s you! Moments of stillness at the start of a prayer time are moments of surrender in which we stop competing with God, relinquish our messiah complexes, and resign from trying to save the planet. We stop expecting everyone and everything else to orbit our preferences; we recenter our priorities on the Lord and acknowledge, with a sigh of relief, that he is in control and we are not.

Much to our surprise, the world keeps turning quite well without our help. Slowly, our scattered thoughts start to become more centered. Bistro chairs finally settle down.

Selah

The word selah appears seventy-one times in the Psalms. It may have been a technical note to people reciting the psalm, or to the musicians playing it, but no one really knows why it is there or what it originally meant. Our best guess is that it was an instruction to pause and an invitation to weigh the meaning of the words we are praying.

Whenever possible, I try to selah at the start of a prayer time by sitting (or sometimes walking) silently for a few minutes without saying or doing anything at all. It’s preferable to do this in a serene environment, of course, but it’s equally possible to find stillness on a crowded train, at a desk in a noisy office, or even hidden in that modern-day hermitage: a toilet cubicle. Stopping to be still before we launch into prayer helps us to recenter our scattered thoughts, priming our hearts and minds to worship.

If you have a smartphone, it’s a good idea at this point to switch it to flight mode, not just to prevent interruptions but also to train your brain to switch off from the abstractions and distractions of life, to become more fully present whenever and wherever you turn to God in prayer.

Pausing before you pray may sound simple —barely worthy of its own chapter —but it is rarely easy. Invariably, my mind rebels against any kind of stillness. The greyhound keeps running. The temptation to rush headlong into my prayer list is almost irresistible. A tyranny of demands and distractions strikes up in the unfamiliar silence like a brass band parading around my skull. One Augustinian monk describes this memorably as that “inner chaos going on in our heads, like some wild cocktail party of which we find ourselves the embarrassed host.”[10]

I cannot emphasize too strongly how important it is for your spiritual, mental, and physical well-being that you learn to silence the world’s relentless chatter for a few minutes each day, to become still in the depths of your soul. You must seek solitude and silence as if your life depends on it, because in a way, it does. When you are stressed, your adrenal glands rele...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Endorsements
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Heroes of Prayer
• Foreword
• How to Read This Book in a Couple of Minutes
• Introduction
• How to P.R.A.Y.
• Step 1: Pause
• Step 2: Rejoice
• Step 3: Ask
• Step 4: Yield
• How to Use This Book with The Prayer Course
• Toolshed
• Further Reading and Recommended Resources
• With Thanks To