2 Practical Suggestions on Prayer

1. Pray the Bible. What in the world should you do if your mind wanders when you are praying? One thing is to pray through some verses of Scripture. Robert Murray M'Cheyne once said, "Turn the Bible into prayer. Thus, if you were reading the First Psalm, spread the Bible on the chair before you, and kneel and pray, 'O Lord, give me the blessedness of the man'; 'let me not stand in the counsel of the ungodly.' This is the best way of knowing the meaning of the Bible, and of learning to pray."

2. Pray your mind. Another thing to do if your mind wanders when you are praying is to pray about where your mind is wandering to (I think this counsel is in one of Paul Miller's books). If your mind is wandering to your to-do list for the day, there's probably a reason for this, and it's something you should pray about ("Lord, give me grace to trust you with what you set before me today, and help me not to be selfish about my time or self-sufficient in my heart"). I think the best bet would probably be to put these 2 things together so that our praying is at the same time biblical and honest.

How to Read the Bible

I think most of us would say that we have some room to grow when it comes to our ability to understand what we read in the Bible. Sure, we understand the essence of the message of the Bible, and we can grasp certain things with confidence from any chunk of Scripture we happen to be reading. But we are often confused by the text and we find ourselves in need of help. If this describes you, let me highly recommend a resource I came across yesterday posted on Justin Taylor's blog, Between Two Worlds. It's a compilation of the articles found in the back of the ESV Study Bible on how to read the Bible, and they have put them into a nice handy PDF. Check out the original post here where you can download the PDF. Some of the articles include "Reading the Bible Theologically" (by J.I. Packer), "Reading the Bible in Prayer and Communion with God" (by John Piper), and "Reading the Bible for Personal Application" (by David Powlison). These would be great to pass on to a friend as well, or to read together with your spouse or family, or perhaps to work through with a new believer over a series of meetings.