Chapter Eleven: The Word of God and Prayer

The truth is that all the instruments of grace, in one way or another, center around the Word of God. This should not surprise us since the Holy Spirit is the agent of transformation and also the ultimate author of Scripture. The Scriptures, then, are His chief instruments of His transforming work in us, so careful and prayerful reading of Scripture should also be a major part of our time with God.

Again, the only two places in the Bible where the word transformed is used are Romans 12:2 and 2 Corinthians 3:18. In Romans 12:2, Paul wrote, “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Though the Word of God is not mentioned, it is obviously implied. There is no other way for our minds to be renewed than by exposure to the Word of God. Note that the encouragement to be transformed is set in opposition to being conformed to the world. These are the only two alternatives. There is no neutral third option. We will either be transformed by the renewal of our minds through consistent exposure to Scripture, or we will, by default, be conformed to the values of the world around us. We see this either/or contrast expressed more fully in Psalm 1:1-2:

Returning to Romans 12:2, we see that Paul uses an unusual grammatical structure: a passive imperative. He tells us to be transformed. Why does he use an imperative when he knows we cannot transform ourselves? The answer is that though we cannot transform ourselves, we can and must bring our minds under the continual influence of the Word of God. As we do that, the Holy Spirit will use His Word to do His transforming work in us.

Keep in mind that the object of our Bible reading is not to grow in merely an intellectual grasp of biblical truth but to listen to Him as He speaks to us through His Word. Remember that regardless of who the human author is of the passage we are reading, it is ultimately the Holy Spirit who is speaking to us. What the text says, He says.

As we open our Bibles to read, we should do so with a prayer that God, through His Spirit, will meet with us in His Word. In 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul said that all Scripture is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” I pray over that verse (adding, “and encouragement”), asking that God will teach, rebuke, correct, and encourage me in whatever way He knows I need. That is to say I am not looking merely for intellectual information; I want God to teach me more about Himself and to address specific issues in my life.

Sometimes the Scripture I am reading is very direct, such as “Do not be anxious about anything” (Philippians 4:6) and God speaks to me about my tendency to anxiety in some particular situation. At another time, He may use a principle from a totally unrelated situation to address an issue in my life. Once God used Paul’s words “We worked night and day” (1 Thessalonians 2:9) to rebuke me for feeling sorry for myself because I was working into the evening every day just to keep up with my ministry responsibilities.

I don’t want to give the impression that I get some great insight or great instruction from God every day as I read my Bible. Sometimes I receive nothing at all. God is sovereign and infinitely wise. He knows what we need, and He apportions to us the truth He knows we need as we need it. But if we will humbly and expectantly look to Him, He will teach us and train us as He sees fit. After all, He is the agent of our spiritual transformation. He is far more desirous that we profit from our Bible reading than we are.

Second, we should not only pray as we read our Bible but we should have a period of time dedicated to just prayer. The Bible is full of the subject of prayer, and scores of books have been written about it, so it is beyond the scope of this book to address prayer as a broad subject. Instead, I want to focus on prayer that I believe is particularly pertinent to our time with God and then look at prayer as an instrument of grace for our spiritual transformation.

Our time with God is not about “me”; it is primarily about God — His glory and His will. And the one passage of Scripture on prayer that focuses on God’s glory and God’s will is the Lord’s Prayer, recorded in Matthew 6:9-13:

Therefore, in our time with God, it is good to expand our horizons beyond ourselves and our families and consider the work of God worldwide. The way God’s name will be hallowed, His kingdom come (at least in this age), and His will be done is through the proclamation of the gospel so that people trust Jesus as Savior and obey Him as Lord. In the spirit of Acts 1:8 (Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth), we should pray for the spread of the gospel in our local church (or campus or military base ministry), in our community, in our nation, and to the ends of the earth. Does your prayer during your time with God reflect this interest in His glory and will?

As we come to the second part of the Lord’s Prayer, we notice that it includes both daily needs (I believe that “our daily bread” stands for all our physical and material needs) and spiritual needs. Again, I suspect that most of us give the majority of our prayer time to our temporal needs. It is not wrong to pray for these needs. Jesus instructs us to do so. After all, prayer for those needs is (or should be) an acknowledgment that all we have in this life is a gift from God our Father. It is an acknowledgment that we are dependent on Him for everything.

But we are also to pray for our spiritual needs, and it is here that we see prayer as an instrument of grace that God has provided for our spiritual transformation. We know that we are both responsible and dependent, and prayer is, among other things, an expression of that dependence. It is an acknowledgment that we are helpless in ourselves — that we are dependent on the Holy Spirit to both do His own work and enable us to do the work we must do.

As we bring our minds under the influence of Scripture, the Holy Spirit will begin to reveal to us areas of our lives that need to be transformed. Sometimes it will be a sinful attitude or action that needs to be “put to death” (Romans 8:13). At other times, He will make us aware of character traits that Paul called the fruit of the Spirit (see Galatians 5:22-23) in which we need to grow. As we become aware of these areas, we need to pray specifically for the work of the Holy Spirit to both change us and enable us to change. I find it helpful to keep a private list of sin patterns I need to “put to death” and of positive traits in which I see a need to grow. I always try to associate one or more appropriate Scriptures with each area of need and pray over those Scriptures.

For example, I am to love my wife as Christ loves the church (see Ephesians 5:25). Because this is an area in which I will never perfectly “arrive,” I keep that subject on my prayer list along with the Scripture reference to remind myself to pray about this daily. In this age where sex is magnified, the lingering look is always a temptation for men, so I pray the first part of Psalm 119:37, “Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things.”

I also pray that I will be motivated to obey and serve Christ out of love and gratitude, not out of a sense of duty. In this connection, I ask God to give me the same sense of love and devotion the sinful woman had when she anointed the feet of Jesus (see Luke 7:36-50 and my discussion of it in chapter 6). As I read the Scriptures, I pray that the Holy Spirit will bring to my mind areas of my life that need to be changed and then that He will work in me both “to will and to work” (Philippians 2:13). We are to “be doers of the word, and not hearers [or readers] only” (James 1:22), and the doing always begins with prayer for the direction and help of the Holy Spirit. Keep in mind that prayer for spiritual transformation is both a duty and a privilege. It is an instrument of grace God has provided, but it is also a spiritual discipline we must practice if we are to be progressively transformed. Also, keep in mind that prayer for transformation does not yield quick results. Growth in “putting off” and “putting on” comes over time.

Lastly, in my time alone with God, I pray for family and friends. For our children and their spouses I pray, first of all, for their spiritual lives. I pray that they will be “taught by the LORD” (Isaiah 54:13) and that God will work in them “that which is pleasing in his sight” (Hebrews 13:21). Then I pray about more temporal needs they have, including the jobs of both our son and son-in-law. I pray that all of our grandchildren (and I mention each one by name) will come to trust Christ as Savior and obey and serve Him as Lord.

I pray for a small group of friends, for both their spiritual and temporal needs as I become aware of them. (If you do this and your list becomes too long and burdensome, you might consider putting them on a one-day-a-week rotating basis: Bob on Monday, Joe on Tuesday, Sam on Wednesday, and so on.)

Lest I appear to be a spiritual giant in prayer, let me acknowledge that this is the spiritual discipline in which I struggle most to be fresh and motivated. I readily identify with someone who said, “We hardly begin to pray and we are done.” More than that, however, is the tendency to just go down the list of people and their needs without a heart for what I’m doing. But Paul said the Spirit helps us in our weakness. He will give us the desire and motivation to pray if we ask Him. God urges us to pray and promises to hear our prayers, so we should make genuine fervent prayer a part of our time alone with Him.

The gospel, the Scriptures, and prayer — these are the major components of our time alone with God. There are other instruments of grace God has provided for us, thus disciplines we should practice, and to these we will turn next.

Scripture memorization is probably the most important of these daily disciplines and is indeed an instrument of God’s grace. I have been using memorized Scripture in my life for sixty years, and nothing has paid greater dividends for the time spent than this discipline. I cannot count for even one month the number of times the Holy Spirit has brought to mind a memorized verse to warn me against temptation, guide in decision making, encourage me in a time of stress or anxiety, and help me with countless other situations I encounter in the course of a day.

This discipline must surely be what the psalmist had in mind when he wrote, “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you” (Psalm 119:11). The purpose of storing up anything is to meet some anticipated future need. When we set aside present income for future retirement needs, we are in effect storing up money to be used in the time when we may not have a current income. Though the practice seems to have largely disappeared, during my childhood many homemakers canned fruits and vegetables in the summer to be eaten in the winter. They were storing up food to be eaten at a later time.

As far as Scripture memorization is concerned, the most notable example of storing up is in the life of Jesus. When the Devil tempted him during His forty days in the wilderness, He answered each temptation from Scripture (see Matthew 4:1-10). As a child, Jesus had stored up God’s Word in His heart so that when Satan tempted Him, He was able to respond from Scripture. Jesus frequently quoted Scripture on other occasions, so it is obvious that He had memorized vast amounts of it. And the fact that Jesus used memorized Scripture to respond to temptations surely sets an example for us to follow.

Of course, we need to memorize more than the commands of Scripture. If we are going to “preach the gospel to ourselves” each day, we need to memorize key gospel verses. It is also valuable to memorize some of the promises of Scripture. Consider how these words of Hebrews 13:5, “I will never leave you nor forsake you,” can encourage you and enable you to trust God in a stressful situation. And that is just one of many promises you can store up for a time when you need to trust in the sovereignty and goodness of God.

However, we need to do more than store up God’s Word in our hearts; in the words of Psalm 1:2, we need to “[meditate on it] day and night.” The expression day and night is an idiom for consistently or regularly. It should be our daily practice to meditate on Scripture. And again, the word meditate in the Bible simply means to reflect on or ponder over a passage of Scripture and make application to our lives, whether the Scripture be about God, the gospel, a command, or a promise. We need all of them if we are to be progressively transformed into the image of Christ. One of the advantages of Scripture memorization is that we have verses in our minds that we can meditate on during the course of the day.

Why is it of not more lasting effect? While lack of effective teaching may often be the cause, I believe the greater problem is lack of effective hearing. Thousands of people come to our evangelical churches each Sunday to enjoy the sermon without expecting any life change from what they hear. They are like the Jewish people of Ezekiel’s day of whom God said, “They come to you as people come, and they sit before you as my people, and they hear what you say but they will not do it” (Ezekiel 33:31). Remember the distinction between ginosko, intellectual knowledge, and espiginosko, the knowledge applied and experienced in one’s life. Too often our hearing the Scriptures results at best in a ginosko grasp of truth, so we should come prayerfully to hear God’s Word taught so that we may apply what we hear.

Some people today would write off the local church and its preaching and teaching ministry as ineffective and out of date in this age of rapidly changing means of communication. But the message of the Bible does not change in response to changing culture and technology, and it is clear from the New Testament that God’s people met together for worship and hearing the Word of God taught (see, for example, Acts 2:42; 20:7; Romans 16:5; 1 Timothy 4:13; 2 Timothy 4:1-2; Hebrews 10:24-25).

Worshipping together regularly also provides the opportunity to partake of the Lord’s Supper with fellow believers. That this was a regular practice of first-century churches seems clear from Paul’s instruction concerning it and his rebuke for improper observance by the Corinthian church (see 1 Corinthians 11:17-34). Though many of us may observe the Lord’s Supper in a reverent but perfunctory manner, it is indeed an instrument of grace that God has provided. As we silently wait for the elements to be distributed, we should use that time to reflect on and thank the Lord for His sacrifice for our sins. By that action, we are beholding the glory of the Lord in the gospel (see 2 Corinthians 3:18), and the Spirit of God will use it as a transforming instrument in our lives.

Somewhat akin to hearing the Bible taught is the reading of Christian books, in that we benefit from the teaching of others. There are many varieties of Christian books and varying degrees of helpfulness. Some merely express the author’s own ideas, which may or may not be based on Scripture. The best books, in my opinion, are those based solidly on Scripture and draw the reader back to the Scriptures. Once again, however, even a good book based on Scripture is only as beneficial as the application we make from it.

Whether it’s hearing the Word preached or taught or reading a Christian book, we should all be like the Bereans, who received the Word taught with all eagerness but then examined the Scriptures daily to see if what Paul taught was true (see Acts 17:11). The fact is that we have many excellent oral communicators and writers who can make a persuasive message and convince us by their rhetorical or writing skills. A friend said of one such speaker, “He is one of the most persuasive speakers I have ever heard but one of the most dangerous.” He was dangerous because he was a skillful communicator with a growing influence on others but was not teaching the truth. So we should follow the example of the Bereans to examine what we hear by the Word of God.

Many people work at jobs that require mental concentration and obviously cannot meditate on Scripture or pray throughout the day. But consider this: When you can think of anything you want to think about, what do you think about? Do you make any effort to “set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:2)? Are you taking advantage of the instruments of grace that God has provided?

There are many occasions to pray throughout the day. We should pray for safety as we drive, we should pray that God will keep us from temptations to sin, we should pray that we will be a testimony to the gospel in our work and that our children will be protected mentally, physically, and spiritually while in school. These are just examples of how we might pray throughout the day.

Remember, all these spiritual activities are the Holy Spirit’s instruments of grace. Taking advantage of them as disciplines will not earn us favor with God, but just as a musician or athlete cannot achieve any measure of competence or skill without the discipline of practice, so we cannot attain any level of spiritual maturity if we do not see these disciplines as expressions of God’s grace and delight in the use of them. Don’t set desire and duty in opposition to one another, but pray that through the motivation of the gospel the Holy Spirit will give you the desire to do your duty.