Lipping Your Prayers

This week I’ve been reading a fine new book by J. I. Packer and Carolyn Nystrom called Praying: Finding Your Way From Duty to Delight, and along the way I’ve been thinking about the challenge of writing about prayer. Or preaching about prayer. It’s easy to fall into one of two traps. Either you make the reader feel guilty (not hard to do) or you make extravagant promises that cannot be kept. Admittedly the last approach sells more books but ironically the end result is often the same. When you read books in the second category, you will no doubt be amazed at the stories of answered prayer that seem, well, supernatural and incredible and out of this world. And many readers (most readers? some readers?) end up feeling guilty because they see nothing similar in their own lives when they pray.

I especially enjoyed the postscript note to “Christians Becalmed in Their Praying.” What do you do when prayer bores you? There is no chiding here, indeed the authors confess they have sometimes been “becalmed” in their own praying. In just four pages, they offer a wealth of practical commentary. I found one piece of advice very helpful. When you pray, pray audibly. They mean even when you pray alone, pray out loud, or at least speak under your breath, mouthing the words, which some writers call “lipping” your prayers. They note that praying aloud helps you to concentrate and keeps your mind from wandering. “The idea that private prayer should always be made in total silence is quite recent, just as it is quite silly” (p. 287). They also advise punctuating your prayers by singing your favorite hymns or songs of praise.

I read that this morning and put it to practice this afternoon as I biked along a country road off the Natchez Trace. Taking another of their suggestions, I used the Lord’s Prayer as a simple guide, making a “twisted strand” out of each phrase, following Martin Luther’s counsel to pray each phrase slowly, stopping to celebrate, give thanks, confess and then make whatever requests come naturally. I often pray and sing as I ride my bike, but usually I sing aloud and pray silently. Today I prayed and sang out loud–not that anyone could hear me on that country road–and took pleasure in praying a “twisted strand” based on “Our Father in Heaven,” the very first phrase of the Lord’s Prayer. Packer and Nystrom have many other suggestions, but lipping your prayers interspersed with singing is an excellent way to jumpstart your praying.