How to Pray

Prayer advice from E. Stanley Jones:

1. First of all, have the prayer hour

Sacredly keep it.  Build the habits of your life around that prayer hour.  Make things fit into it, not it into things.

2. In the beginning of the prayer hour be silent.

Let your mind relax and let it roam across your life to see whether it stops at anything wrong.  If so, tell God you will right it.  Let the first moment be a sincere moral search.  If nothing is shown to be wrong, then, "Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, we have boldness toward God."  We are ready for bold praying.

3.  Bathe your thought in the Word.

God's Word will wash the dust from your eyes.  Then you will see, have insight.  You will get right attitudes through the Word, so you will pray right prayers.  You are pulling your thoughts up alongside of His thought, your purposes up to His purposes.

4. Take a pen or pencil with you and write down what comes to you as you pore over the Word.

That pen is the sign of your faith that something will come.  And it will. Don't hurry through that Word.  Every word is precious.  Pause, assimilate.  When a man hurries through a wood, he sees few birds or animals.  They hide.  But if he sits down and waits, then they come out.  It will be so with you.

5. Take obedience with you into that hour.

You will know as much of God, and only as much of God, as you are willing to put into practice!  For God will answer many of your prayers -- through you.