God never intended for the Bible to be a book we merely read. As a part of looking for how any passage I’m studying can be applied, I’ve begun to ask what prayers the passage might lead me to pray. Some choices for prayer are obvious, such as the Lord’s prayer or the prayers that Paul prayed for the Christians to whom he was writing. Some prayers are the result of scripture exposing truths about me. Sometimes I see something that makes me think, “I’d like God to do that for [person or situation I know about].”
Here are some ways scripture has influenced my prayer in the past couple of years:
Jesus tells us to ask the Lord of the Harvest to send laborers into the fields. The parable of the sower tells us laborers are needed to sow God’s word, but also implies that some work is needed to make soil receptive to the word. (Paths can be broken up, and rocks and weeds removed, for instance.) I ask God to use me to help sow his word and build good soil.
The blindness of the disciples and the Pharisees makes me aware of how I, too, can have preconceived notions of who God is and what he’s going to do, which can blind me to who he really is and what he is doing. I pray for God to remove them.
In 1 Thessalonians, Paul says that the gospel came to them in word, in power, in the Holy Spirit, and with full conviction. A few verses later he says the word has sounded forth from them. This is what I want for me and for other believers I’m connected with. So now I regularly pray that the gospel would come to us and go out from us in exactly those four ways.
In Galatians, Paul mentions sowing to the Spirit, walking in the Spirit, and displaying the fruit of the Spirit. Only the Spirit can do some of this, but what part do I play in it—especially sowing to the Spirit? I don’t want to try and do what only God can do, nor do I want to be waiting for him to do what he expects me to do, so I pray for wisdom.
Every book can offer prayer suggestions, and praying like this helps keep the lessons from that book on the front burner instead of being pushed to the back as I move on in my scripture studies.