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Why Pray?
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Have you ever wondered why we pray? God knows everything we’re going to ask before we ask it (Matt. 6:8). Even more, we don’t know exactly what to pray for, so the Holy Spirit intercedes for us, doing a much better job (by far) than we can (Rom. 8:26). So why pray?
One answer is that prayer must do much more for us than it does for God. Prayer not only changes things for the world. Prayer changes us. Praying as a spiritual discipline transforms us. It readies our hearts and minds. It strengthens our connection to God and helps maintain that connection.
Consider the Possibility
Is it also possible that God waits for our prayers? Is it possible that God in his foreknowledge sometimes decides what he is going to do based on whether we pray or not? The fact that Jesus healed people based on their faith suggests that the difference sometimes between God acting miraculously and God not doing so is our prayers (Matt. 9:27-29). What a startling realization that our prayers could make such a difference! What a staggering responsibility!
Why pray before studying the Bible? If you think of our spirits as engaging our thinking (mind), our feelings (emotion), and our deciding faculties (will), prayer transforms all of them. Prayer can help our thinking. It can help our attitudes and dispositions. It can help our choices.
The Will
Our wills are the most important, for it is our choices for or against God that shape and reveal our heart toward God. Are we acting from faith or not (Rom. 14:23)? Are we choosing to do the good we know to do (James 4:17)? We cannot choose to do good in our own power, but the Spirit can make it happen (Rom. 8:1-4). God can make a way for us to escape the wrong choices in temptation (1 Cor. 10:13).
Praying before reading Scripture can soften and prepare our hearts to receive what the Spirit wants us to do. It can pave the way for us to seek and allow the Spirit to empower us for righteousness.
Feelings and Attitudes
The Spirit can also shape our feelings and attitudes. The Spirit can bring peace to our hearts (John 16:33; 2 Thess. 3:16). The Spirit can keep our anger from leading to sin (Eph.4:26; Jas. 1:20). The Spirit can heal us of hate, lust, and vengeance (Matt. 5:21-48). The Spirit can transform our whole hearts through prayer. The Spirit can change our hearts as we read and meditate on Scripture.
Dr. David Smith gives us yet another reason why prayer is important when reading Scripture. The Devil will especially be on the prowl for us as we read Scripture, like a hungry lion (1 Pet. 5:8). How did Satan come at Jesus when he was tempted in the wilderness? One of the ways he came was quoting the Bible (Matt. 4:5-6).
Bible study is the most dangerous Christian practice we can ever engage in; thus, we pray for both enlightenment and protection against the evil one.
Dr. David Smith
One of the most insidious tricks of the Devil is to twist our reading of the Bible toward evil. What if we have sinful anger, and Satan tells us we are just being wrathful like God? What if we are gossiping, and the Devil tells us we are merely concerned for them? What if we are making excuses for sin, and the Devil tells us we are just being loving? What if we are hateful, prejudiced, or racist, and the Devil tells us that we are simply angry at sin? What if we are convicted by the Spirit, and the Devil gives us godly sounding excuses why we should ignore our consciences?
If our hearts are not fully open to the Spirit, the Devil can use the Bible to harden our hearts, to make us feel self-righteous, or to justify ungodly anger.
Body and Mind
The Spirit is also interested in our bodies and minds. Our bodies are temples of the Lord (1 Cor. 6:19-20). We less often associate the work of the Spirit with our thinking. But God wants to change our whole person, body, soul, and spirit (1 Thess. 5:23).
God can help us think! Reading the Bible as Scripture is a spiritual task, to be sure. That is the far more important work of transformation God wants to do in us. But God can also help our thinking. God can help our minds think logically. God can help us hear a train of thought in a passage. God can help us observe details of the text that we might otherwise have missed. God can help us find the right background to understand a text. God can help us see the right connections between their time and our time.
These are prayers for illumination, where God “enlightens” the text for us to see what is actually there. On the one hand, God seems to speak often to people in spiritual ways through the text. In those instances, he speaks directly to us through the text by making things jump out at us. Lectio divina or “divine reading” is a practice that aims to hear directly from the Spirit by way of the text.
In a different vein, God can also help us see what God was saying to them, the original, first audiences of the Bible. After all, the Bible says it was written to (ancient) Israel (Deut. 6:4) or to Thessalonians (1 Thess. 1:1) or to the seven churches of Asia Minor (Rev. 1:4). It actually says it was written to people who have been dead for thousands of years.
The Bible as Scripture is for us, but it says it was written to them. And that means the original meanings of the words were a function of their worlds and their contexts. Otherwise, the initial audiences of the Bible wouldn’t have had a clue what something actually written to them was saying!
The Bible is Scripture for us, but it was written initially to them – Israelites, Romans, Corinthians, etc. Reading in context requires us to learn how to “read their mail” for what it originally meant and for what the Spirit was first saying to them, while the Spirit is always free to speak directly to us through the text as well.
When we read the Bible in context, we are reading someone else’s mail. God can and does speak directly to us through those words too, but these “inspirations” are by their very nature slightly different meanings than what God said to the actual, first audiences of the word. Both are valid readings. Both can be spiritual readings. To read in context requires us to use our minds in their full thinking capacity because we must work to understand a world that was quite different from our own.
Either way, the Spirit will get us where we need to go if we are receptive to him. This course primarily focuses on how to read the Bible in context. We can hear the Spirit out of context with little preparation other than opening our hearts to hear from God. By contrast, we are unlikely to hear Scripture in context without some discipline. Prayer works for all valid readings of Scripture. May the Lord give us ears to hear, eyes to see, and minds to understand!