PRAYING THE BIBLE

DONALD S. WHITNEY

wheaton, illinois

Praying the Bible

Copyright © 2015 by Donald S. Whitney

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Tim Green, Faceout Studio

Cover image: Shutterstock, iStock.com, Getty Images

First printing 2015

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-4784-3

ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-4787-4

PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-4785-0

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-4786-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Whitney, Donald S., (Professor)

Praying the Bible / Donald S. Whitney.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4335-4784-3 (hc)

1. Prayer—Christianity. 2. Bible—Devotional use. I. Title.

BV215.W465 2015

248.3'2—dc23

2014046060

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

For T. W. Hunt, the most prayerful man I’ve ever

known. Thank you for decades of daily prayer for me.

And also for R. F. Gates, whom God used in ways neither

of us could have ever imagined in that moment on

March 1, 1985, when you held up the Bible and

said, “When you pray, use the prayer book!”

And most of all, for my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

All this, indeed all of life, is for you and

about you. After talking with you so many

thousands of times, I can’t wait to see you.

Contents

1 The Problem

2 The Solution

3 The Method

4 More about the Method

5 Praying the Psalms

6 Praying Other Parts of the Bible

7 The Most Important Part of This Book

8 Evaluating the Experience

9 What Have We Learned?

10 The Examples of George Mueller, Jesus on the Cross, and Christians in the Book of Acts

Appendix 1: “Psalms of the Day” Chart

Appendix 2: Praying the Bible with a Group

General Index

Scripture Index

1

The Problem

If I try to pray for people or events without having the word in front of me guiding my prayers, then several negative things happen. One is that I tend to be very repetitive.… I just pray the same things all the time. Another negative thing is that my mind tends to wander.

John Piper

Since prayer is talking with God, why don’t people pray more? Why don’t the people of God enjoy prayer more? I maintain that people—truly born-again, genuinely Christian people—often do not pray simply because they do not feel like it. And the reason they don’t feel like praying is that when they do pray, they tend to say the same old things about the same old things.

When you’ve said the same old things about the same old things about a thousand times, how do you feel about saying them again? Did you ...