Nicholas Wilton

Every growing baby needs to learn to talk in order to navigate his new world. Likewise, learning to pray—that is, talking to God—is a foundational building block in every believer's relationship with God.

Prayer is learned the same way a child learns to talk. First, a child listens to others. Then he imitates something he's heard. Children learn to speak by mimicking words and sounds, not by formal instruction.

Jesus knew that the disciples would need words to "mimic" if they were going to speak the language of prayer. So He said, "When you pray, say . . ." (Lk. 11:2). He taught them to pray by giving them a prayer. Samuel Chadwick understood this when he wrote, "The only way to learn to pray is to pray."

Over the years, I've had the privilege of helping many young believers learn the language of prayer. The most effective way I have found to do this is to take them to the prayers in the Bible.

A Prayer for All Seasons

God has recorded prayers in Scripture for every occasion: for praise, thanks, grief, pain, frustration, warfare, joy, and more. Just as Jesus offered His disciples a model prayer, so the Scriptures are full of prayers we can use to help a young believer learn to talk to the Father.

If someone is burdened by excessive stress, for example, I might take him to one of David's prayers, such as Psalm 57 or 63. Both were written while David was running from Saul. Or if someone has a wayward child, we might look at Exodus 32 to see how Moses prayed as he led his rebellious people. If someone wants to pray for the ongoing spiritual needs of others, I might show him the prayer of Jesus in John 17 or the Apostle Paul's intercession in Ephesians 1.

Keeping in mind that prayer is a language, I try to help people imitate the words of Moses or David, Paul or Jesus. Next, we work on putting these prayers into their own words, for their specific situation.

These words perfectly describe what David was facing. But the person I'm discipling faces his own unique struggles and battles. I would encourage him to pray something like this: "Father, I am in the midst of a lot of uncertainty and stress. I feel as if my life is being drained out of me." It's important that people who are learning to pray be very specific with God about what they are experiencing.

Through the Eyes of Prayer

The next step is to help people observe the heart and vision of the person whose prayer is recorded in the Bible. I do this by asking several questions.

1. What were the circumstances surrounding the prayer? What caused the person to cry out to God?

2. What did the person believe about God? What titles did he use for God? What kind of attitude did he display toward Him? What did he recall about God?

These are critical questions because our concept of God will determine how we talk to Him; it determines what we can believe Him for. In the Lord's Prayer, Jesus believed that God was the heavenly Father. This concept of God spurred Jesus to ask for the Father's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. It also caused Jesus to believe that the loving Father would give His children food, forgiveness, and protection.

For novices in prayer, the study of God Himself is more important than the study of other prayer topics, such as spiritual warfare, which can be covered as their prayer lives mature.

3. What is the major content of the prayer? What did the person praying spend most of his time talking to God about?

The praying people of the Bible took time to review who God was and what He had done in the past. Many of the prayers in the Bible contain several verses but have only one or two requests. When the early disciples' lives were threatened, for example, their prayer began by focusing on how God had ruled in sovereignty throughout history.

They ended by asking for boldness, that God's power would be demonstrated.

It is essential to take beginners in prayer to passages such as that one. That's how they learn to pray about what's on God's heart rather than praying in a self-absorbed way.

4. What, if anything, did the person ask God to do? It can be surprising to see what someone in the Scriptures requested in light of his apparent needs.

5. What did the person expect to see changed as the result of prayer? This question is closely related to the preceding one. It's valuable to examine Scripture to see how God answered a particular prayer.

6. If you are looking at an Old Testament prayer, how might that person have prayed in light of the death and resurrection of Christ? As a general rule, New Testament prayers are primarily concerned with the inner life of God's people, not with the destruction of an enemy or physical needs. For instance, David often asked God to destroy his enemies. When Jesus came, however, He told us to pray for our enemies, not against them (Mt. 5:44).

In the Old Testament, the blessings of God on His people were usually directed toward the fruitfulness of their land. This was because God's people lived in one location: Israel. The fruitfulness of their land was a sign to other nations that the God of Israel was blessing them. In the New Testament, God's people are scattered throughout the world. His blessing has to do with fruitfulness in their lives. "This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples" (Jn. 15:8).

Discipling others in prayer goes well beyond helping them learn to pray for a given situation. The goal is to help them become attentive to God and to grow into people who long to communicate openly and to live in utter dependence upon Him. When these things happen, prayer becomes the rich, organic language it's meant to be.

Lee Brase is the international prayer-ministry coordinator for The Navigators.  Lee is also the coauthor of Praying from God's Heart and the author of Approaching God: Lessons from the Inspired Prayers of Scripture (both NavPress).