Does God Hear Our Simple Prayers Too?

This post is the voice of Pete Greig, author of How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People. Here, Pete encourages us to not overthink or over-spiritualize the activity of praying. Why? Because that’s how Jesus taught his first disciples to pray.

The best bit of advice I ever received about how to pray was this: keep it simple, keep it real, keep it up.

You’ve got to keep it simple so that the most natural thing in the world doesn’t become complicated, weird, and intense.

Jesus warns us quite specifically against getting overcomplicated in prayer:

The world is full of so-called prayer warriors . . . peddling techniques for getting what you want from God. Don’t fall for that nonsense. This is your Father you are dealing with, and he knows better than you what you need. With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply.

Matthew 6:7-8 The Message Bible

He then goes on to give the Lord’s Prayer, which was just thirty-one words long in its original language. It also originally rhymed—Jesus wrote us a poem! Having advocated simplicity in prayer, he modeled it with a short, rhyming prototype that takes about thirty seconds to recite in English and fits in a single tweet. As Archbishop Justin Welby says on ChurchofEngland.org, the Lord’s Prayer is “simple enough to be memorised by small children and yet profound enough to sustain a whole lifetime of prayer.”

If you’re new to faith, you will probably have all sorts of sensible questions about prayer. I remember a sophisticated-looking lady coming to speak to me one Sunday after a service. “I’m new to Christianity,” she said. “Is it all right if I talk to God in the shower?”

I was driving a friend across town. He was a brand-new believer, and I suggested we pray. “No way!” he screamed and tried to grab the wheel, terrified that I was about to close my eyes.

There are very few rules for Christians when it comes to prayer. Yes, of course we can pray in the shower or while driving. We are not required to close our eyes, to adopt a particular posture, to dress in a certain way, to wash ourselves ritually, or to use a fixed form of words simply to be heard by God. Some of these things can on occasion be helpful, as we shall see later, but the writer of Hebrews is clear that God’s presence is freely available to us all at any time, in any place, through Jesus. (See Hebrews 10:19)

God invites you to pray simply, directly, and truthfully in the full and wonderful weirdness of the way he’s made you. Take a walk in the rain. Write prayers on the soles of your shoes. Sing the blues. Rap. Write Petrarchan sonnets. Sit in silence in a forest. Go for a run until you sense God’s smile; throw yourself down a waterslide, yelling hallelujah if that’s honestly your thing. Just pray!