the good way

Prayer

A daily rhythm of prayer

As followers of Jesus, we want to grow in our awareness of God’s perfect love for us and his continual presence with us. We can develop intimacy with Jesus by enjoying time with him in prayer every day.

Prayer is simply any way in which we enjoy God and communicate with Him. Prayer can be formal or informal, it can be planned or spontaneous, it can be done in community or it can be done alone. We start with the daily practice of prayer because prayer bleeds through every practice that we’re going to engage with and every practice can become a way of praying.

“Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.” — Romans 12:1

When the apostle Paul talked about praying without ceasing, he didn’t mean that he spent every minute of every day on his knees in formal prayer. It means that he learned to journey through the ordinary moments of his day with an awareness of God’s loving presence.

A personal relationship with Jesus is like any other relationship we have in that the relationship will grow, develop and deepen through shared experiences - quality time spent together, rich, honest conversation, asking for help, speaking words of affection, sharing hidden, secret moments, sharing pain or anger or hurt. Our practice of prayer will involve all of these elements. We see this modelled for us in the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray - The Lord’s Prayer.

“When you pray, say: ‘Father Hallowed be your name, Your Kingdom come. Give us our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, For we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation.”

Cultivating a relationship of intimacy with Jesus will involve us being alone with Jesus regularly. One of the ancient ways of engaging with prayer is through the practice of silence and solitude and we will begin to explore what it might look like to embrace this practice in our individual rhythms of prayer.

“When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively, no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer. Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, … and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.” — Thomas Merton

Session video

Personal Reflection

Take some time to reflect on the following questions:

  1. How do I experience God’s pleasure and loving presence during my day/my week?
  2. When and where do I feel most alive, most free, most content or most myself?
  3. What activities or practices make me feel most connected to God?
  4. How am I creating space to know God and myself better in my daily life?

Stories of prayer


Session Resources

To go further with this session, take a look at some of the following activities, readings and other resources:

Activations

Devotionals

Teachings

Books