Turn Your Bible into Prayer

If you have ever led a Bible class or facilitated a small-group study, then you know the dread of leading a conversation that can easily devolve into a thoughtless recitation of well-worn answers. Ask a well-crafted and thought-provoking question and, in return, you might very well receive a painfully predictable one-word response: 

“God.”

“Jesus.”

“Love.” 

The experience is so common that even the jokes are stale. Ask a question that is a little too obvious, and you’ll undoubtedly hear a sarcastic, “JE-SUS,” in a dumb, exaggerated tone. You can hear it, can’t you? 

The most frustrating of these reductionistic answers, though, usually arrive towards the end of class, when the teacher moves into the “application” portion of the lesson, and asks some version of the question, “So, then what should we do?” We inevitably hear the same two answers: 

“Read your Bible.”

“Pray.” 

Every. Single. Time. 

To be clear, I don’t find these answers frustrating because they are wrong. Reading Scripture and spending time in prayer are certainly essential to living a life oriented towards God. 

No, what frustrates me about those answers is that they’ve become so clichéd that both prayer and Scripture are made to seem lifeless and sterile – and by proxy, discipleship itself is made boring. As if the sum total of Christian life can be contained within these two practices that we half-heartedly offer as the solution to everything. If we truly believe that both prayer and Scripture are the lifeblood of our spirituality, then why don’t we speak of them with an energy and creativity that honor them as such? 

We need language that helps us receive these practices as sacred and compelling, that helps us see them for what they really are: entries into the very real presence of God.

Toward that end, I’m thankful for having stumbled upon a single line from the 19th-century Presbyterian minister, Robert Murray M’Cheyne: “Turn your Bible into prayer.”[1]

Here is an invitation whose ambiguity begets a kind of clarity. What does it mean to turn my Bible into prayer? I’m not quite sure, to be honest. And yet, it seems that saying it exactly that way reveals something about the nature both of the Bible and of prayer. 

Turning your Bible into prayer draws both practices into relationship with one another in a way that enlivens them both. 

M’Cheyne insists that the Bible exists to facilitate prayer, and that prayer is conversation with the God revealed in Scripture. Separating one practice from the other, as we so often do, can produce disastrous results. 

Reading Scripture without prayer can be soulless and disinterested. 

Prayer without Scripture can be misguided and shallow. 

“Turning our Bibles into prayer” gives us language for what we are doing when we read our Bibles or pray. We read Scripture to fuel our imaginations for prayer. The fundamental aim of Scripture is an encounter with God – nothing less. So, we ought to open our Bibles with expectation and awe. 

And we pray to the One we’ve met in the pages of Scripture. Scripture gives us the address by which we find God. More than that, we are taught the rhythms and dialect of faithful human speech when it is directed to the Divine. The wrestling we have done with Scripture, the meditations of our heart as we have read, are vocalized in prayer so that they can materialize in our lives. We don’t just read Scripture, we pray it – only then can it transform us. 

So, yes: 

Read your Bible. 

Pray. 

And then, turn your Bible into prayer.