Does Your Prayer Filler Use Whole, 2%, or Skim?

. . .plus a fun announcement

Personal photo, 2025

I’ve convinced myself I’m going to try to write a book.

You’ll find some thoughts on this below the main post, as well as some paranoia about the Amazon self-publishing machine.

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Scripture urges us to pray without ceasing. (1 Thessalonians 5:17)

But in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, we also find this caution flag:

“When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.” (Matthew 6:7)

Trying to pray continuously is daunting enough. Combine that with a warning against empty phrases and the task can seem hopeless. Pray all the time, but whatever you do, don’t pray like this!

Thankfully, as the passage continues, Jesus offers an example of how His people should pray. It’s concise and to-the-point. You’ve heard it before. It starts like this:

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come,

your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Some Christians pray this word-for-word. Others prefer to improvise on its themes. Either way you lean, passages like this invite you into a richer prayer life.

Almost all of us rely on some amount of prayer “filler.” This usually happens when we talk to God for a longer stretch. Maybe our enthusiasm wanes, maybe our minds wander. And soon the words we’re using, even if they aren’t “empty phrases,” aren’t exactly rich and meaningful either. Thankfully, Scripture offers the opposite of filler and empty spiritual calories. It’s like whole milk, the real deal, with nothing skimmed off. In 1 Peter 2:2, the apostle Peter urges believers to “crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.”¹

So when possible, keep a Bible handy when you pray. Start as you usually would. You can praise God. You can tell Him what’s on your mind. You can ask that you’d be more aware of His presence moment-to-moment. You can pray for friends and loved ones. Don’t think too hard about it. Just pray.

Then, whenever you start to feel your momentum stall, simply turn to the Word. Some passages, like Matthew 6:9-13, can be prayed as written. Or you can take an idea from the text, turn it over in your mind, and pray in response. Either way, you’ll likely find that God’s Word recharges your own heartfelt prayer. You’ll discover that recitation, reflection, and spontaneous prayer can all serve one another.

The Bible offers countless passages that work well for this. As you notice them in your regular reading, it’s a good habit to bookmark some. Then they’re easy to find when you need them.

The examples here are just a small fraction of what you might choose.

Psalms are a classic go-to for prayer.

“Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory above the heavens. From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” (Psalm 8:1-4)

The New Testament letters are chock-full of possibilities.

“I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)

Daniel’s prayer guides us into repentance.

O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant of love with all who love Him and obey His commands, we have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and rebelled; we have turned away from your commands and laws. We have not listened to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. (Daniel 9:4-6)

Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2 invites us to rejoice².

My heart rejoices in the Lord; in the Lord my horn is lifted high. My mouth boasts over my enemies, for I delight in your deliverance.

There is no one holy like the Lord; there is no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God.

As you explore passages like this, you can respond to them with your own prayers, as I’ve written about before. Or, as I’m suggesting here, you can allow the Scripture to be your prayer.

Whichever approach makes sense to you, and wherever you are today in your prayer life, the goal is simply growth. If you go days at a time without talking to the Lord, trying to “pray without ceasing” for hours on end probably won’t be successful.

Remember that the Lord’s invitation to us to pray is designed to uplift us. It’s not a challenge meant to burden us. Using Scripture as “prayer filler” should relieve your efforts. It shouldn’t add pressure to find just the right verse.

“Come to me,” Jesus said, “all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28)

Let your prayers rest in the Word, and let your soul and spirit rise.

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Could the World Possibly Need Another Christian Book?

It’s not exactly unheard of for someone with a blog to proclaim they’re going to write a book. So even if this announcement doesn’t surprise you, it did surprise me. During my first year posting here, I’d kept the idea of writing a book safely in the “someday” category.

And I wish I had a more spiritual story for why I suddenly moved it to “why not now?” It occurred to me one day (while eating my lunch) that I could outline a book and slowly write it post-by-post. Excited, I wrote a couple of (very short) chapters.

I originally intended to share some of what I came up with in this post. But somebody warned me that might be a problem. Amazon, I was told, crawls the web to catch copyright violators who try to self-publish with them. This makes sense, in principle, but causes problems. The person who reached out to me had Amazon refuse to print her book. She believed this was because she had shared part of it on her blog.

I have no idea what the odds of that happening are, but any chance might be too high. As a no-name, never-published author, I feel like Amazon is kinda the ballgame. I mean, if I can’t self-publish there, then where? Kinko’s?

I looked at the fine print for Amazon’s print-on-demand arm, Kindle Direct Publishing. Sure enough, it says they enforce their guidelines “using a combination of machine learning, automation, and dedicated teams of human reviewers.” I have a hunch their bots are plentiful, but their human reviewers are few. And I’m guessing those humans are hard to get a hold of and plead your case to if you get mistakenly blackballed.

If anyone knows more about this or has experience using Kindle Direct Publishing, please let me know. Is the way I’m thinking wildly paranoid? Or wise?

I did have a couple of ideas for how I might share drafts with you while staying in the clear. One was to record portions of what I write as audio. If you’re still reading at this point, first, thank you! Also, let me know what you’d think of that.

Do you ever listen to audio on Substack? Would you give it a try if I shared some of my book project that way?

1. 1 Corinthians 3:1-2 and Hebrews 5:12-14 use milk as a spiritual metaphor in a somewhat different sense. In these examples, milk for new believers is contrasted with “solid food” for the mature. Whichever image you lean into, you’ll benefit when you incorporate God’s Word into your prayer.

2. It also, as it happens, invites us to boast over our enemies. This kind of thing comes up a lot in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. It can be perplexing, to say the least. If you want help navigating passages like this in your own prayers, wise Christians you personally know will usually be your best guides. If you’d like some of my thoughts, I shared them here.