When You Pray Scripture, Are Tangents Okay?
A mind is hard to keep in one place.
So you’re willing to give praying the Bible a try. Maybe you’ve already discovered the power of psalms for this kind of prayer.
Or maybe you gave it a go, but it felt clunky. Anything new can seem that way for a while.
I want to encourage you to keep going back to it. I really believe that the practice of praying the Bible belongs in every believer’s prayer toolkit. And with time it can become second nature.
Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about:
Let’s say you read Psalm 19:1:
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
In response, you might pray:
Lord God, thank you that creation points to you. Sunsets, stars, meteors: none of this amazing stuff is a fluke. Thank you for putting these reminders of your greatness everywhere.
Or you might just pray:
Wow, Father. Wow.
I hope you find that this kind of prayer frees you up. It’s meant to relieve some of the burden of feeling like you have to constantly come up with original words to pray. God will supply all of the inspiration you need. He’ll speak to you in his Word. And then you’ll answer.
The hope is for it to feel like a conversation, and that you won’t be worried about “getting it right.”
I’ve enjoyed hearing about the positive experiences many of you have had with praying the Bible. And I’ve also seen some great questions.
One I’ve heard is this: what if you pray in a way that doesn’t really reflect the meaning of the Scripture you’re reading? Is that okay?
With an amusing example, here’s how Donald Whitney answers that question in the book Praying the Bible:
Suppose you are praying through Psalm 130, and you come to verse 3: “If you O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” And when you see that verb “mark,” your friend Mark comes to mind. What should you do? Pray for Mark! You know that verse is not about Mark, but it’s certainly not wrong to pray for Mark just because he popped into your head as you were reading Psalm 130:3.
Our minds tend to wander. They go off on tangents. And that’s okay. The Lord can use those tangents. Think of it this way: if your friend Mark came to mind unexpectedly when you were reading part of your Bible with no connection to his name whatsoever, what would you do? I hope you’d pray for him. And a similarity between his name and the text surely shouldn’t be a reason not to pray for him.
There are more subtle examples of prayer tangents. Whitney shows this with Psalm 23:3, “He restores my soul.” What if, in that moment, you think of a friend who doesn’t know the Lord yet? And so, you pray that God would restore that person’s soul from darkness to light. You pray the Lord would save that person.
This isn’t the kind of obvious tangent we talked about earlier with your friend Mark. But it still doesn’t really fit the passage. After all, Psalm 23 begins with, “The Lord is my shepherd.” The psalmist, then, is speaking as a person who already knows the Lord. The believer’s soul is being restored to the full joy and satisfaction of knowing God.
Have you done something wrong, then, in using it to pray for an unbeliever’s salvation? Whitney’s answer, again, is no:
This isn’t reading something into the text; it’s merely using the language of the text to speak to God about what has come into your mind.
Of course, there is also the fact that none of us fully understands the Bible. You might come across a passage and unintentionally read something into it. You could then pray something that reflects that misunderstanding.
In that case, you won’t even know that you did it. So as you pray the Bible, take heart that God is gracious and kind. He knows you won’t “get it all right.” It also happens that a side benefit of praying the Bible is that you will correct some of those misunderstandings over time. Praying for greater understanding of the Word, as it turns out, works quite well with praying the Bible.
So our minds may go off on quirky tangents while we pray the Bible. And we may occasionally feel moved to pray responses that we know don’t really fit the context of what we just read. It’s also inevitable that sometimes we’re just going to misunderstand parts of Scripture.
In each of those cases, I wouldn’t worry. Again, the hope is that praying the Bible will provide a lift and a relief to your prayer life. The goal isn’t to add a layer of anxiety about doing it incorrectly.
That being said, I will sound one note of caution: don’t ever intentionally twist Scripture. What I have in mind here is praying for something that you know isn’t pleasing to God, yet dressing it up with a Bible verse anyway. Here’s an example from Philippians 4:13:
I can do everything through him who gives me strength.
Everything? Seems like a useful prompt for a prayer for wealth. Money falls under the umbrella of “everything,” doesn’t it?
Here, the context of the passage is that the apostle Paul has found contentment in all circumstances—including those where he’s in financial need. Now earlier I said that praying for a friend’s salvation is fine, even if that doesn’t really fit the overall text.
The difference, of course, is that the intent behind one of these prayers is pleasing to God, while the other isn’t. Psalm 23:3 isn’t about an unbeliever being restored to life in Christ, but plenty of other passages in the Bible are. In that case, you mind may have wandered, but it’s still landed on a prayer that reflects God’s will. That’s because, while you aren’t praying in the context of that particular verse, you are still praying in alignment with the Bible as a whole. The same can’t be said of trying to twist Philippians 4:13 into a prayer for wealth.
Is that warning really necessary? For most, hopefully not. But even though praying the Bible is meant to be freeing, it’s true that there are some guardrails.
Until next time, keep up the prayer!
If you’d like to continue praying the Bible right now, here’s Psalm 19 again, this time with the first eight verses:
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun,
which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion,
like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
It rises at one end of the heavens
and makes its circuit to the other;
nothing is hidden from its heat.
The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.
The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy,
making wise the simple.
The precepts of the Lord are right,
giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the Lord are radiant,
giving light to the eyes.