I just read a post over at Not Ashamed of the Gospel. It’s about prayer. The basic idea in the post is that you should always put others before yourself when you pray. It offers an order for how we should prioritise things in prayer – “Father first, others second, you last.” It’s backed up by a good looking vid from Living Waters (Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron) that says that if you focus on prayer for others you’ll forget your own problem. In so doing you’ll become more thankful to God.

I desperately want to agree with the post as I believe our lives should be oriented to others just as Jesus’ was. I want to affirm it because it gives us a formula that encourages us to move beyond being fixated on ourselves. It makes perfect sense. I get the point, understand the sentiment and want to applaud it. The only problem is that when looking at the Bible I can’t entirely agree.

In my early reflections on the Psalms, some of the most intimate prayers in the Bible, I see David often being fixated on his own problems. Read Psalm 6. In it there is only a glimmer of praise to God and it comes because he believed God had answered his cry for mercy – otherwise the Psalm is a straight up cry for help that has his own problems front and center.

Of course, many of the Psalms counter balance the focus on the writer’s troubles with an understanding and worship of the God who acts, but in those early Psalms, it’s David’s troubles that are fueling his approach to God.

Even in the prayer that Jesus taught that many extract a prayer formula from, the order begins with recognising God as holy, asking that his will would be done and then the next thing is asking for our basic needs, our forgiveness and keeping us – those doing the praying – free from evil.

A study of prayers in the Bible demonstrates something about what an intimate relationship with God looks like – it’s primal. Prayer isn’t an intellectual exercise in getting it right, following the right priorities and hitting the right formulas… it’s about connecting with God in a very real relationship. If you wanted to extract formulas from prayers in the Bible there’d be hundreds of different formulas  – that’s reflected in the number of books on the topic that are out there. Far too many people are peddling formulas.

If someone looked at how I talk to my wife – all the various, diverse and colourful conversations and tried to extract formulas and priorities out of each of them for how all husbands should talk to their wives I’d tell them to throw their formulas away. How I relate to my wife shifts and varies based on circumstances, moods, time etc and I have no doubt that it has looked very different in times when we have felt close to each other as opposed to those times when we have been somewhat disconnected. It’s the same with God.

I have ‘methods’ and ‘disciplines’ that I use, but they’re not formulas to get it right, they’re just vehicles I use to create rhythm and space – they could, can and do change sometimes.

With prayer, don’t stress too much about getting it right. If you’re doing it at all, you’re getting it right. Just do it and if just doing it throws up some conversations with God that are clumsy, messy and downright selfish then so be it – it’s better than nothing at all. We can paralyse ourselves if we get fixated on getting it right. The more you do it simply with an openness and desire to be with him, the more he’ll shape you. You’ll have sublime times where you’ll think what you just prayed should have been recorded in the Psalms and other times where you’ll walk away thinking it was a waste of time or wondering ‘why the heck did I say that?’ And sometimes you might not say anything at all.

Just pray.