Responding to God’s words

Here are some ideas on responding to scripture in prayer, and an encouragement to think of every passage in the Bible as an invitation to speak to God. If you are persuaded by this idea, it will make a significant difference to way in which you respond to God’s words to you. I have found this approach such an encouragement.

God speaks: We know from the example and the teaching of Jesus that God speaks to us through every word in scripture. We are used to the idea that the psalms consist of words from God that we are encouraged to say to God.

God’s words are an invitation: We are less familiar with the idea that every word from God is an invitation to respond to God, to worship him, express our love for him, to confess our sins, lament, give thanks, obey, and more.

What could this look like in practice?

Here is a prayer written in response to Esther 1:

Almighty and everlasting God, thank you that you are always and everywhere omnipotently present, even when you are most conspicuously and painfully absent. We thank you that you are the king of kings, and the lord of lords, and that one day every knee will bow at the name of Jesus. Please use the story of Esther from this first chapter onwards to help us look upwards beyond the thrones we can see to the throne we cannot see. Help us to look forwards from the feasting all around us, to the feast that lies ahead for us. Teach us to look through the wisdom of the world to the wisdom of God revealed in the Lord Jesus Christ. Help us fill our minds and our eyes with your majesty and your glory, rather than the glittering displays of human glory and the brutal reality of human tyranny. Protect us from the love of money, from the love of property, and from every other form of misdirected love. Draw our hearts to you, so that we love you more than anyone or anything else. We ask in the name of the one who was rich, who became poor so that we might become rich in him. Amen.

I wrote this piece after studying the chapter and the surrounding story, after reading and thinking about it with help from several commentaries, and I began to think about other ways to respond in prayer to a passage from scripture.

Here are further responses to scripture in prayer, from Proverbs 6

Go to the ant

What sort of community is Proverbs 6 designed to achieve and to avoid?

Two responses to Proverbs 6.6-11

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Here are some of the approaches that occurred to me. I would very much like to hear your reactions, your suggestions and criticisms, and improvements.

1. We can learn to pray from a specific passage in the light of church history, and in the context of the cultural variety across the people of God today and throughout history

As we read God’s word to us scripture today, in our geographical location, our social context, our political and personal circumstances, every chapter is an invitation to remember the faith, the hope, the love and the suffering of the people of God in earlier centuries and around the world today, in different ethnic contexts, under a range of political regimes. Every chapter invites us to respond to God, and to speak to God, in the light of the experiences of Christians in earlier years, and in the light of the experiences of Christians across today’s world.

2. We can learn to pray from a particular Old Testament passage in the light of the whole Old Testament

As we hear God’s voice in a particular Old Testament passage, we can learn to hear God’s words in the light of the whole Old Testament.

For example, we can read Esther in the light of Proverbs, and as the story develops we can see individual Proverbs working themselves out, through the decisions and the actions of the King of Persia and those around him.

We can pray for wisdom, for ourselves and those in authority, in the light of Esther’s portrait of the foolishness of the Persian regime.

We can read Esther in the light of the Ten Commandments, and pray in response to what the Ten Commandments help us to see in the narrative.

The Old Testament itself encourages this approach. For instance, God’s revelation of his character to Moses provides the backdrop for the rest of the narrative. We can pray in the light of the earlier passage from any subsequent chapter as God continues to reveal himself.

3. We can learn to pray from a particular passage in the light of the whole Bible

As we hear God’s voice in a particular Old Testament passage, we can hear and respond God’s voice in the light of the whole Bible.

We can pray from Esther 1 in the light of the Sermon on Mount, or the wisdom of God that is hidden and revealed in the Lord Jesus Christ (Colossians 1), or any other NT passage (such as the description of the feast in Revelation 19)

4. We can learn to pray from a passage by remembering the various biblical metaphors for scripture

When Esther 1 functions as a mirror we can thank God for showing us ourselves, so that we can repent and seek his forgiveness

When Esther 1 functions like a sword (or a scalpel) we can thank God for speaking in ways that penetrate beneath the surface of our self deception, and reveal what is usually hidden

When Esther 1 functions like milk, bread, or meat, we can thank God for nurturing us with his word, for developing our love for him and for those around us, and ask him to develop our appetite and capacity for scripture

When Esther 1 functions like a lamp, we can thank God for enough light to get through the next week, or for the next leg of the journey, or through a particular issue that is facing us.

5. We can learn to pray from a passage by thinking about some of the metaphors for the function of scripture

When Esther 1 functions as glasses, showing us God more clearly .. we can praise God, and thank God for what we can see of his glory

When Esther 1 functions as a wedding invitation, leading us to the wedding supper of the Lamb .. we can worship God for his grace, for the cost of the invitation, for the glory of what he has in mind for us.

6. We can learn to pray from a passage by thinking about a variety of spiritual conditions

   We can bring Packer’s seven Puritan spiritual categories of people to a passage, as prompts for prayer in response to the passage.

   Packer distinguishes between these different classes of people, taken from Perkins The Art of Prophesying: “(1) the ignorant and unteachable who need the equivalent of a bomb under their seats, (2) the ignorant but teachable, who needed orderly instruction in what Christianity is all about; (3) the knowledgeable but unhumbled, who needed to be given a sense of sin; (4) the humbled and desperate, who needed to be grounded in the gospel; (5) believers going on with God, who needed building up; and (6) believers who had fallen into error, intellectual or moral, and needed correction” …

   Packer adds six kinds of application from the Westminster Directory of Publick Worship …. “In form they are inferential and logical, being structured thus: since this is true (‘this’ being the truth just taught), you must (1) be sure of the following further truths which it implies; (2) abjure the following errors, which it contradicts; (3) do such-and-such good things, which it requires; (4) stop doing, or avoid doing, such-and-such bad things, which it forbids, (5) take to yourself the encouragement which it offers; (6) ask yourself where you stand spiritually in the light of it, and how far you are living by it.” ¹

7. We can learn to pray from a passage in the light of the Lord’s Prayer

   What concerns within the Lord’s prayer are echoed or expressed in the passage? How does Packer’s analysis of the Lord’s Prayer help? Packer describes seven aspects of prayer that the Lord’s Prayer includes, and four questions that the Lord’s Prayer answers.

As analysis of light requires reference to the seven colours of the spectrum that make it up, so analysis of the Lord’s Prayer requires reference to a spectrum of seven distinct activities:

approaching God in adoration and trust;
acknowledging his work and his worth, in praise and worship;
admitting sin, and seeking pardon;
asking that needs be met, for ourselves and others;
arguing with God for blessing, as … Jacob did in Genesis 32 …
accepting from God one’s own situation as he has shaped it;
and adhering to God in faithfulness through thick and thin.

These seven activities together constitute biblical prayer, and the Lord’s Prayer embodies them all. J.I. Packer, Praying the Lord’s Prayer, (Crossway, 2007) p. 17

Here is another way of thinking about the Lord’s Prayer, picturing the prayer as the answer to a series of questions from God our gracious and glorious Father:

“Who do you take me for, and what am I to you?” (Our Father in heaven.)

“That being so, what is it that you really want most?” (The hallowing of your name; the coming of your kingdom; to see your will known and done.)

“So what are you asking for right now, as a means to that end?” (Provision, pardon, protection).

Then the “praise ending” answers the question, “How can you be so bold and confident in asking for these things?” (Because we know you can do it, and when you do it, it will bring you glory!)

Spiritually, this set of questions sorts us out in a most salutary way.

J.I. Packer, Praying the Lord’s Prayer, (Crossway, 2007) p. 24

7. We can learn to pray from a passage by reading the passage in the light of Biblical creeds and the catholic creeds

Biblical creeds: e.g. Deuteronomy 6:4; 1 Corinthians 8:6; Romans 10:9-10; 1 Corinthians 15:3-4

Apostles Creed
Nicene Creed

Luther does something like this in his Letter to Peter the Barber he prays the Lord’s Prayer guided by the Ten Commandments and the Creed.

We could ask ourselves what clauses from the creed are relevant to this passage?
How does reading the creed alongside this passage prompt prayer?

For example: The Creed knows that the one who is reigning will one day return. A Sunday that is devoted to thinking about Christ the King can be guided by the Creed to remember in prayer that the king who currently reigns, invisible to our eyes, will one day return when every eye will see him.

8. We can learn to pray from a passage by responding to God in a variety of rhetorical forms

Write a collect
Write a confession
Write a praise prayer
Write a lament

Think about the rhetorical range of prayers across scripture
Find examples of scripture using scripture in prayer
Follow biblical examples where they are available

9. We can learn to pray from a passage in the light of what we can see in the passage that is broken in God’s world

Reading God’s world so as to respond to God’s word, as for example Esther 1.

Esther 1 pictures scandalous conspicuous consumption
Esther 1 records sexual violence against women and men
Esther 1 reveals human creativity misused for pointless luxury
Esther 1 reveals the astonishing variety and beauty of God’s world
Esther 1 reveals the ugliness of Xerxes’ regime, and the brokenness of the relationships between women and men, at court, and everywhere across the empire

10. We can learn to pray from a passage in ways that express the concerns within the passage that contrast with our concerns in today’s world and today’s church

    For example: Esther 1 pictures a world without democracy, and an empire living under tyranny, with women and men suffering sexual abuse, without the narrator expressing any concern about those issues within the immediate context.

    The lack of any comment on issues that immediately strike us can be disconcerting. It’s sometimes in the strangeness of what we read that we learn, the strangeness helps us. The rest of the Bible makes clear that the issues that immediately resonate within our context are certainly causes for serious concern, but the passage makes clear that there are other issues that also matter as the narrator tells the Esther story.

11. We can learn to pray from a passage when we bring to the passage the different seasons of our emotions

    Different psalms can helpfully express different “emotional seasons” in our lives, in response to our changing circumstances, as a community or within our families, or our lives individually. In this way of approaching the psalms:

    A summer psalm expresses our feelings when the sun is shining, God is on his throne, and all is well in the world, and in our lives
    Autumn psalms express our sense of loss, when the sunshine has now gone, the temperature is lower, a lighter brighter season is over
    A winter psalm expresses our feeling that summer was a long time ago, the world is dark and cold, and there is no sign or prospect of spring anytime soon
    A spring psalm celebrates the snowdrops that are appearing in our lives, green shoots, new beginnings, longer days, and new hope

For any passage in scripture we could write a prayer that approaches the passage from the context of one of these emotional seasons

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1. JI Packer, Among God’s giants (Kingsway, 1991) p. 377f↩︎

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