A Prayer for before Reading Scripture

Normally when I sit down to have a quiet time in the morning, I do one of two things first; open my Bible and start reading, or I try to pray—and struggle to get the words out because I haven’t had a coffee yet.

That’s why writing this prayer is as much for me as it is for you. 

It’s words that I have been, and will continue, to offer to God before I start reading the Scriptures each morning. I desperately want to focus my heart and mind on what I’m about to do, and ask for God’s help as I do that.

I know that structured or written prayer can be strange or formal for some people, but here’s why I hope this prayer helps: every line is taken from a verse of Scripture. I’ve shaped them a little, but the essence of every line you’ll find below is taken from the verse in brackets.

My hope is that this prayer is a way of centring your heart and mind on what matters before you read the Scriptures. That it would allow you to marvel at the beauty held in the Creator’s word, to acknowledge your forgetfulness if needed, and to ask the Triune God to be actively working the time you spend together.

Pray it each time you open your Bible, pray it occasionally, or use it as a launchpad for writing your own prayer!

May you love reading God’s word, as a way of loving God more deeply.

Good and Gracious Father,

Your words are more precious than gold, (Psalm 19:10)

a lamp for my feet and a light for my path, (Psalm 119:105)

sweeter than the taste of honey, (Psalm 19:10)

truer than the gift of life itself. (Psalm 119:60)

And yet I often convince myself otherwise,

falling into distraction and disregard,

for my ways are not steadfast, (Psalm 119:5) 

and my sin remains stubbornly wilful. (Psalm 19:13)

Father, hear my prayer:

turn my heart away from my desires and toward yours. (Psalm 119:36)

As I open your word, cause my

heart,

soul,

mind,

and strength to love you completely. (Mark 12:30)

Uncover my life and lay it bare,

penetrate my soul and spirit,

judge the attitudes and thoughts of my heart,

so that I become more like Jesus. (Hebrews 4:12-13)

Grant me understanding to learn your commands, (Psalm 119:73)

that I may obey them with all my heart. (Psalm 119:34)

Be gracious and teach me your decrees, (Psalm 119:29)

that I may meditate on your wonderful deeds. (Psalm 119:27)

Spirit of God—teach me and remind me in this moment, (John 14:25-27)

True and living Word—meet me in these words, (John 1:1)

Author of Life—allow me to delight in what you’ve written. (Psalm 1:2)

Amen.

Two Books to Help Your Rhythms

There are often two reasons we struggle to develop good rhythms; we don’t think they matter that much or we can’t seem to make them ‘stick’. I’ve found both of those to be true at different points in my life, and the books recommended below tackle each of those struggles in different ways. I think they’d both benefit anyone - but have a read to see which one might fit you better!

You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K.A Smith

Smith opens by stating that ‘discipleship...is a way to curate your heart to be attentive to and intentional about what you love’, and he demonstrates this in theory and practice throughout. This book helps us to recognise the vital role that our habits and desires play in our worship of Jesus, and then provides a roadmap for directing them more fully towards Jesus.

One of the most helpful aspects of You Are What You Love is that it unflinchingly addresses the fact that you might not love what you think. I’m not sure if you’ve ever had a moment when you’re reading something and the author has put things into words that you’ve always felt but never been able to articulate, but for me, that happened multiple times throughout my reading. I was forced to reckon with the fact that I loved things more than I ought to and I’d never even recognised it. Much of this comes by virtue of the culture in which we live, as Smith notes that ‘the habits we’ve acquired shape how we perceive the world, which in turn disposes us to act in certain ways.’

Helpfully, the book concludes with three chapters given to practically considering how this plays out in the home, in the raising of children, and in the workplace. For anyone desiring to embody their faith in Jesus more faithfully and intentionally in any sphere of life, this book will not only enable you to take stock of where you are currently but also help you in working out how to practically live to that end.

You can purchase it here.

Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear

You cannot read this book and walk away without greater clarity about how to build lasting habits. While offering detailed practical advice and examples is Clear’s main purpose, he concludes that ‘your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be...quite literally, you become your habits.’ For anyone wanting to embed their rhythms of grace deeper in their life - this book offers great practical wisdom.

There are definitely points where the desire to ‘achieve greater success’ and striving for more efficiency in life seem to clash with the Christian worldview, which is worth being aware of while reading. However much of what Clear presents can be adapted and tempered helpfully to apply to the rhythms of following Jesus, and when held within a framework of grace the practical strategies prove to be beneficial and useful. The tools to adapt your habits to your own life, practising the art of showing up rather than perfection, and loving the process not the product are particularly useful in developing spiritual disciplines. 

Strikingly, Clear suggests that ‘your habits are how you embody your identity’, giving examples such as ‘when you make your bed each day, you embody the identity of an organised person. When you write each day, you embody the identity of a creative person. When you train each day, you embody the identity of an athletic person.’

When our identity is already secure in Christ, how much more should that lead us to live into that identity through our rhythms?

You can purchase it here.

Forming Resilient Rhythms

The first step towards forming a resilient rhythm is to be actively embodying and practising it. Sounds simple right?

Well, in 2021, it’s probably not.

Neil Postman, the author of ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’, suggested that many people are LIARs. Before you take that too personally, hear me out—it’s an acronym he coined that stands for Low Information to Action Ratio. When talking about this, Postman says; “Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about had action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became the context for news. Everything became everyone's business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked.”

It’s hauntingly accurate, but even more so when you know the year that Postman published this work in: 1985. If this was his assessment a quarter of a century ago, I can only imagine what he’d say today. We have more information available in our pockets than we’re able to cope with, and the result is often inaction. There’s a limited amount of knowledge that we can act upon, meaning that even if we nod our head in agreement at something we hear, we’re often given no choice but to remain inactive.

If we want to make our rhythms resilient, we need to act on the information revealed to us by God in His word. In light of Barna’s research, David Kinnaman—author of Faith for Exiles—says that ‘if you want to be a resilient disciple, you’ve got to do more than attend worship. You have to engage in other spiritually formative practices.’

So, how do we avoid being LIARs and put this information into practice?

I want to suggest five simple ways that you can go about implementing any new rhythm into your life. They’re adapted from James Clear’s helpful book, Atomic Habits, and should be taken as a guideline rather than a set of rules. I’ve used these personally and found them helpful within the context of grace. I’ll refer back to these regularly as we continue to talk about implementing other rhythms as well.

1. Start SMALL: the art of ‘showing up’ is often more formative in the beginning than the practice itself. Establish your rhythms before you try to improve them.

2. Give your rhythms a SPACE and TIME: when you’re specific about the place and time in which you intend to implement your rhythms, you allow them to live in the real world. It’s not about making rules, but about creating space for them to be embodied regularly.

3. Adapt your habits to bring you JOY: there is a version of every spiritual practice that will work for each of us. Your life is unique, so adapt. It might not happen well right away. It might take perseverance. It might mean some trial and error. Ask God to guide you in this process!

4. Craft your ENVIRONMENT: your physical surroundings matter, and only you know what will allow you to thrive. Craft your surroundings to help and not hinder your rhythms. James Clear says that your ‘environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behaviour’, so consider what is around you and alter it as you need to.

5. Love the PROCESS, not the product: sometimes we can get down on ourselves when we don’t read as much as we’d planned, pray as often as we’d set out to, or miss church, rest or bible study altogether. The ‘output’ is less important than what God is doing through those things. Love the process, not the product.

I don’t believe there’s any special set of tips or tricks that make a rhythm foolproof, but I do believe that heeding practical wisdom is a way of stewarding the gifts of grace that God has given us. We’re creatures of habit, and by understanding simple things that can help us and then putting them into practice it gives glory to Jesus and, God-willing, allows us to abide more fully in him too.

If you’d like to have a go at implementing this now, then pick one of the rhythms in your life this week to reflect on, and ask yourself these two questions:

1. Do I have a plan to practice this rhythm?

2. Do I need to alter my plan to help me grow more in Christ?

And then pray about it!

Rhythms of Resilience

When I was in high school I got fixated on the sport of boxing. I’m not sure if it was because I was the shortest kid in my grade so I felt like I had to constantly defend myself, or if it was because I thought it would help me get a six-pack, but that’s besides the point. I used to train multiple times every week, and watch YouTube videos of professional fighters to learn whatever I could from them. The thing that always impressed me most about them was their ability to get back up after being knocked down. After taking blow upon blow to the head or body, and finally being brought to their knees, somehow they often had the ability to rise to their feet and continue to fight again.

The world resilient means to be able to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. It brings to mind the image of a boxer rising to their feet again after being knocked down, continuing to persevere under difficult circumstances. When it comes to being a Christian in today’s world—resilience is certainly something we need. There are so many things that compete for our attention, worldviews and ideologies that seek to persuade us away from the authority of the Scriptures, and hardships that will cause us to question our faith. Resilience is a crucial characteristic to following Jesus for the long-haul. The Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy near the end of his own life, declaring that ‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith (2 Timothy 4:7).’ If we want to be able to echo these words of Paul’s, we need to develop rhythms that will enable that kind of resilience. 

Over the last decade the Barna Group has conducted research into what is helping young Christians stick with their faith in turbulent times. They called those that continue to follow Jesus as ‘resilient disciples’—which meant at a minimum they attended church at least monthly, engage in church life outside of services, trust firmly in the authority of Scripture, are committed to Jesus personally and affirm his death and resurrection, and express a desire to transform society as an outcome of their faith. They then compared these ‘resilient disciples’ with other categories of Christians, such as habitual churchgoers, on a range of aspects regarding their faith.

In ‘Faith for Exiles’, the book that presents the culmination of this research, we’re presented with the findings that those who are resilient in their faith are twice as likely as habitual churchgoers to strongly agree that ‘reading the Bible makes me feel closer to God’. They’re also nearly twice as likely to feel re-energised by spending time with God, and spend twice as much time taking in spiritual content each year compared to others who attend church regularly. And 64% of these resilient disciples strongly agree that ‘prayer does not feel like a formal routine but a vibrant part of my life’, compared with 39% of habitual churchgoers.

While the research touches on other factors too, it’s worth pausing and considering the implications of these facts alone. In a world overloaded with incoming information, updates on never-ending global issues, and rhetoric that pulls us further from the way of Jesus—one of the strongest remedies is simply to continue to spend time being re-energised by God, in His word, through prayer and by consistently taking time to renew and fill our minds with the knowledge of Jesus.

If you want to fight the good fight, then develop rhythms that will help you to be resilient. Don’t wait until you’re struggling with your faith to put them into practice, act now. When you get knocked down by difficult questions from your friends or colleagues, being able to depend on God in prayer will help you to stand again. When suffering hits you hard, and it will at some stage of life, spending time reading God’s word will allow His open arms to comfort you and lift you to your feet. When the busyness of life and the stress of raising kids, navigating your workplace or juggling competing priorities has you feeling cornered—meeting regularly with brothers and sisters and continuing to practice sabbath will lift your eyes above the struggles to gaze upon the goodness of your Saviour.

The Christian life is a bumpy ride, and there’ll be plenty of times when you get knocked down. But they’re precisely the moments that your rhythms were built for, because they’re God’s gifts of grace that help you to be resilient and get back up in the strength of Jesus.

A Prayer for your Rhythms

Here’s a prayer for your rhythms in Christ! The hope of writing these prayers is that they might give words when they’re hard to come by, offer form to your own prayers before the Lord, or be a blessing in your church context. Each line of the prayer is based on one of these verses: John 15:1-16, Psalm 1:3, Matthew 11:28-30, Luke 10:27

Please take and use them however you find helpful and my prayer is that it allows you to behold God’s glory more fully.

Great and mighty Gardener,

In your love, you chose me before I chose you.

So grant that I remain in your Son,

pruning my life as you see fit, 

that I might love you with

heart, soul, mind and strength.

These things I cannot do on my own,

and so I come to you for rest,

tired and burdened,

asking that you might replace my yoke with yours. 

Take the rhythms of my life

and plant them by streams of water,

yielding the fruit that you desire - 

of loving others as you have loved me.

In this - make my joy complete,

through the mundane and the miraculous,

so that not a moment of my life

would be lived without my greatest friend.

Amen.

Rhythms of Grace

From a young age, I’ve been able to explain the gospel. I could recognise that I’d sinned and so there was a break in my relationship with God that was irreparable without His intervention. I knew Jesus was the one God had sent, in his grace and love, to lay down his life for my sin and to make a way for me to know God again. And the cherry on top was that it meant there was eternal life in heaven forever! That’s all seriously good news. Period. I just struggled to ever have those truths sink down deep enough to make a difference in the day to day of my life. It felt more like a set of beliefs rather than a relationship, and I wasn’t sure what to do with that. To be honest, I’ve seen and heard the same thing from other Christians for years. Maybe you’ve felt the same thing before too.

Why is that?

I want to suggest that it’s because we teach people the truths of the gospel clearly, but we don’t often have the same diligence in teasing out the implications of the gospel for our life in Christ. We form a good theology of salvation, but fail to equip them for the vital process of spiritual formation that will help to carry them through to the end. I know that was the case for me.

After all, Jesus himself says this ‘this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent (John 17:3).’ What he means is eternal life begins when you enter into a relationship with God - there are obviously some differences between what that life looks like in heaven and on earth - but the relationship has begun. Here and now. And that’s how eternal life is defined - knowing God and the son he sent. He offers ‘life, and life to the full’ (John 10:10) in the present, which is found in the context of a relationship with Jesus.

You see, the grace that Jesus offers to us in his life, death and resurrection isn’t isolated to salvation from our sin. It absolutely must involve that, but this grace then invites you and me into a grace-saturated way of living life. This is what we often call ‘discipleship’. And sometimes that discipleship is practical, however, more often than not it is exactly as James K.A Smith describes it, where ‘we often approach discipleship as if becoming a disciple of Jesus is largely an intellectual project, a matter of acquiring knowledge. Why is that?’

It’s because too often we value the life of Jesus more than we value the lifestyle of Jesus. By that I mean we appreciate what Jesus’ sinless life achieved for us more than we value living like Jesus. In his recent book ‘The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry’, John Mark Comer suggests that ‘the western church has lost sight of the fact that the way of Jesus is just that: a way of life. It’s not just a set of ideas (what we call theology) or a list of do’s and don’ts (what we call ethics). I mean, it is that, but it’s so much more. It’s a way of life, based on that of Jesus himself. A lifestyle.’

Here’s the point: to understand the grace of Jesus fully, we need to create space for our knowledge of Jesus to shape the rhythms of our lives. In the ordinary moments of our lives, through simple means of grace - like reading Scripture, prayer, taking a Sabbath rest, serving others, silence, fasting and meeting in community with our spiritual family. It still centres on what Jesus has done and not on what we do. And it revolves around grace-filled response rather than guilt-driven duty. But it enables a richness and vitality to the relationship that we were created for - us and God.

Jesus invites us, ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light (Matt 11:28-30).’ This is a deeply practical call to approach Jesus with every mundane moment of life and draw from his unending well of grace. It’s from that place that our life in Christ can truly flourish because our conception of being a Christian has shifted from being purely knowledge-based to involving a practical following of Jesus. Rather than navigating life with our own yoke, or way of living, it involves taking direction from Jesus in each sphere of life.

This is precisely what James K.A Smith means when he suggests that ‘the Christian faith is the practice of many practices - not because faith is works but precisely because such practices and disciplines are habitations of the Spirit’.  There is a practical nature of embodying grace that is inevitable. The practices, or rhythms, that make up our lives are exactly the places in which the Spirit continues to work out the grace of Jesus for the sake of his glory. In your life, and in my life. Each and every day.

That’s why we need to recognise how important the rhythms in our life are - because they’re precisely the places God’s grace is made tangible. It’s not just in our right knowledge about God but in the outworking of our relationship with Him. I’m grateful that in his grace God is continually teaching me this, and my prayer for you is that the same would be true.

May the grace of God shown to you in Christ guide you into a life of deeper communion with Him.