How to pray with the Bible
Short answer
Praying with the Bible means using the text itself as the words of the prayer, instead of talking about it. Three ancient practices do that: praying the psalms as if you had written them, reading slowly until one line stops you and turning it into a request, and praying spontaneously from the passage you read. None requires method or long stretches of time.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 10 min read
Many people read the Bible one way and pray another, as if these were two separate activities that happen to occur at the same hour. The chapter is read, the book is closed, and only then does the prayer begin — usually about the day’s concerns, with no relation to what has just been read.
The Christian tradition, Catholic and Protestant alike, did the opposite for almost all of its history: the text read was the matter of the prayer. Not because praying in your own words is inferior, but because a text in front of you solves the most common problem of anyone trying to pray — not knowing what to say after the first minute.
Praying the text and praying about the text are different things
A good part of the Bible does not speak about God: it speaks to God. The psalms in particular are whole prayers, already formulated, written to be repeated by other people — that is what the musical headings several of them carry are for. Someone reading a psalm aloud in the first person is not studying an ancient document; they are using a prayer that is ready.
The practical difference shows up quickly. Praying about a text means commenting on what it means and then asking for what you want. Praying the text means saying those words as your own, including when they say what you would not have had the courage to formulate alone.
1A Canticle in steps. From the depths, I have cried out to you, O Lord.
2O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.
Two lines that are already the whole prayer: a place from which one speaks and a request that the voice be heard. There is nothing to interpret before using it — you can open at this verse and simply say it, which is exactly the function it was written for. (This edition follows the Vulgate numbering of the Psalms; this is Psalm 130 where the Hebrew count is used.)
Praying the psalms: the oldest practice
The hundred and fifty psalms cover an emotional range no modern devotional collection covers: gratitude, fear, guilt, physical joy, thirst, insomnia, rage against enemies, direct accusation against God. Praying the whole Psalter, a little at a time, means agreeing to say the parts that do not match your mood that day too — and that is the part that frightens beginners most.
The classic argument for it is simple: someone who only prays what they feel ends up always praying the same thing. A psalm of praise read on a bad day is not hypocrisy; it is the same thing as a congregation singing together when not everyone there is well. And a psalm of complaint read on a good day is a reminder that somebody else, somewhere, is exactly in that place.
No plan is needed. One psalm a day, in order, takes five months. One psalm a day with the same psalm repeated through the week covers less and fixes more.
2O God, my God, look upon me. Why have you forsaken me? Far from my salvation are the words of my offenses.
The harshest opening in the Psalter — an accusation of abandonment addressed to God, and in this edition it comes with a plea to be looked at first. It stands in the canon of both traditions, which means complaining inside prayer was never treated as a defect of faith. It is also the verse the Gospels place on the lips of Jesus at the cross, and that changes the weight of praying it. (Psalm 22 where the Hebrew numbering is used.)
2O God, my God: to you, I keep vigil until first light. For you, my soul has thirsted, to you my body, in so many ways.
3By a deserted land, both inaccessible and waterless, so I have appeared in the sanctuary before you, in order to behold your virtue and your glory.
The opposite of the previous one, and just as usable as it stands: keeping vigil until first light, thirst, the body, and then a deserted land without water. Notice that the psalm describes desire for God in the language of the body rather than the language of feeling — anyone expecting prayer to be an emotion finds something else here. (Psalm 63 where the Hebrew numbering is used.)
Reading slowly until one line stops you
The second practice is to read a short passage several times, without hurry, until some sentence weighs more than the others — and then to stay there. It is what monasteries call praying the Scriptures, and the four-step scheme usually taught today was formulated in the twelfth century, though the practice is much older than the scheme.
The point almost every summary of this practice misses: it is not a comprehension technique. It is not about extracting the meaning of the passage but about letting the passage last. Anyone who finishes the four steps with an exegetical question has not done it wrong — they have only discovered that the question needs another kind of reading, at another time.
- Read the whole passage, slowly, once. Genuinely short: five to ten verses is enough.
- Read it again and stop at the sentence that weighed. If none weighs, choose any one — the exercise works the same.
- Stay with that sentence for a few minutes, repeating it. Without trying to conclude anything.
- Answer it in your own words: a request, a thank you, an objection. Whatever comes.
- Close in silence. One or two minutes, with no words at all, is the part most often skipped and the hardest.
19But Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her heart.
The verb Luke uses describes someone who keeps and turns over, rather than understanding at once. It is the exact posture of this practice: the passage stays with the person for an indefinite time, without their needing to close a conclusion in order to move on.
8The book of this law shall not depart from your mouth. Instead, you shall meditate upon it, day and night, so that you may observe and do all the things that are written in it. Then you shall direct your way and understand it.
The text asks for continuous meditation, day and night, and ties it to the person’s way. Notice what it does not ask for: fast reading, or coverage of much material. The ancient image behind the verb is chewing over — the same passage revisited many times.
From reading to asking
The third form is the most spontaneous of the three and the one needing least instruction: read the passage and talk from there. If the text is about forgiveness, you talk about the forgiveness you need to give or receive. If it is about hunger, you talk about the month’s bills. The reading works as a starting subject, not as a script.
This has precedent inside the Bible itself, and it is not a figure of speech. There are characters who read an earlier text and, because of it, begin to pray; and there are whole communities praying by quoting a psalm as if it described what they were living through at that instant.
2in year one of his reign, I, Daniel, understood in the books the number of the years, concerning the word of the Lord which came to Jeremiah, the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would be completed in seventy years.
3And I set my face to the Lord, my God, to ask and make supplication with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes.
The sequence is explicit and it is the model for this section: he studies an earlier prophetic text, understands what is written there, and the immediate consequence of the reading is turning to prayer. First he read, then he prayed, and the subject of the prayer was what the reading raised.
24And when they had heard it, with one accord, they lifted up their voice to God, and they said: “Lord, you are the One who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them,
25who, by the Holy Spirit, through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said: ‘Why have the Gentiles been seething, and why have the people been pondering nonsense?
26The kings of the earth have stood up, and the leaders have joined together as one, against the Lord and against his Christ.’
A community under threat prays aloud, and the core of the prayer is a quotation from a psalm. They do not paraphrase or explain: they use the words as they stand to say their own situation. It is the proof that praying with the text in hand is older than any named method.
The prayer Jesus taught came out of a request
It is worth remembering where the Lord’s Prayer came from, because the circumstance says something about this whole article: the disciples asked to be taught. That is, people who lived alongside Jesus daily admitted to not knowing how prayer was done, and the answer they got was not advice about sincerity — it was a text, short, to be repeated.
That settles, straight away, the most common objection to praying with words written by somebody else. The most used prayer in Christianity is, by definition, a received formula. And the instruction that appears right beside it, about not multiplying words, points the same way: the criterion was never quantity or originality.
1And it happened that, while he was in a certain place praying, when he ceased, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.”
2And he said to them: “When you are praying, say: Father, may your name be kept holy. May your kingdom come.
3Give us this day our daily bread.
4And forgive us our sins, since we also forgive all who are indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.”
Notice that the request comes after they see Jesus praying, and that the answer is a formula. Anyone who feels that praying with someone else’s text is less authentic is unknowingly disagreeing with the way the thing was taught at the source.
7And when praying, do not choose many words, as the pagans do. For they think that by their excess of words they might be heeded.
8Therefore, do not choose to imitate them. For your Father knows what your needs may be, even before you ask him.
The warning in this edition is against choosing many words and expecting to be heeded for the excess of them — not against using words that were given to you. The distinction matters for anyone who feels guilty about praying little: the text suggests that short prayer was never the problem.
Fixed text or your own words: the real divergence
Whoever asks how to pray with the Bible is almost always, without realising it, asking something else: whether it is better to use written prayers or to speak in your own words. Both practices exist in both traditions, and the difference between them is smaller than it usually looks — but the weight each community gives to each is different, and that is honest to acknowledge.
When no words come at all
There are days when even the psalm does not work: you read, you understand every sentence, and you cannot say it. That is not a failure of method, and the three practices above have nothing to offer in that case — worth saying plainly instead of suggesting a fourth exercise.
What the Bible offers there is not a technique but a statement: that not knowing how to pray is the normal condition and does not prevent prayer from happening. Anyone at that point has usually read too much advice already. Reading the passage and staying silent, producing nothing, is a legitimate response and probably the only one available that day.
26And similarly, the Spirit also helps our weakness. For we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself asks on our behalf with ineffable sighing.
The letter states, without hedging, that we do not know how to pray as we ought — and treats that as a starting point, not as a problem to be corrected. It is one of the few New Testament passages that describes prayer as something held up from outside the person praying.