A prayer before reading the Bible
The prayer
Lord, I am about to open the Bible.
Do not let me read it just to tick the box.
Let me understand what can be understood today, and let me bear not understanding the rest.
And if the text says something I did not come here to hear, give me the nerve to hear it anyway.
Amen.
In short
This is a short prayer to say before opening the Bible. It was written for this site and it is signed. It asks for as much understanding as today allows, patience with the rest, and the nerve to hear whatever you did not come looking for. Below it, the tradition of lectio divina.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 5 min read
When to pray it
With the Bible already open and before the first line. It takes ten seconds and serves the daily chapter as well as a longer sitting of study.
There are two ways for Bible reading to go wrong, and this prayer answers both. The first is reading to tick the box: the day’s chapter struck off the plan, the eyes moving along the lines, nothing staying. The second is the opposite and subtler — stalling at the first difficult passage and concluding that the book is not for you. The prayer asks for understanding where it comes and patience with the rest because both things happen in the same reading, usually on the same page.
It is worth saying without ceremony that failing to understand part of what you read is normal and permanent. The Bible is a library written across more than a thousand years, in three languages, by people whose cultural assumptions are not ours. Anyone who reads Leviticus for the first time without finding it strange is not paying attention. Leaving a question open is not a failure of faith — it is the ordinary condition of any serious reader, and the alternative is usually to invent an answer.
On the last request, the practical example is as uncomfortable as it gets. Practically everyone who reads Scripture regularly runs sooner or later into a text that asks something of them they had no intention of changing. James compares the person who hears and does nothing to somebody glancing in a mirror and forgetting their own face on the way out. It is a comic and unpleasant image, and it is precisely the risk of reading well and changing nothing.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared Written for Faith Flame in 2026
Praying your way through Scripture is an old monastic practice with a name: lectio divina. It took its schematic form in the twelfth century, when Guigo II, a Carthusian prior, wrote the Scala Claustralium and set out four rungs — reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation. The practice is older than he is; the ladder is his. That is why lectio divina begins and ends in prayer, with the reading in between.
English has one famous prayer on exactly this subject, and it is worth knowing about even though we are not reprinting it: the collect for the second Sunday in Advent in the Book of Common Prayer, which asks that we “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” the Scriptures. Four verbs, and the last one is the interesting one — the image is of food rather than of information.
This prayer was written for this site, and that is why it is signed. It is short because it competes with the reading itself, and nobody who has just opened the Bible wants to pray for ten minutes first. All it does is put the reader in the right posture: whoever reads Scripture is listening to somebody, and listening is a disposition rather than a technique.
Little-known details
The four rungs of lectio divina were numbered by a twelfth-century Carthusian
The biblical scene that best describes reading without understanding ends in a request for help
What the passages say
18Reveal to my eyes, and I will consider the wonders of your law.
The request assumes the problem is with the eyes of the reader rather than the clarity of the text. It is the verse that best sums up the position of anyone opening Scripture: the wonder is already there, what is missing is seeing it. (Psalm 119 in Hebrew-numbered Bibles.)
30And Philip, hurrying, heard him reading from the prophet Isaiah, and he said, “Do you think that you understand what you are reading?”
31And he said, “But how can I, unless someone will have revealed it to me?” And he asked Philip to climb up and sit with him.
The Ethiopian official’s answer is the model of reader’s honesty this page is arguing for. He does not pretend to follow, and the text treats that as the right starting point — the explanation arrives after the admission, not before it.
45Then he opened their mind, so that they might understand the Scriptures.
The verb is the one used for opening doors, and the object is not the text: it is the mind of the listener. The scene works as a correction for anyone who assumes understanding the Bible is purely a matter of studying harder.
22So be doers of the Word, and not listeners only, deceiving yourselves.
23For if anyone is a listener of the Word, but not also a doer, he is comparable to a man gazing into a mirror upon the face that he was born with;
24and after considering himself, he went away and promptly forgot what he had seen.
25But he who gazes upon the perfect law of liberty, and who remains in it, is not a forgetful hearer, but instead a doer of the work. He shall be blessed in what he does.
The mirror is the most concrete image in the New Testament about reading. Note that the complaint is not aimed at people who read little, but at people who read, see, and leave unchanged — which is only possible for somebody who was paying attention.