Why You Should Read Praying the Bible by Don Whitney

This book was one of the first books I was ever given as a new Christian. I didn’t grow up going to church, so when I became a Christian, my prayer life was pretty simple. Honestly, the only prayer I really knew was how to thank God for the food in front of me. I knew I was supposed to pray, but I didn’t really know how to pray beyond the few things I already knew to say. This book became like training wheels for my prayer life. It helped me learn how to pray by giving me the guidance and confidence I needed to grow in something I was still learning how to do.

My prayer life is still far from perfect. I still struggle with distraction, inconsistency, and sometimes simply not knowing what to say. But isn’t that true of all of us? Prayer is one of those things that every Christian knows we should do, and yet it can often be one of the most difficult spiritual disciplines to maintain.

That is where Praying the Bible begins. Don Whitney introduces the book with a very common problem: prayer is hard for every Christian. He writes, “I maintain that people—truly born-again, genuinely Christian people—often do not pray simply because they do not feel like it. And the reason they don’t feel like praying is that when they do pray, they tend to say the same old things about the same old things” (11).

Does that sound familiar to you? Have you ever been praying and realized that you are essentially saying the same things you said yesterday, last week, and maybe even last year? Have you ever become so bored with your own prayers that you wanted to stop praying altogether and then felt like something was wrong with you as a Christian because you were struggling to pray?

When we pray, we pray for all sorts of things. We pray for the salvation of lost family members, our finances, jobs, health, marriages, children, churches, and future. We bring our fears, burdens, needs, and desires before God. None of these are bad things to pray about. In fact, Scripture commands us to bring our needs before God. The problem isn’t necessarily what we pray for. The problem is that our prayers can become repetitive because we keep saying the same old things about the same old things. As Whitney puts it, “The problem is not that we pray about the same things; rather, it’s that we say the same old things about the same old things” (20). This is where Whitney’s solution is so clear and simple. He says, “when you pray, pray through a passage of Scripture, particularly a psalm” (27).

Think about what that means for you and me. God has given us 150 divinely inspired prayers in the Psalms that we can use to shape and guide our own prayers. Instead of wondering, “What am I going to pray about today?” we can open God’s Word and let God’s Word guide us in the words to pray. "To pray the Bible, you simply go through the passages line by line, talking to God about whatever comes to mind as you read the text. See how easy that is? Anyone can do it" (33). We don’t have to manufacture something new every time we come before God.

Whitney doesn’t just present this idea; he teaches you how to actually do it with an example of Psalm 23 (29-32). The instructions are practical and simple.. I love the tone of the book; it feels almost like a father coming alongside a son or daughter and saying, “Let me teach you what I have learned. Let me show you how to pray.” Whitney's years of experience praying this way, combined with his enthusiasm for the practice, make the method feel both practical and doable. As you practice, you can slowly take off the training wheels, not because you no longer need to pray the Bible, but because praying God’s Word begins to become more natural.

I hope you’ll check this book out from our church’s library or order it here, and that you’ll get the same joy and encouragement to pray the Bible as I have found.