Are you running into roadblocks with prayer? You know prayer is important, but you feel you aren’t praying like you should be. You aren’t alone. Many Christians struggle to maintain a consistent habit of prayer, and the biblical vision of praying without ceasing seems foreign and impossible. Maybe your prayers feel repetitive and stale; maybe your prayers feel dull when they should be fervent. Maybe you aren’t sure whether your prayers are really doing anything. And maybe you feel unworthy to try praying at all.
You don’t have to be unsure about your prayer life. Here are ten spiritual growth steps from Scripture that transformed the way I pray and taught me how to pray every day.
1. Be humble.
James 4:10 says:
Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.
Prayer is an act of humility; it is admitting to ourselves that we cannot handle life on our own. We need God. The absence of prayer reveals a type of arrogance that assumes we never need help, we never need to say, “thank you,” and we are in control. But when we humble ourselves before God, prayer becomes our first instinct in any situation. We know we need God, so we pray.
2. Start small.
In Luke 17:5–6,
The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith.” So the Lord said, “If you have faith as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be pulled up by the roots and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”
Prayer can be overwhelming and intimidating; there’s too much to say, or you don’t know what to say at all. When Jesus’s disciples asked Him to teach them to pray in Luke 11:1–4, He taught them a prayer that simply begins, “Our Father in heaven.” The prayer contains less than forty words and takes less than thirty seconds to say. In it, Jesus praised God, acknowledged God’s will, and requested basic physical and spiritual needs. If we can do that for thirty seconds a day, we’ve begun to pray!
3. Be intentional.
Ephesians 5:16 tells us to be “redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” Few things can override our commitment to prayer like busyness. If the devil can’t make you reject God outright, he will schedule as many things as possible that get between you and God. We must be intentional about prayer in our daily routine. Jesus, on one occasion, after a long day and late night of preaching and healing, and with a busy day of travel and teaching ahead of Him, woke up well before sunrise and went out by Himself to pray (Mark 1:35). If Jesus was that intentional about prayer, we too should make time for God every day.
4. Trust God’s love for you.
Hebrews 4:16 says:
Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
You may struggle with prayer if you believe that God doesn’t want to hear from you; you feel unworthy to enter God’s presence and speak to Him. I have known people who refuse to pray because they feel like they have done too much wrong or been too far gone to come back to the Lord, and I personally know how shame can make us perceive a barrier between us and God.
I think these feelings come from good places—a sense of justice, a recognition of our flaws, a guilt over sin, an awareness of God’s greatness and holiness. When Peter encountered Jesus and discovered who He was in Luke 5:8, he responded by instinct, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!” Knowing his own unworthiness, he pushed Jesus away. But Jesus did not say, “You’ve done too much wrong; you’ve gone too far; you aren’t worthy.” Jesus knew the truth Peter confessed: Peter was a sinner. God knows what you have done, too. And Jesus said to Peter, “Do not be afraid.”
We are not worthy to be in God’s presence, much less speak, but when we pray, we approach a throne of grace—a throne characterized by God’s favor and compassion for those who humbly seek Him. What will disqualify you from prayer is the kind of pride that would keep you from praying in the first place. “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6). When we seek God in our unworthiness and our helplessness, we receive mercy and discover grace. God helps us because He loves us. Trust His love.
5. Be disciplined.
Prayer has long been understood as a spiritual discipline, a habitual practice of the followers of Jesus who adopt His lifestyle and listen to His teachings. It originated prior to the Christian way in the life of the Hebrew people, exemplified in men like David, who prayed his way through all of life, and Daniel, who kept a habit of praying three times a day. Prayer may often be a natural response to the moment, but prayer should also be a practiced part of our daily life. It is a daily expression of our obedience, our love, and our desire for God. Psalm 63:1 says:
O God, You are my God;
Early will I seek You;
My soul thirsts for You;
My flesh longs for You
In a dry and thirsty land
Where there is no water.
A life without prayer offers no alternatives for the blessings only God can give. But if God is my God, I will pray to Him day by day.
6. Trust God’s promises.
Does prayer really work? That is, does anything actually happen when I pray? If we believe the promises of God in Scripture, we will have faith in the power of prayer. James 5:16 says:
The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.
Prayer has great power! God is able to do far more than we can ask, and He also responds when we ask. Jesus said:
Everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.
Luke 11:10
James 4:2 says:
You do not have because you do not ask.
Does this mean God always says “yes” to our prayers? If God were not wiser than that, I wouldn’t want to pray to Him. I can reflect on my childhood and know that I asked for many things I did not need, which would not have been good for me, and my parents wisely said no. Even imperfect parents know how to give good things to their children, and they know when to say no. God, in His infinite wisdom, knows when to say “yes,” when to say “no,” when to say “later,” and when to say, “I have something better.” If we trust God enough to pray, we should trust God enough to accept His answers to our prayers as they are. So, as Jesus taught in Luke 18:1, we “always ought to pray and not lose heart.”
7. Be still.
Psalm 46:10 says:
Be still, and know that I am God.
Though we might assume differently, true prayer begins not with speaking, but with listening. Prayer is communication, and God has already spoken to us in His word. Prayer is a response to God; He initiated the relationship. To help us keep the appropriate posture of listening first, the Bible teaches us to be still. Calm your heart. Slow down your life. Quiet your spirit. Put the world and its noise on pause. Free yourself from distractions. Be still for a moment, and become conscious of God’s presence—not marked by the arrogance of immediately speaking and asking and telling, but filled with the humility to listen, to be in awe, to love, and to adore. Jesus sought solitude and quiet for His times of personal prayer. Spiritual intimacy thrives in stillness, not noise. So take time to be still. Remember that He is God, and you are not. It is okay for your world to pause. Philippians 4:6 says:
Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.
8. Read biblical prayers.
One of the most practical steps you can take to improve your own prayers is reading, learning, and even praying the prayers of others. Remember that when Jesus’s disciples asked Him to teach them to pray, He responded by giving them a prayer to say. The only way to learn to pray is by praying, and we learn best in the time-tested prayers of others. You may even be surprised at the boldness, the depth, the emotion, and the confidence of the prayers of people in Scripture.
I would recommend beginning in the psalms, the clearest portrait of the prayer life of God’s people. There are psalms of praise and devotion, of pain and lament, of fear and danger, of love and community, of history and prophecy, of anger and regret, and so much more. The psalms explore the whole expanse of human emotion, and they teach us how to bring everything in us before God in prayer. Read the psalms and other prayers of Scripture, and you will learn something better than what to pray. You will learn how to pray.
9. Be near to God.
James 4:8 says:
Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.
Prayer is communication, and communication both forms and reveals a relationship. Sometimes, we struggle with prayer because we are distant from God in other ways of our spiritual life. That’s what sin does: it separates us from God (Isaiah 59:1–2). This sets the stage for the biblical language of seeking God, pursuing God until we are near to Him again—a reconciliation made possible by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. We were created to seek the Lord with the hope of finding Him, because He is not far from us (Acts 17:27). The nearer you are to God in every way, the easier you will find it in you to pray.
10. Learn God’s will.
Jesus prayed before the cross, “Not My will, but Yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). The purpose of prayer is not getting God to do whatever I want. Rather, the goal of prayer is aligning my will with what God wants and pursuing His mission on earth. So, if we want to know how to pray, and pray well, we should learn what God wants. Ephesians 5:10 tells us to be “finding out what is acceptable [pleasing] to the Lord,” and a few verses later, we are instructed, “Do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is” (5:17).
The only way to learn the will of God is to listen to His word. What does God tell us that He wants? Knowing God’s will guides our prayers. His concerns become my passions; His character becomes my desires; His judgments become my commitments. If you read the prayers of people in the Bible, notice how often they quote God’s own word back to Him and how they ground their requests in God’s revealed character. Moses, David, Nehemiah, Jesus, and others appeal to God based on who He is and what He wants to be involved in their lives and the world. Jesus taught His disciples to pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That’s what prayer is all about, and we have opportunities to participate in the will and work of God every day. Prayer is not always easy. You may have other questions about prayer, and you may keep struggling with it. But that’s what I encourage you to do: keep struggling with it. Don’t give up! Your Father loves you, and He wants to hear from you. Don’t know where to start? Start right now by asking God to help you seek Him, find Him, and learn more about praying to Him.