How to Pray When You Feel Like You Pray the Same Thing Every Day

This article is part of the How to Pray series.

Pray Scripture

The most formative class I took in seminary was Personal Spiritual Disciplines with Donald Whitney. It was formative not only because he was a great teacher, but also because I was chronically late. Every day, he began class with prayer—praying a psalm, in fact. To select the psalm, he taught us a simple tool. Take the number of the day of the month, and add thirty a few times. For example, let’s say it’s the first of the month. You could pray Psalm 1, Psalm 31, Psalm 61, Psalm 91, or Psalm 121. Tardy students were called on to state the psalms of the day and then choose one to pray. Suffice it to say, I got lots of practice praying the Psalms.

Dr. Whitney’s rationale for teaching us to pray the Psalms has often come to mind in my struggles with prayer. He said we tend to “pray the same old things about the same old things.”¹ I know this is true in my life, and I wonder if it is in yours as well. Have you ever begun praying, only to draw a blank just moments into it? You want to pray, but the words don’t come. Or you make the same requests day after day after day. Maybe you lack direction or clarity.

If you don’t want to pray the same things all the time, praying Scripture might be helpful. When we pray Scripture, whether it’s a psalm or any other passage, we have fresh ideas to fuel our prayers each day. And it helps us ask for things according to God’s will (1 John 5:14–15) because we’re praying God’s word back to him.

Prayer

Courtney Reissig, Winfree Brisley

This volume of TGC's Disciplines of Devotion series invites women to stir their affections for God by cultivating the biblical practice of prayer.

Pray the Psalms

Part of my daily rhythm of prayer includes praying a psalm. Christians have used this practice for centuries because many of the psalms are prayers. You can turn any verse or passage of Scripture into a prayer, but if you’re familiar with the experience of trying to pray but drawing a blank on what to say, the book of Psalms is a good place to start.

Prayers are often shaped by adversity. We pray in desperation but forget to pray in times of contentment. When we pray the Psalms though, we have a model for every context. We have psalms of celebration (Ps. 145), grief and lament (Ps. 88), deliverance (Ps. 34), confession of sin (Ps. 51), thanksgiving and praise (Ps. 92), and much more.

Here’s what praying a psalm could look like. Turn to Psalm 22, a psalm that might be familiar to you because Jesus prayed it on the cross. You could pray this psalm about all sorts of situations, but as an example, imagine you want to pray for a friend who’s suffering from cancer. Let’s consider how you could pray this psalm for her. Verse 1 says:

My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?

You could then pray like this: God, it feels like you’ve forsaken my friend. As she walks through this journey with cancer, her cries have become groans. Why do you seem so far from her?

Then move to verse 2:

O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer,
and by night, but I find no rest.

When will relief come for her? Are her cries falling on deaf ears? Will you answer her as she cries out day and night? Will you answer me as I cry out for her day and night?

Sometimes we pray lament psalms and all we have are tears. When we are so stricken by grief that all we can do is cry, the Spirit hears even this and continues to intercede on our behalf (Rom. 8:26–27). But often, psalms give us words to pray and help us shift our prayers as our eyes are lifted to see God’s character and promises. Look at Psalm 22:3–5:

Yet you are holy,
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In you our fathers trusted;
they trusted, and you delivered them.
To you they cried and were rescued;
in you they trusted and were not put to shame.

God, you are holy, and I am not. You are perfect, and I am full of flaws. Yet you are a God who does not put me to shame. I stand in a long line of believers who have seen you work and found you worthy of trust. When I’m tempted to despair, let me remember that you were faithful to them, and you will be faithful to me and to my friend.

As we pray God’s word, we’re reminded of what he has done in the past, which fuels our faith for what he can and will do in the future.

Allow God’s word to shape and give language to your prayers.

Pray Any Scripture

Praying Scripture is not isolated to the Psalms or even the Old Testament. In the New Testament, Jesus frequently modeled prayer. The apostles also gave us words to pray. Nearly every one of the Epistles includes a rich prayer for the people to whom the apostles (such as Paul, James, or John) wrote. But we can also pray passages of Scripture that aren’t specifically written as prayers.

A few years ago when I worked on a church staff, we went on a planning retreat for a day. The morning included a forty-five-minute block for individual prayer. At first, the idea felt overwhelming, but our pastor gave us a model for praying through Romans 8 and encouraged us to pray through its rich theology. While I initially thought the time would drag on, by the end I was frantically journaling, anxious for more time.

We started our time by reading the first verse of Romans 8. Our pastor prompted us to spend some time thinking and journaling about the verse, praying the words of the verse for people and situations that came to mind. We repeated the process for each verse that came after until we had a journal full of prayers for ourselves and others, all prompted by the words of Romans 8.

Because we will never fully mine the depths of Scripture, we will never run out of things to say to God when his own words guide us. As Whitney said, when we pray Scripture, we won’t “pray the same old things about the same old things.”² Allow God’s word to shape and give language to your prayers.

Notes:

Donald S. Whitney, “How to Stop Praying the Same Old Things About the Same Old Things,” Crossway, July 21, 2015, https://www .crossway.org/.
Whitney, “Praying the Same Old Things.”

This article is adapted from Prayer by Courtney Reissig.

Courtney Reissig is a writer and teacher living in Little Rock, Arkansas. She has written for numerous Christian publications including the Gospel Coalition and Christianity Today. Courtney is the author of Glory in the Ordinary and The Accidental Feminist.

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