So you can address Him directly with confidence that He is as close as He could be.įind out more about how to understand the Holy Spirit’s role in your life. If you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit is the presence of God living within you. Choose one or try praying to each member of the Trinity at different times, because they are all listening to you. Do I pray to God the Father, Jesus or the Holy Spirit? People will say things like, “Father God,” “Heavenly Father” or “Almighty God.” How you choose to address Him will remind you and anyone you might be praying with about who you are talking to and what He represents in your life. Start by addressing God directly in a way that acknowledges the uniqueness of who He is. It’s also a way to show how much you respect His authority. Kneeling, or bowing your head, is a great way to focus your body and your mind on God. God will hear you whatever you do, so choose a position that helps you focus. You can bow, kneel, stand or walk around when you pray. And if that’s you, we want to share about more of the essentials before we go any further. If you have never really prayed before and you want to know what to say, these four reasons for prayer also provide a good template to start with. To explore this more, read “Reasons Why We Pray.” You want to bring a concern about your life or someone in your life to God and invite Him to help. You need to say “I’m sorry” for specific actions or attitudes. You want to tell God how much you love Him and why. Here are four great reasons why you might choose to pray as a Christian: Saying that you can experience being a Christian in the way God intended without learning to pray is like saying you can be happily married or have a deep friendship without regular communication.īut maybe the question is not why should Christians pray, but why should they want to? To be a Christian is to believe God invited you into a personal relationship with Him and to accept that invitation. But Christians pray for very specific reasons.īecoming a Christian is about much more than adopting a label, changing your demographic or subscribing to a new worldview. Some pray to comfort themselves in troubling times and to acknowledge there is a spiritual dimension to life. So where do you start? Why Should You Pray? If you believe that, or you want to believe that, you’re ready to learn how to pray. God is ready and willing to listen because He knows you and wants to be known by you. Faith is the essential ingredient if you want your prayer life to never lose its flavor. What you believe about God and your relationship with Him is fundamental to how you will learn to talk with Him. Perhaps the best place to begin is by making clear that prayer is more about talking with God than just talking to Him. So talking to God is just like relating to anyone else except in the ways it is completely different. But there is at least one unique factor: we can’t rely on the senses of sight, sound or touch to connect with God. It’s true that a relationship with God contains many of the same ingredients as our other relationships. People often say that prayer is just talking to God as you would to anyone else. If you still have questions, please ask them in the comment section. We hope that after reading this guide, you’ll feel equipped for your journey with prayer. Here are some questions we will answer, and you can use these links to go straight to those sections: This is a practical guide to getting started talking with God, no matter where you are on your spiritual journey. He is supernatural.Įven if talking honestly with other people comes very naturally to you, it’s understandable if talking with God feels like a steep learning curve. He is beyond what you can understand in the natural everyday world. He’s so much bigger and more incredible than that. He has a personality and qualities you can understand and relate to, but you cannot expect to relate to God in exactly the way you might to a close friend or family member.
You are talking with a God who is unlike anyone else you could ever talk with. What does that mean? Think about it for a moment. But how do you do that with the God of the universe? Those moments of connection bond you to another person, and many of them center on communication - the words you say and the way you say them.
Relationships are built on moments of connection. Learning how to pray is really about developing a relationship with God. It can even mean just talking to Him as you would to a friend. That can mean thanking Him, praising Him, confessing something you’ve done wrong, or expressing a need you have.