Practical Prayer
I already have several books on prayer, and have even reviewed one of them HERE. So I wasn’t looking to buy another one. My habit is to visit the church bookstore after the sermon and I happened to spot Prime’s book. You might say it was an impulse buying moment. But perhaps it wasn’t.
Derek Prime is a close friend of Pastor Alistair Begg. You can watch his testimony HERE. A quick perusal of the book and the Contents page sealed the deal for me. There were still nuts and bolts questions about prayer that I wanted answered and this little book addresses them. You may not expect too much from 142 pages but Prime gets right to the heart of a topic with an economy of words.
These are some issues which Prime addresses:
How many times a day should I pray and for how long? Must we pray audibly? Whom should we address when praying? How does a busy wife with young children find time to pray? Do I do my devotional readings before or after prayer? What can we do when prayer becomes stagnant or too routine, and we lose our fervor? Must we pray for the same things every day?
How do we pray for the lost? Why are some prayers not answered? How do we know when to stop praying for something? Why do we need to pray anyway if God has already sovereignly determined what will happen?
My favorite was chapter 4 – Prayer and the Holy Spirit. How does one pray in the Spirit? How does the Holy Spirit help us to pray? In one example Prime tells us that there will be times when the Holy Spirit prompts us to pray for particular individuals. He writes:
It may be presumptuous at the time to describe it as the Spirit’s prompting, but looking back afterwards we may often be in no doubt that it was His work because we discover just how amazingly timely our prayers were…Only time will tell whether or not that awareness of the other person is the Spirit’s prompting to pray, but it will always be right to follow through that possible prompting with prayer…(p 61)
Interestingly enough, the week after I finished the book, a Christian man had been rushed to the Emergency Room after a heart attack. Apparently he almost died three times. According to a friend several people had been prompted to pray for him that week, without having being aware of his circumstances.
I will always keep Practical Prayer by Derek Prime close by. Every Christian should read it.
Contents:
Introduction
1) Defining Prayer
2) Prayer and the Christian Life
3) Prayer’s Potential
4) Prayer and the Holy Spirit
5) Method on Prayer
6) Praying for Others
7) Praying With Others
8) Problems and Questions about Prayer
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