In this video, Dr. Sinclair Ferguson suggests a framework Christians can practice to cultivate a fruitful prayer life.
How can we cultivate fruitful prayer lives? That‘s really a very challenging question, and I say that because I don’t know that there are many Christians who would say, “Just follow my example, because I’ve cracked the secret of a really fruitful prayer life.” But I think here the important thing for us to do is to get some of the basics in place. I think one helpful thing for young Christians, and also Christians who are struggling to grow in prayer, is to live in the presence of God. So that in everything you do, you’re conscious that you’re in communion with Him. And in that context, I don’t mean that you should be thinking of Him all the time. It’s not a good idea to be driving your car and not concentrating on the road. But to develop a consciousness that God has promised to be with you, so that you can tell Him, share with Him, anything and everything that happens in your life. And if you pray in those circumstances, your prayers are probably going to be quite sharp. That, I think is the absolutely fundamental thing: to seek to live in the presence of God and to commune with Him.
And then, I think a helpful thing is to learn how to structure our praying, because prayer is a discipline, and for some of us it’s a very challenging discipline. So how can we structure our prayers? Well, the Lord has given us one way to structure them in the Lord’s Prayer. And I think many Christians in the past and in the present have found it really helpful to think about the Lord’s Prayer, not just as a quick prayer, but as an outline for prayer and to pause on each statement in the prayer. So even if you begin to pray, “Our Father,” and then meditate on what you have just said, that will make you pray even more. It’ll help you to praise God that He is your Father. It will help you to pray about the needs that you have, because He is your Father. And you can, I think, work through the Lord’s Prayer in that way. And that gives you a framework that really helps you to grow in prayer.
I think another possible framework that can be helpful is remembering you’ve been baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And especially when you want to praise God, to think about Him as Father and all that He has done as Father, you could, for example, look up references in the New Testament,—references in the teaching of Jesus to what it means for Him to be your Father—and to pray these through.
And another way to do it—although this isn’t really an outline for prayer, but it’s a very good and helpful spiritual discipline—is to remember that the Book of Psalms is mainly a book of prayers, various kinds of prayers. And I would encourage you to find a place where you can read those prayers and pray those prayers out loud. Not just to read them into yourself, but actually as they did when Jesus was ministering, even up to the time of Augustine. And beyond that, people rarely read to themselves when they read. They read out loud. The Psalms were written to be spoken and prayed and sung out loud. And many of them have the first person singular in them. And I think it was a practice for many years in the church to pray your way through the whole of the Psalms every week. Now that’s a pretty tough order for a modern-day Christian, I think. But it’s a great help to us, that God not only calls us to pray, but He’s given us a book in which He’s actually given us prayers that help us to pray.
I think if you do one or several of these things, it will be a help to you. Also, take the opportunity to pray with others. It can be a lonely business trying to grow your own prayer life, but I think when you do meet with others to pray, it really helps you, energizes you, and also you learn from them, I think, increasingly how to pray.