Prayer: Lord, under Your precious blood we come again to You. We look to You for Your help. Lord, You know that in the proper practices we need the help in the spirit. May we have the liberty and the encouragement to speak and to practice in the way of life. Do help us to this effect. We ask this in Your precious name.
The more we practice to exercise our spirit to pray with the word we read, the more we will be adjusted and learn how to do it. This kind of reading will become spontaneous to us. There is no need to understand what we read and then make a formal prayer. We simply need to read something and speak to the Lord. At first, some may need to close their eyes when they pray, but after a certain amount of practice, they will become more inward and able to pray in any way.
At a certain point we will be able to read and pray with John 15:10, for example. This verse says, “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; even as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.” We may speak to the Lord in a spontaneous way, “Lord, not only are You Yourself life, but even Your commandment is eternal life. I do not take Your commandment merely like the Ten Commandments. I take Your commandment as life, because Your commandment is You Yourself. Lord, You told us clearly that without You we can do nothing. I take simply Your commandment as Yourself. You are joy, and You are love.” There is no need to make a formal prayer. We may simply speak with the Lord in this way.
When we talk to the Lord in this way, we should not exercise our mind too much. Rather, we need to learn to exercise our spirit to open deeply from within and speak something to the Lord. We need more practice. When we start to practice to read and pray in this way, we will need to set aside some definite time each day. After we are more accustomed to this, however, we can do it throughout the entire day. The word will be familiar to us, and we will be able to turn any verse into prayer. Then each verse will become the Spirit to us. We need more practice to become accustomed to this.
We need to read the Bible without exercising our choice. We should begin from Matthew 1:1 and simply continue to read in order. One day we can read the first eight verses, and the next day we can continue from verse 9 and read another five or ten verses. One morning we may come to Mark 4:3 to 6, which says, “Listen! Behold, the sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell beside the way, and the birds came and devoured it. And other seed fell on the rocky place, where it did not have much earth, and immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of earth. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered.” We can pray something simple without much doctrine and without “ministering a message” in our prayer. Spontaneously we may say, “Lord, I praise You that You are the sower and You are the seed. O Lord, You have sown Yourself into me. Oh, the seed! You are the seed.” Sometimes we may repeat several times, “O Lord, You are the wonderful seed.” Then we may come to our spouse and say, “Dear wife, the Lord is the seed!” We can also turn to the enemy and say, “Satan, do you not know that the Lord is the seed within me?”
This is a simple and living way to pray without many words. Sometimes our prayers are too wordy. Many words are piled together, but there is nothing of substance. Our prayer over Mark 4 can simply be: “Lord, You are the living seed, the seed of life that has been sown into me. I praise You that by Your mercy I am not by the wayside. I am afraid, though, that I may have some stones. My heart may be the stony earth. Lord, show me the stones and take them away. Grant that You may grow deeply within me.” Such a prayer is living; it is not in the exercise of the mind. We have to exercise our spirit to say something to the Lord in a living way from deep within. This requires our practice.