When we pray to adore the Lord and praise Him, we have to learn to drop the natural and religious thought. We have many positive items from the Scriptures with which we can praise the Lord. There is no need for us to use utterance that comes from the religious, natural feeling. We should learn to speak things from deep within and also to use the utterances from the Bible. We see this kind of speaking in the prayer of Samuel’s mother (1 Sam. 1:10-11) and the praise of Mary, the mother of the Lord Jesus (Luke 1:46-55). We also need to learn to pray in the way Paul prayed in Ephesians 1:17 through 23 and 3:14 through 21. When we praise and adore the Lord, we need to drop our natural thought, concept, and feeling and speak something heavenly, spiritual, new, full of life, full of the anointing, and full of the sweetness of the Lord.
Whenever we come to pray, we must not bring our old things to the Lord. We simply must come to contact the Lord and open ourselves to Him. We should not consider what to say. We should forget our natural mentality and learn to sense something of the Lord within, exercising the inner sense to speak something to Him. We need not compose our utterance. Rather, when we sense something in our spirit, in the depths of our being, we should express it in a brief way. To compose our prayer will frustrate the inner sense. If, for example, we sense that the Lord is sweet, we can say, “O Lord! Oh, You are so sweet.” The Lord knows what we mean; there is no need to complete our utterance. Sometimes according to our sense we may pray, “O Lord, You are so deep. This satisfies me.” It is sufficient simply to utter something from within us with simple words and phrases, without any composition. We should simply express our inner sense.
For this purpose, we need to spend adequate time in our prayer. If possible, we should shut ourselves up with the Lord and not let anything intrude into our time with Him. Then we will have something to express. If we do not have something to express, we should not compose anything. There is no such law that every time we enjoy the Lord we must have a burden to express. To do this may be of our own manufacture. If we do not have something particular to express, we should just enjoy the Lord. It may be that in the morning we simply enjoy Him, and then two hours later the expression will come. At that time we may spontaneously have a burden to pray. This will be something with which the Lord burdens us. We must not make our coming to the Lord into a routine. This will deaden us. Instead, the principle is this—we come to the Lord to open ourselves and to sense a burden to pray.
When we come into the presence of the Lord to pray with a burden, we need to focus on one matter at a time. We cannot come to a feast to eat too many dishes at once. To pray for many different matters without focusing on a real burden may indicate that our practice is merely religious. When we pray in this way, we cannot tell in particular for what we have prayed. When we come to the Lord, we should be touched by Him with a certain matter. Sometimes we may be touched by the love of the Lord, His holiness, or His presence. When we receive a certain matter from the Lord, we will be burdened for that one thing.
Consider Daniel’s prayer in Daniel 9:3 through 19. It was a long prayer, but it stressed mainly one point—the revelation that at the expiration of seventy years the Lord would release His people and bring them back from captivity (v. 2). Daniel was burdened for what he saw, and his prayer concentrated on that one matter. Similarly, Psalm 119 with one hundred seventy-six verses is the longest chapter in the Scriptures, but it focuses on only one thing—the word of God. There is a real burden in the praise of that Psalm. Our prayer should have one main focus. It is difficult to have two burdens at one time. We cannot tell if such a prayer is “beef, mutton, or pork.” If our prayer is a collection of many items together without a real burden, that may indicate that it is out of our natural self and religious knowledge.
We need to drop the things from our natural and religious background and come to the Lord with a single, simple heart and an open spirit to be touched by Him. If we learn not to speak naturally, we will speak in a proper way. A young musician once applied to learn under an expert in Italy. That expert said to him, “I will receive you as a student on one condition. For three years you must not open your mouth to speak.” The young man considered whether or not he could learn anything if he did not speak, but eventually he agreed to the condition. He remained under that tutor for three years until one day the tutor told him, “Now speak to express your feeling.” Once the young man began to speak, what he expressed was everything that the tutor had taught him. If the student had been allowed to express himself for those three years, that would have been a frustration to his learning. In the same way, many times we need to come to the Lord to be silent. At such times we should say nothing from ourselves but let the Lord teach us what to say.
We must avoid all religious thought and understanding when we pray. Sometimes we have to pray with a long prayer, but still we need to concentrate on a main burden. Sometimes we may pray, “Lord, be merciful to me.” That is a good prayer. In Matthew 20:32 and 33 Jesus asked two blind men, “What do you want Me to do for you?” They replied, “Lord, that our eyes may be opened.” As a prayer, that was good enough. There was no need to say, “Lord, I know You are the Son of David. You came with the power of God. You are sovereign. You can do everything. If You will, You can heal me.” We should learn not to speak in this way when we pray. Then we will have something proper to speak. The more we pray, the more we enjoy the Lord, absorb Him, and inhale Him. Then we will have a burden that comes out of our being filled with the Lord, and we can utter and express something of the Lord.