How To Pray When You Don't Know What To Pray

There are seasons when prayer feels like talking into a phone with no signal. You kneel, or you sit in your car, or you stand at the kitchen sink, and the words just will not come. You have things to say. You cannot say them. You wonder if something is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you. Or rather, everything is wrong with all of us, and that is the point. You are not the first believer who has run out of words. The Bible was written by people who ran out of words on a regular basis. The good news is, Scripture does not leave you stranded there. It hands you a way to pray when you cannot pray, and the way is older and deeper than anything you'd think to do on your own.

Let me show you five moves that have carried God's people through silence, sorrow, and confusion for thousands of years.

You Are Not Praying Alone

Start here, because everything else stands on it.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

Read that slowly. Paul is not describing a special class of mature believers. He is describing the normal Christian life. We do not know what to pray for as we ought. None of us. Not on our best day. The Spirit does. He is groaning inside you right now, lifting up the prayer your tongue cannot form.

If you take nothing else from this post, take that. Your silence is not absence. The Spirit is praying when you cannot.

Pray The Scriptures

When the words run dry, the Bible itself is a well of words. Open a Psalm and pray it line by line. Not as a reading exercise. As your own prayer. Make the pronouns yours. Put your name in the gap.

Psalm 23. Psalm 42. Psalm 51 if you've sinned. Psalm 73 if you're confused. Psalm 121 if you're afraid. Psalm 139 if you feel unseen. The Psalter is a hundred and fifty prayers that fit every season a soul can pass through. The Holy Spirit inspired them. He will not mind you borrowing them back.

I have prayed Psalm 13 line by line on mornings I could not pray anything else. "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?" That is in your Bible. God put it there because He knew you would need it.

Use The Lord's Prayer As Scaffolding

When the disciples asked Jesus how to pray, He did not hand them a meditation technique. He gave them a sentence and told them to build on it.

Pray then like this: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Use it as scaffolding. Walk through it slowly.

• Our Father in heaven — name who He is to you today.
• Hallowed be your name — speak something true about His character, even if you don't feel it.
• Your kingdom come, your will be done — surrender the thing you are clutching.
• Give us this day our daily bread — name what you actually need today, not next year.
• Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors — confess, and release.
• Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil — ask for protection.

That is a whole prayer life on a frame Jesus drew Himself. You can pray the Lord's Prayer in thirty seconds when you're wrecked and in thirty minutes when you have margin. Both count.

Lament — God Invites The Complaint

Here is where modern Christianity has done a lot of you a disservice. We have made prayer so polite that we have edited out the part of the Bible that screams. Roughly a third of the Psalms are laments. The book of Lamentations is in your Bible. Habakkuk asks God why He is silent while wicked people prosper. Job demands an audience and gets one.

Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall! My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me.

That is in your Bible. So is Psalm 88, which is the only psalm in the entire collection that does not end in hope. It ends with the line that darkness is the psalmist's closest friend. God left that one in there on purpose, because some seasons do not resolve by sundown, and He wanted you to know He knew.

Lament is not unbelief. Lament is honest belief. It says, "God, this is awful, and I am bringing it to You because You are the only one big enough to hold it." If you have been swallowing your real prayers because you think God cannot handle them, stop. He wrote a book full of complaints. He can handle yours.

Sit In Silence

Sometimes the right move is to stop trying to fill the air.

But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.

Silence is a posture, not a failure. There is a kind of prayer that has no words because the soul is just being present with the Father. Sit in a chair. Set a timer if you need to. Five minutes. Ten. Do not perform. Do not strain. Just be there, in His presence, with nothing to say.

You will be amazed how often, after a few minutes of silence, the words come. Not because you forced them. Because the Spirit, who was groaning the whole time, finally lets you hear a syllable.

Let The Spirit Groan With You

Come back to where we started. The Spirit is praying for you with groans too deep for words. You do not have to manufacture eloquence. You do not have to feel something dramatic. You have to show up, and let Him carry what you cannot lift.

Some of the most powerful prayers I've prayed in my life were three words long, spoken into a steering wheel. Help me, Jesus. Save my marriage. Hold my child. Keep me here. God is not impressed by your vocabulary. He is moved by your dependence.

If you are in a dry season right now, do not let the dryness convince you that you are far from Him. He is closer than your breath. The fact that you are reading a post about how to pray means the Spirit is already pulling at you. Answer Him.

A Way Forward

Here is what I want you to try this week. Pick one of the five. Just one. Pray a Psalm out loud in your car. Walk through the Lord's Prayer over your coffee. Write God an honest, ugly lament in a notebook you will burn later. Sit in silence for five minutes. Let the Spirit groan with you in the dark.

Do that for seven days, and see what happens. You will not become a prayer warrior overnight. You will become something better. You will become a son or daughter who knows the way home, even when the lights are out.

The Father is not waiting for you to find the right words. He is waiting for you to come.