Newbie's Guide: Some special kinds of prayer
In sections 1 and 2 we talked about how to pray, or talk to God, and how to hear from Him. At its core, that is what prayer is — talking to God and hearing from Him. You can pray at any time and anywhere, and in fact, the Bible encourages Christians to pray all the time (Ephesians 5:17). However, there are certain kinds of prayer that are special. Usually they require a bit more organization and effort than simply talking to God on your daily walk or during your quiet time. The extra effort and organization, however, is definitely worth it for the benefits you can get from incorporating these types of prayers into your walk with God.
Meditative prayers
These prayers are structured prayers that encourage you to meditate on certain parts of the Bible while you pray. They are a prominent part of the older, more liturgical Christian churches, such as the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican churches, but many prayers have been adapted for other parts of the global Church as well.
Meditating on and praying through the Bible is one of the most powerful ways of engaging with the Bible. As mentioned before, the Bible is the biggest collection of God’s thoughts and sayings that we have. As we think about what we’re reading in Scripture (another name for the Bible), we are able to learn how God thinks, how He moves, and how He speaks to us, and in turn, grow closer to Him through it. Praying through Scripture and thinking about it is also a good way of learning how to apply the Bible to your life.
Some meditative prayers are very structured and preset, such as the famous Rosary prayer from Roman Catholicism, or the Jesus Prayer from Eastern Orthodoxy. Others are less preset, such as the lectio divina (Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism) or the contemplative prayers. Either way, these prayers encourage us to meditate on the Bible, and encourage us to have times of prayer that are not necessarily dedicated to our own needs, but simply to pleasing God and growing closer to Him. This kind of prayer can easily be added to your quiet time, and usually doesn’t take too long (anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes).
Prayer and fasting
If you grew up in a Western country like I did, you may know about fasting due to the health and wellness phenomenon of intermittent fasting. You may also know fasting from your Muslim or Jewish friends who fast during Ramadan or Yom Kippur, respectively. But you’ll find that in Christianity, prayer and fasting are as old as the Bible itself.
Fasting is the act of abstaining from certain kinds of food and drink, or from all food, for a short time — it could be for a couple hours or for a few days. From a Christian perspective, the idea is to use the time and mental energy that you would normally use towards eating or preparing food to pray to God and meditate on the Bible. In my (limited) experience, if you’re simply abstaining from food and not using that energy to pray more, then you’re merely depriving yourself of food, and that is neither enjoyable nor useful! The major benefit of fasting is being able to clear out more time and energy to pray to God and to listen to Him.
If you’ve never fasted before, you may wonder why anyone would ever do so. Why deprive yourself of food, which can be one of the great pleasures of life? The Bible gives multiple reasons for prayer and fasting, such as follows:
As preparation for ministry or for your calling in life (Jesus in John 4, Moses in Exodus 34:28-35)
As an act of repentance, showing that you want to turn away from sin and serve God (the city of Nineveh in Jonah 3)
As an act of entreaty to God for protection and clarity during a dangerous time (Esther and the Jews in Esther 4:16)
As a way of breaking the power of demonic strongholds (Jesus and his disciples in Matthew 17:20-21)
As a way of gaining clarity for your next step in life (Paul and Barnabas in Acts 13)
It is important to note that biblical fasting is never used as a way to force God to do something. Instead, it helps you to focus more on God, so that you can hear more clearly from Him and be empowered by Him when you need to be.
When you fast depends on the situation as well as your specific church. Most of the older churches (Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Lutheran, Methodist and Baptist churches) observe Lent, which is a 40-day period of partial fasting before Easter. Lent is not specifically ordained by the Bible, but is based on the 40 days of fasting that Jesus went through before going into His ministry. The specific structure of Lent depends on your church; some churches will declare a church-wide specific fast, while other churches will give you the choice of what you want to fast from during that period. Some of the newer, nondenominational churches, especially in the U.S., will proclaim a 10-21 day fast during the month of January; this comes from the modern American tradition of resetting one’s diet, habits, and life during the first month of the year. Observant Orthodox Christians fast more than any other group of Christians, with partial and total fasts lasting over half a calendar year (180-200 days)!
It is important to mention that fasting has been proven to be medically safe, and can even be beneficial for one’s physical health. (There has to be a reason why intermittent fasting is so popular, after all.) Multiple peer-reviewed medical studies have been done on people who fast for certain periods of time (such as 5, 10, 21 or 40 days) and have found that they not only survive, but sometimes even do better physically than they did before the fast. If you have a preexisting medical condition, you should always consult with your doctor before beginning any kind of fast. It is also important to note that fasting is always meant to be temporary. Most medical experts have concluded that a human can survive without food for up to 2 months, and without food and water for only about 8-21 days. Thankfully, most churches rarely get anywhere near those parameters when declaring a fast; please take those limits into account when deciding to fast or follow your church on a fast!
Medical studies cited:
Trepanowski JF, Bloomer RJ. The impact of religious fasting on human health. Nutr J. 2010 Nov 22;9:57. doi: 10.1186/1475-2891-9-57. PMID: 21092212; PMCID: PMC2995774.
Wilhelmi de Toledo, F., Grundler, F., Bergouignan, A., Drinda, S., & Michalsen, A. (2019). Safety, health improvement and well-being during a 4 to 21-day fasting period in an observational study including 1422 subjects. PloS one, 14(1), e0209353. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209353
Kottusch, P., Tillmann, M., & Püschel, K. (2009). Oberlebenszeit bei Nahrungs- und Flüssigkeitskarenz [Survival time without food and drink]. Archiv fur Kriminologie, 224(5-6), 184–191.
Spiritual warfare
If you’ve never heard this term before, you may think I’ve gone crazy. Ah, so you’re one of those loopy Christians…you may think. Stay with me.
Recall that I mentioned that God is a spirit in section 2. This simply means that God is a whole person with a personality, but He is invisible to our eyes. This is also true of the devil, or Satan, who I mentioned in sections 1 and 2. Both of them are invisible, but they exist, and they can influence the people and things that we can see. 2 Corinthians 4:18 (NIV) explains this well: “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
The devil is God’s sworn enemy, and as mentioned before, is only out to harm you and to impede God’s plan and purpose for you and for everyone else on the earth. He primarily does this by tempting you, which means that he tries to manipulate your thoughts and emotions and/or convince you to do the wrong thing and/or stay far away from God. As long as you are far from God, you’re not necessarily the devil’s enemy, but once you do come to Christ, you become an enemy of the devil. And sometimes he will go farther than just tempting you and will actually try to attack you.
These attacks can come in several ways. It can be a physical attack, such as a serious illness or a physical attack. It can be abuse in any form — verbal, emotional, financial, physical, domestic, or even spiritual abuse. It could be a mental attack, in the form of depression, anxiety, or any other mental illness. It could be a serious situation at work, where he stirs up people to lie about you and say things that aren’t true so that you get fired or are under constant pressure at work. It could be a sudden loss of finances. Or it could be all of those things at once. All in all, these attacks come in order to fulfill the devil’s purpose: to steal, kill and destroy your life (John 10:10).
That all sounds very sobering, as it should, but there is good news in all this, and that is that as Christians, we have victory over the devil already, as shown in these verses and more:
“Behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you.” (Luke 10:19 NKJV, emphasis mine)
“You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” (1 John 4:4 NKJV)
“ For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.” (1 John 5:4 NKJV)
Before we came to Christ, we were trapped in our sin, and we were liable to anything the devil had in store for us, since he is “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4). However, after coming to Christ, we not only gained forgiveness for our sins, but we also gained the same authority Jesus had and has over the devil. This doesn’t mean that nothing bad will ever happen to you — on the contrary, since we live in a broken world, bad things are guaranteed to happen (John 16:33). But the difference is that with Jesus, we have the power to overcome the devil and all of his schemes, and often we do have the power to stop him from stealing, killing and destroying our lives and the lives of those around us.
So how do we appropriate this power? It is beyond the scope of this beginner’s guide to cover everything you can do to fight the devil, but here are some things you can do to start:
Resist him. James 4:7 simply says “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” When the devil gives you a bad thought, don’t just sit there and take it — resist it! Any form of resistance will work, but if you know a Bible verse (or several) that contradicts the specific bad thought, that works especially well. You will probably have to do this several times before the bad thought leaves your mind.
Focus on God. Again, James 4:7 says “submit yourselves therefore to God” before saying, “resist the devil”. The more you are in God’s presence, the more the devil will be unable to stand you, because he can’t stand God! You will also find comfort for all of your wounds if you stay close to God’s presence by praying, praising Him and reading and meditating on the Word.
Take authority over the devil. If you see something bad that is clearly from the devil, such as a serious physical illness or mental attack or any of the other attacks I mentioned above, you can take authority over the devil who is working behind the scenes to mess up your life. This doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding other means of healing, such as medication, or neglecting to do any preparation you would do in this physical world, but you can stop the spiritual forces behind all the madness that you’re seeing physically. Jesus said in Matthew 18:18-20 (ESV): “Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” The simplest way to do this is to say “stop (blank) in the name of Jesus!” You may not see immediate results, and you might have to take authority several times over a long period of time, but more often than not, when we fight back and take our authority, change happens!
I have only scratched the tip of the iceberg on spiritual warfare, but if you don’t remember anything from this section, remember this: you have victory over the devil through Jesus Christ!
Praying in tongues
While we’re on topics that seem completely weird to the natural mind, let’s talk briefly about praying in tongues! These days, you’ll see this kind of prayer most commonly in Pentecostal or Charismatic churches, but you may run into it in other kinds of churches as well.
Most simply defined, “praying in tongues” is a special kind of prayer where you are inspired by the Holy Spirit to pray in a language you don’t know. This language may be a language that’s known to other people around you, or it may be a language that no one around you knows. Regardless, the actual words you’re saying will sound like gibberish to you until someone interprets them into a language you understand.
Sound weird? Good! I think you get it now.
The first instance of praying in tongues was actually with the birth of the Church in Acts 2, when Jesus’ 12 close friends and about 100 other people were inspired by the Holy Spirit to pray and praise God in languages they didn’t know themselves. What happened next was pretty astonishing:
“And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men, from every nation under heaven. And when this sound occurred, the multitude came together, and were confused, because everyone heard them speak in his own language. Then they were all amazed and marveled, saying to one another, “Look, are not all these who speak Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each in our own language in which we were born?…we hear them speaking in our own tongues the wonderful works of God.” (Acts 2:4-11 NKJV)
In this instance, though Jesus’ friends and the 100 other people couldn’t understand the languages they were speaking, they spoke as the Holy Spirit gave them words to speak, and other people were able to understand their message. This caught their attention and brought them over to listen to this group, and as a result, the Church was born!
Praying in tongues (also known as “praying in the Spirit”) can be a wonderful tool when used correctly. As the apostle Paul explained in 1 Corinthians 14:11 (NKJV), “when I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful”. It is like a direct way for your spirit to communicate with the Holy Spirit when your mind might otherwise get in the way of things. For example, if you’re having a severe panic attack and your thoughts are running wild, and you can’t hear God clearly, you can pray in tongues and your spirit will be communicating with the Holy Spirit, even though your mind doesn’t understand. And as always, when you pray, God will answer!
Praying in tongues, however, is not to be misused. It is mostly a tool to be used in your private prayer life. If people are praying in tongues in church, it should either be as a separate time where people are allowed to pray and worship God themselves, or, if it is done out loud by a person, it should be only one person at a time, and there should be someone interpreting what the person says. (The interpretation will also be given by the Holy Spirit — see 1 Corinthians 12:11.) All of these instructions are clearly laid out in 1 Corinthians 14.
Praying in tongues can be a wonderful addition to your prayer life. Like every other special kind of prayer described in this chapter, it is just one tool that you can use to enhance your communication with God. It has nothing to do with your salvation — that was already handled by Jesus on the cross. And it doesn’t make you cooler than any other Christian if you choose to do it. As Paul summarized it in 1 Corinthians 14:15 (NKJV): “What is the conclusion then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will also pray with the understanding. I will sing with the spirit, and I will also sing with the understanding.”
I hope that as you develop your relationship with God, you can use some or all of these prayer tools to enhance your communication with Him (and kick the devil in the pants while you’re at it).