Do you ever struggle with prayer and knowing how to pray or what to say? Me too! I am by no means an expert on the topic of prayer. So instead of pretending like I am an expert on prayer or always know what to say, I am really just going to be repeating what other people have taught about prayer.

The first teaching I am going to highlight is The Lord’s Prayer. I have also heard it referred to as the “Sinner’s Prayer” since Jesus was giving it as an example for us to follow in our prayers. We find the prayer in Matthew 6:9-13, which says:

“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.

Give us this day our daily bread,

and forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.’”

Jesus gives us the basic outline for prayer. We praise God and give Him glory, we ask for His will to be done, we ask for what we need, we ask for forgiveness, and we ask for guidance and deliverance. God does not expect or want us to just routinely repeat this exact prayer word for word, but through this example, we have all of the aspects that we should be using in our prayers.

For the second teaching, I am going to share a very simple acronym that we can use. The acronym is PRAY.

P – Praise

R – Repent

A – Ask for others

Y – Yourself

When we pray, we can sometimes get caught up in trying to say the right thing or make it into something more complicated than what it is: talking to our Heavenly Father. I love the simplicity of this reminder to praise, repent, ask for others, and then ask for yourself. We don’t always need to complicate conversations with God, we often just need to be there.

At this time of year, a lot of people are going back to school and starting to get in their daily or weekly routines. This is the perfect time for those of us who are not already in the habit of praying daily to add that to our routines. Whether it is in the car on the way to work or school, right when you get up, when you go to bed, or even better, all of those times, let’s all get more consistent in our prayer!