Liturgical Prayer: Words That Enrich the Heart of the Church

A phenomenon that continues throughout evangelicalism is the juxtaposing of unaided, private, individual prayer with liturgical prayer, as if the two related like oil and water. The former is seen as lively, earnest, and Holy Spirit-prompted, whereas the latter is frequently depicted as dead, perfunctory, and contrived. Wherever this contrasts exists, “free, from the heart” (ex corde) prayers are said to exemplify biblical prayer, whereas “rote” prayers, as they might be unfavorably denominated, are the product of hearts held captive to “tradition,” hearts usually devoid of a rich, personal relationship with God.

To be sure, a healthy Christ-honoring prayer life is inseparable from what Holy Scripture teaches and how the church, from apostolic times, has appropriated such knowledge. What one finds is not one kind (that is, only ex corde prayer) but a wide variety of prayers set forth in the Bible, as well as many exhortations to pray in different contexts that include both private, individual prayer and liturgical form prayer. Indeed, one even discovers that these two types of prayers are not repellant like oil and water but often deeply connected, even though they look, sound, and operate differently in the Christian life. What is more, a biblical and theological approach to prayer evidences that the foundation of all true Christian prayer, be it private or corporate, actually derives from liturgical concepts—concepts set to forms consciously Trinitarian and christological and poised to yield a rich understanding, appreciation, and love for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

While that may seem surprising or perhaps counterintuitive, it shouldn’t be. In the liturgy of the Divine Service (or Divine Liturgy or Mass, and so on), we say back to God what is most certain and true by using his words from Holy Scripture. When the Lord says that we are sinners, we confess that “we have sinned against [him] in thought, word and deed.”1 When the Lord says that we are forgiven in Christ, we say Jesus is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,”2 and we further affirm such divine truths by saying, “Amen.” Likewise, in liturgical prayer, Scripture-appropriate, Scripture-saturated words, clauses, and phrases are employed in carefully crafted speech to God so that we may speak to him rightly, truly, honestly, and affectionately. The words he has given us in Holy Scripture are the surest form.

The Lutheran Service Book, for example (used by approximately 90 percent of Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod parishes), aids worshipers by annotating beside each element of the liturgy, including all of its prayers, scriptural citation, or (when adapted) inspiration. Adding the biblical referent transforms this particular presentation of the liturgy into a purposeful engagement with the Lord through “the sword of the Spirit”—namely, the word of truth. Families and individual Christians can then take the liturgy home with them and pray confidently with truthful words, with all their heart.

The framers of the Lutheran Service Book have simply traditioned the basic understanding that to pray is to speak to God our king, and therefore it behooves us to reflect on the actual words we use, especially in a corporate setting but also around the family table. This naturally prompts reflection on what we say to God in private, individual prayer. Such a reflection highlights the great value of liturgical prayer: it is purposefully didactic, inculcating Christian orthodoxy (the teaching of Holy Scripture) and manifesting it through orthopraxy (acceptable worship) that has been scrutinized and time tested.

Liturgical prayer can therefore help us, guide us, and teach us, so that all of our prayer—including our private, individual prayer—is the result of established patterns of habit (orthopraxy) that conform our passions, loves, and desires toward God in a truthful, rightly ordered way (orthodoxy) that resonates with new covenant worship (John 4:23). This is a thought worth considering—namely, that liturgical prayer can be profoundly devotional, deeply personal, and yet corporate, biblically truthful, and theologically precise; further, that liturgical prayer may be seen not as repellant to a rich relationship with God but actually an avenue by which our personal experience of God may be said to mature.

Prayer Is Learned Worship

Reformer Philipp Melanchthon set forth a maxim in the Augsburg Confession (1530), stating that the highest form of worship is faith, which lays hold of God’s promises and acknowledges his holy presence. Above all, faith trusts that God is as his word and his word is as his character and nature. Nothing, therefore, could be more God-honoring than trusting that the promise-making God has proven to be the promise-keeping God in and through Christ Jesus. For “all of God’s promises find their Yes in [Christ Jesus]. That is why it is through him that we utter our [prayerful] Amen to God for his glory” (2 Cor. 1:20).

The apostle Paul here speaks of worship— prayer as worship. God’s truth gives shape to the heart, mind, and acts of the baptized: what we have already identified as orthodoxy and orthopraxy. The two, however, are in a reciprocal relationship so that the old dictum lex orandi, lex credendi (“the rule of prayer establishes the rule of belief”) also works the opposite way. The point being that prayer is learned and shapes the way we think about God, the world, and humanity. Conversely, what we are taught about God, humanity, and the world also profoundly influences the manner of our prayers and worship. Just as every aspect of the worship event bespeaks a theology (as well as an anthropology and soteriology), so too prayers actually say something about our understanding of God. This is why getting the words—the content—right actually matters. Liturgical prayer is all about a mature, scriptural employment of the truths of Holy Scripture and setting them artistically in the mouths of the faithful.

Worship, of course, can take place in both personal and public settings, individually and corporately. Yet all worship is learned one way or another; even habits of devotional life are imbibed by way of some sort of tutelage or pedagogy, whether through imitation or advice. And even though prayer—as an act of worship—may be as instinctive as a child’s first words, it too is taught and learned, just like standing for the reading of the gospel, making the sign of the cross, and choral singing. So even while we might think that private, individual prayer is a uniquely personalized act of worship or engagement with God, it is formed through some sort of formal or informal educational process. Individual prayer, then, shares this in common with liturgical prayer: It is a learned act of worship by which faith in God finds requisite expression.

Keeping private, personal prayer within the boundaries of orthodoxy, however, can be a challenging matter. Sometimes it can be hasty, ill-conceived, and/or theologically gaunt or suspect (we’ve all cringed at the hearing of doctrinally incorrect prayers!), especially where fatigue, high emotions, or pressing needs may be a factor. On the other hand, liturgical prayer has been slowly processed and scrutinized by the church’s great minds, liturgists, and theologians, so that what is offered to God in prayer accurately reflects the content and teaching of Holy Scripture. Utilizing liturgical prayers in one’s private, individual prayers can help us say to God—in Spirit and in truth—what we hope to pray.

Since nearly all other religions and even the irreligious world pray, Christian prayer needs to be theologically correct, for “God does not listen to sinners” (John 9:31); that is, he does not countenance the petitions of those outside the new covenant, prayers unmediated by Christ (Heb. 8:6), or prayers without intercession of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:26–27). This, too, is learned. Paul instructs Timothy, and therefore all the church’s future clergy, by insisting that prayer as an act of worship and faith must be theologically and soteriologically grounded in Christ Jesus.

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings be made for all men. . . . This is good, and it is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all. (1 Tim. 2:1–6).

Prayers directed to God must be ensconced within Christ, the one Mediator, through whom we alone have access to the living God. Jesus unites to himself the church and therefore each baptized Christian in such a way that there is an intimate bond between the prayer of Christ and the prayer of the church. And so it is in Christ alone that Christian worship through prayer may be said to be of faith, have value, and attain its appointed end. But this cannot be whimsical. It does not happen of its own accord. Rather, the Christian is taught the boundaries of prayer, the content of prayer, and the point of praying with and in the church.

So while private, individual prayers may rightly conclude “in Jesus’ name,” liturgical prayers go several steps beyond the comparative informality and theological minimalism of private, individual prayers. In this way they enrich our private prayers a great deal, adding to them elements that resonate with the larger kingdom-of-God agenda of Christ and the wider needs of the world, according to the Scriptures.

Private, Personal Prayer and Liturgical Prayer

Having established that biblical prayer is a learned worshipful act of faith that takes place “in Christ” with the Spirit, we now note that both private, individual prayer and liturgical prayer properly belong in a symbiotic relationship to each other as complementary sides of a single coin.

Private, personal prayer is fairly recognized as a more subjective kind of prayer where the pressing needs of daily life usually set the agenda. Such prayers are highly adaptable to individual needs and wants. Virtually all prayer requests are of this sort. Persons suffering pray for relief. Those who are grieving ask for comfort. Those with physical, material, or employment needs ask for provision. Broken relationships seek restoration. Broken hearts desire mending. Our Lord’s prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane were of this sort as he prayed, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me” (Luke 22:42; emphasis added). Both testaments encourage this kind of prayer: “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver, you, and you shall glorify me” (Ps. 50:15); “In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Phil. 4:6).

These prayers offer an informal opportunity to encounter our Good Shepherd, our Blessed Physician, the Sovereign Lord who provides, protects, and prepares. As such, personal prayer strengthens the bond between individuals and God through Jesus Christ with the aid of the Holy Spirit. Devotional prayer is meant to help sustain each believer as we sojourn as “strangers and aliens in this present age” (1 Pet. 2:11; Rom. 8:18), especially in our quest to “pray continually,” as urged by Saint Paul (1 Thess. 5:17). Moreover, it is also something we can do on our own, at any time, which allows us to individually engage God and convey our personal love, needs, and thanks to our Creator and Redeemer, which flow out of enjoyment of God rather than compunction. Devotional practices that utilize Portals of Prayer, My Utmost for His Highest, Our Daily Bread, Give Us This Day, and the like can deepen our private, individual prayer and render it more habitual, even broadening our horizons.

Liturgical prayer, on the other hand, is the orderly public worship of God by the church as the body of Christ. It is more formal with prescribed, usually predictable structure, employing rubrics, ritual formulas, even gestures, sometimes garments, symbols, and materials such as bread and wine, candles, ashes, palms, and oils, and is usually led by an ordained minister of God’s word and sacraments.

An example of liturgical prayer is the Litany, a series of entreaties and responses cantillated or spoken. It possesses the feel of the petitions of the importunate friend in Luke 11:5–10. The Litany includes both the “Deprecations,” which entreat God to ward off evil from among his communicants, and the “Obsecrations” that implore God on theological grounds, recalling the mystery of faith and the historical facts of Jesus’ incarnation, nativity, baptism, fasting, temptation, agony and sweat on the cross, death and burial, resurrection and ascension, and the sending of the Holy Spirit. These are prayers “by” Jesus’ accomplishments. Only through Christ can the Christian approach the Father (John 16:23). There are also the “Supplications,” which are prayers for a variety of situations in life in general terms. And finally, the “Intercessions” are prayers for others and on behalf of others. They can be recited intact or augmented throughout. This exhibits flexibility while retaining inflexibility with regard to its theological and christological content, making it a great aid to private, individual prayer and also a most appropriate didactic prayer in a corporate context.

In the modern era, however, there is a tendency to view private, individual prayer and liturgical prayer as nonoverlapping spheres, emphasizing the former rather than the latter, especially given evangelical emphasis on the individual, reinforced by cultural and ideological individualism. This, however, would be a distinctly modern phenomenon, alien to ancient Semitic cultures and early Christianity throughout the first millennium and beyond.

For both communities, there was no clear division between public and private prayer or, for that matter, public and private reading. Whether in the synagogue or on street corners (Matt. 6:5), the temple itself (Luke 18:1), or their homes, Jews tended to offer their prayers aloud. Internalization of thoughts (what constitutes much of what we experience as personal silent prayer) became normative only well after Saint Augustine in the fifth century, although it was not entirely absent in Old or New Testament times, as we find with Nehemiah’s instant prayer (Neh. 2:4) or the breathy prayer of the humble tax collector (Luke 18:6). Private life simply imitated public life in substantive ways.

There are two significant reasons for this. First, the way Jews considered themselves not as individuals, but within a dyadic framework in which their most irreducible identity was the family and which itself was derivative of ethnic-religious identification as Israel, the people of God. Consequently, no prayer was considered totally private, since it always had within it a consciousness of being Israel. Second, there was the Jewish concept of time that was infused with the divine notion of the eternal, which militated against individualism and a self-referential prayer life.

Within Christianity, these two factors—self-identity grounded in community identity (i.e., the church) and the consecration of time—profoundly influenced early Christian approaches to prayer, rendering them far more liturgical than individual, yet at the same time opening fresh avenues for personal devotional prayer.

For instance, carried over from the Jewish tradition and seen acutely in the life of Christ, the earliest Christians viewed life as “a living sacrifice,” in which every aspect is informed by the active presence of God, even amid the mundane routines of daily life. Indeed, this was so much the case in Judaism that the Christian concept of time itself was brought into the rhythm of life by melding the seasonal calendar with the events of Christ’s life and, later, the lives of the saints with whom sacramental union and communion continue. In this sense, the whole of life was committed to prayer, and it was exemplified through the observance of the canonical hours, services of praying Scripture that punctuated the day, also known as the Liturgy of the Hours. With an acknowledgment of the Eucharist as the center of the church’s life, and a highlighting of baptism as a model for discipleship, prayers associated with the services of Matins, Vespers, Compline, and the like were increasingly seen as extensions of these monumental community-forming sacraments that stretched throughout the day, week, and indeed the entire Christian life.

This view of chronological time infused by kairotic (eternal) moments of divine redemptive and re-creative activity was reinforced by the overlap of heaven and earth manifest in the church itself. Jesus’ incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension bridged the gap between the two dimensions of our one reality, so that “individual” Christians always understood themselves in terms of the great cloud of witnesses in heaven, throughout history, and at home. Different from the way private, individual prayer is conceived today, early Christian prayer was always in the body of Christ, as explained earlier, making it impossible for a Christian to pray entirely privately, for their basic worldview understood that they ever participated in the saving events and organism of Christ and his body, the holy church. This idea finds early expression in Hebrews 15:15: “Through [Christ Jesus] let’s offer to God an unceasing sacrifice of praise”—unceasing in the sense that the catholic church with saints in heaven and on earth form a contiguous existence. The kingdom of God transcends time and space and thoroughly eclipses individuality.

This last point warrants further explanation. Liturgical prayer facilitates praying and praising God with the saints in heaven. The idea here is that prayer is the voice of the bride addressing her bridegroom, where the bride is one, whether on earth or in heaven. When the church offers prayer and praise to God in a liturgical setting, it unites itself with that hymn of praise sung throughout all ages in the halls of heaven, as described by John in the book of Revelation. By participating in such liturgies, Christians receive a foretaste of this prayerful song. Our close union with the portion of the church in heaven is given effective voice when we all, “from every tribe and tongue and people and nation redeemed by Christ’s blood” (Rev. 5:9), gather together into the one church to entreat, receive, and glorify the Triune God. Here, the liturgy moves praying Christians out of their private world and connects them to the grand, wider world of God’s kingdom and kingdom people.

The liturgy of that one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church also has its origins in the liturgical practices of the Jews in the first century. When Luke tells us in Acts 2:42 that the earliest Jewish followers of Christ in Jerusalem “devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching, to the communion in the breaking of the bread, and to the prayers” (emphasis added), not only is this “communion in the breaking of the bread” the Eucharistic adaptation of the Passover Haggadah, but they also drew their formulas from the synagogue services for prayer—hence, Luke’s recognition of the prayers; that is, the established, liturgical prayers of synagogue and temple worship. Generally speaking, the liturgical prayers of the years AD 100 to 313 knew only one source—the psalter—and even these were thoroughly Christianized by Jesus’ teaching that he was their subject (Luke 24:44) and by adding the doxology at the conclusion of each psalm. This Jewish carry-over into Christian worship quickly found its way into Christian homes as devotional prayer books. Christians prayed the psalms in church and at home, the former yielding the latter by way of example and established catechesis.

Likewise, although the earliest versions of liturgical prayers drew upon the Jewish berakah formulas (which we find stretched throughout Ephesians 1–3), they quickly became enmeshed with Christian themes based on the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, and leached into Christian homes as models of prayer. Thus domestic liturgical prayer was normative and thoroughly christocentric, incorporating Christianized Jewish prayer forms from the corporate gathering of believers, with canonical texts sanctioned by the church. It was safe and hallowed ground by which to verbally commune with God, heightening the expectation of God hearing the church and acting on its behalf.

The most important features of the corporate gatherings—the assembly of believers—centered on the core features of the kingdom of God: (1) an acknowledgement of the Eucharist as the center of the church’s life, unity, and prayer; (2) holy baptism as the model for Christian discipleship with its themes of death and resurrection; (3) scriptural catechesis; (4) cross-bearing servitude; and (5) prayerful missional engagement for the salvation of the world and the preservation of Christ’s kingdom. It was precisely these features, these distinguishing marks of the church it taught and practiced in its liturgy, that were brought into domestic, devotional prayer.3 Liturgical prayer was at home in the believer’s home. So much so that the physical gestures that established conformity of belief and practice—signing the cross, kneeling, bowing, kissing—also became habituated in private, individual prayer, thereby establishing a graphic, conscious connection with the body of Christ and so prompting prayers on its behalf, resonating with the will of God found, for example, in the Lord’s Prayer.

Objecting to Liturgical Prayer

Some demur at employing liturgical prayers: for example, reciting the Lord’s Prayer (much less other liturgical prayers such as “The Jesus Prayer,” “Angelic Trisagion,” “Gloria,” and so on) and other parts of the established Eucharist Liturgy, because of what has been perceived as an injunction in Matthew 6:7: “But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do; for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking” (KJV). The prohibition concerns “vain repetition,” such that those who customarily, even daily, pray the Our Father are engaged in the empty practice of heathens, which was condemned by Christ himself. Consequently, liturgical prayer is unbiblical, tantamount to paganism—or so it is thought.

The ESV gives a better rendering of the verse, offering the following: “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do for they think that they will be heard for their many words.” The Greek word in question, battalogein (“vain repetition” in the KJV), found only here in the New Testament and nonextant in all other contemporary manuscript evidence, suggests either “nonsensical” words or a large quantity of words, or both. In its historical context, pagans used incantational prayer to appease the gods within a transactional theology that required exactitude in recitation, similar to uttering a conjuration from The Book of Spells within the Hogwarts Library. In the very next verse, Jesus says, “Do not be like them,” because (1) you need not repeat in vain since you pray to the living God who hears, as opposed to having to repeat prayers to a non-hearing nothing; (2) Christ himself mediates between God and humanity, and so such repetitious appeasement is in vain (that is, to no avail); and (3) Jesus gives us infallible words that actually comport with the will and ways of God.

Further, since Jesus does not contradict himself on this subject by his own practice, the interpretation derived from the KJV is incorrect. Jesus, for example, repeats a prayer three times in Gethsemane (Mark 14:32–39; cf. Matt. 26:44). He also employs set prayers, time and again, by prayerfully invoking psalms (e.g., Ps. 22:1 in Mark 15:34; Ps. 31:5 in Luke 23:46). In addition to his example, he of course gave the church the gift of the Lord’s Prayer, directing them with “When you pray say [this]” (Luke 11:2; Matt.6:9). In Luke 18:1–14, he furnishes a parable extolling the importunate representing of the same prayer with earnest expectation of our heavenly Father to answer such prayers consistent with his good will for the kingdom of God and his kingdom people.

What is more, Scripture provides numerous examples of sanctioned prayer forms that are repeated. Consider the prayers of the angels in Revelation 4:8:

And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all round and within, and day and night they never cease to sing, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!”

These “four living creatures” refer back to the Seraphim of Isaiah 6:1–3 who repeated the same song of prayer over and over. Likewise, Psalm 136 is a classic example of a highly repetitious responsive prayer, repeating the words “for his steadfast love endures forever” twenty-six times over twenty-six verses.

The idea, then, that liturgical prayers are unbiblical cannot be established. Instead, Christians can “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:16) through prayers that Scripture itself offers.

Jesus Teaches Liturgical Prayer

Earlier we noted that all prayer, individual and liturgical prayer, is taught and learned. The teacher par excellence for biblically sound, theologically correct, God-pleasing prayer is, of course, Christ himself. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus not only encouraged his disciples to pray (Matt. 6:1–18; 7:7–11), but he also taught them how to pray (Luke 11:1–3) by giving them a model prayer: the Lord’s prayer, also known as the Our Father or Pater Noster (Matt. 6:9–13). In fact, it may be seen as both a form prayer or prayer formula set in the Jewish tradition of liturgical prayers. Luke records the Our Father as something to be straightforwardly repeated:

He was praying in a certain place, and when he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say…”

In Matthew, however, the Pater Noster is more formulaic, allowing for both plagiarism and innovation, saying: “This is how you are to pray” (6:9; emphasis added), rather than “this is what you are to pray.” In both ways, we have received a gift from Christ: perfect words from the perfect One to speak to God, and a perfect model for prayers that comport with the Lord’s highest priorities and our greatest needs.

It is also important to know from the example of Christ that he also prayed the psalms and knew them from memory (e.g., Matt. 27:46 [Ps. 22]; Luke 23:46 [Ps. 31]; Matt 21:16 [Ps. 8:2]; John 10 [Pss. 23, 95]), continuing an ancient Jewish practice that reaches back to David. Note the example of Ezra, who prays by means of the psalms in 9:6 (Ps. 106:6) and 9:8 (Ps. 13:3). The “hymn” Jesus and his disciples prayerfully sang at the conclusion of the Passover (Matt. 26:30) was the Great Hallel from Psalms 115–118. Immediately, the early church followed this pattern of praying the psalms as seen in Acts 4:23–31, where the church prays the second psalm. Paul, likewise, describes the worship life of the early church as involving “singing psalms” (Col. 3:16), for in the psalter we also have divine content for our prayers that can be spoken, chanted, or sung. And that, too, is something liturgical prayer can add to private, individual prayer: the beauty and affectation of prayerfully singing to God, especially with the psalms. Such prayer songs expand and emote prayer as a faith act of worship and continue the earliest of Jewish-Christian traditions of tunefully praying and reading.

For the Christian, to pray the psalms is to pray them in Jesus’ name, because the voice in the psalter is Christ’s own voice; he is their referential center (Luke 24:44). This is also learned from the liturgical practice of punctuating the end of each psalm with the doxology: the name of the blessed Trinity given to us by Christ in Matthew 28:19.

A Bigger Picture

Significantly, liturgical prayer was purposed for the salvation of the world. Praying for the salvation of humanity was and is considered to be among the primary duties of the church. According to theologian Timothy Maschke, this marks “a vast, albeit frequently unrecognized, difference between personal prayer and liturgical prayer.”4 Maschke cites Pius Parsch (1884–1954), a Roman Catholic priest and leading figure in the Liturgical Movement, to explain:

“In private prayer I pray, mostly for myself and my own affairs. It is the isolated person who stands in the center of the action, and the prayer is more or less individualized. But in liturgical prayer . . . it is not primarily I who am praying, but the Church, the Bride of Christ. The object of her prayer is broader, too: all the needs of God’s kingdom here on earth. In liturgical prayer, I feel more like a member of a great community, like a little leaf on the great living tree of the Church.”5

The content of liturgical prayer is determined by what the church has found to be God’s will, rather than what the minister or even individual worshippers consider to be important. It takes its missional agenda from Scripture and has the entire church in view. Such praying is every bit as important as the personal prayers we speak privately to God, for in this way our hearts are open to the whole of God’s people and their needs and to the concerns God himself places into our prayers.

This is why the “Prayer of the Church” before Holy Communion in the Divine Liturgy consciously resembles Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer (John 17:1–26) and therefore the will of God in prayer. One function of the Jewish high priest was to offer the annual sacrifice for all the people of Israel (Lev. 15). In fulfillment, at the Last Supper Jesus prayed to God the Father in the presence of his disciples about his own sacrifice of himself for all people (see esp. vv. 1–2, 19). In the “Prayer of the Church,” led by the celebrant or presiding minister, individual Christians are assembled as a priesthood of believers and engage in their priestly duty where one, the pastor, speaks with the voice of all, and responsively all speak with the voice of one, bringing requests and petitions to God’s heavenly throne (Matt. 18:19). Their concern is for all people (1 Tim. 2:1–4), following the teaching of Christ and Saint Paul, but also Solomon in 2 Chronicles 6:12-42, where in a stately, repetitive manner he prays for the nation and unbelievers. Paul continues that tradition and sets forth God’s will: “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions” of authority (1 Tim. 2:30).

Liturgical prayers are found throughout the Divine Service and set a big picture view of the Christian life, in which each element of the liturgy can be suitably brought into one’s private, individual prayer. It can then be expanded proportionally and offered as a doctrinally correct pathway to personalized requests, petitions, contrition, intercessions, and praise—especially when we fail as individuals to find the words we want or need. More often than not, the liturgical prayers have already provided them. [See the sidebar on page 43, “Using Liturgy for Private Prayer”—Ed.]

Liturgical prayer and devotional prayer are meant to work together to lift our minds and hearts to God. Private, individual prayer allows us to develop our personal relationship with the Lord according to the way that best suits each of us. That is why the type of devotional prayer one chooses is subjective; even the manner of praying the same form may vary from one person to the next. But once we have established that personal relationship with the Lord in our devotional prayer life, we bring it to liturgical prayer, especially when words fail us, where it is then united with the others in the church and incorporated into the celebration of Holy Communion, the remembrance of baptism, and the needs of the world.

Commingling private, individual prayer with liturgical prayer will manifest believers’ complementarity, elevating their spiritual life by bearing the cares of God for the church and the world.

Conclusion

Our endless need of God’s care and provision means that our prayers never cease, and so we always need to enhance and expand our prayers and to mature in prayer—which includes increasing our appreciation and use of liturgical or form prayers.

This is why we look to Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith. Worship as an act of faith expressed through prayer is in fact something our Lord Jesus taught, encouraged, and extolled as a central aspect of Christian life—indeed, as one of the primary duties of the individual Christian and the church as a whole. In doing so, Jesus advanced an already well-established Jewish tradition of teaching prayer and providing set forms and alterable formulas of prayer. His teaching intentionally focuses our hearts and minds on the things of God—the divine will and ways concerning the growth, provision, and protection of his kingdom (John 17)—and so it elicits faith from the baptized. It is the God who keeps his promises in Christ whom we trust, who evokes faith once bestowed by the water and the word.

Therefore, far from being antithetical, personal devotional prayer and liturgical prayer are complementary—with the former being particularly expanded and enriched by the generally Scripture-determined content and form of the liturgy, purposely engaging in petitions that resonate with the expressed will of God, the mission of the church, and the needs of the world, as opposed to the private individual. Employing or mimicking carefully crafted liturgical prayer helps safeguard the biblical soundness and theological accuracy of our personal prayers, keeping them within the God-honoring boundaries of Trinitarianism and orthodox Christology and soteriology.

Our prayer in the liturgy may be objective and physical in nature, reflecting the complexity of our engagement with the world around us, including our sense of perception, intuition, and memory. When this is the case, and the liturgy’s wonderful content is brought into our private, personal prayer lives, we begin to find that liturgical prayer incorporates us into the united voice of God’s people and thus transforms us, since it belongs not to any individual but to the church universal.

Rev. John J. Bombaro, PhD (King’s College London) is senior pastor of Grace Lutheran Church, San Diego, and USN Chaplain serving with the Marine Corps.