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Prayer: Lord, under Your precious blood we come again to You. We look to You for Your help. Lord, You know that in the proper practices we need the help in the spirit. May we have the liberty and the encouragement to speak and to practice in the way of life. Do help us to this effect. We ask this in Your precious name.
The more we practice to exercise our spirit to pray with the word we read, the more we will be adjusted and learn how to do it. This kind of reading will become spontaneous to us. There is no need to understand what we read and then make a formal prayer. We simply need to read something and speak to the Lord. At first, some may need to close their eyes when they pray, but after a certain amount of practice, they will become more inward and able to pray in any way.
At a certain point we will be able to read and pray with John 15:10, for example. This verse says, “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; even as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.” We may speak to the Lord in a spontaneous way, “Lord, not only are You Yourself life, but even Your commandments are eternal life. I do not take Your commandments merely like the Ten Commandments. I take Your commandments as life, because Your commandments are You Yourself. Lord, You told us clearly that without You we can do nothing. I simply take Your commandments as Yourself. You are joy, and You are love.” There is no need to make a formal prayer. We may simply speak with the Lord in this way.
When we talk to the Lord in this way, we should not exercise our mind too much. Rather, we need to learn to exercise our spirit to open deeply from within and speak something to the Lord. We need more practice. When we start to practice to read and pray in this way, we will need to set aside some definite time each day. After we are more accustomed to this, however, we can do it throughout the entire day. The word will be familiar to us, and we will be able to turn any verse into prayer. Then each verse will become the Spirit to us. We need more practice to become accustomed to this.
We need to read the Bible without exercising our choice. We should begin from Matthew 1:1 and simply continue to read in order. One day we can read the first eight verses, and the next day we can continue from verse 9 and read another five or ten verses. One morning we may come to Mark 4:3 through 6, which says, “Listen! Behold, the sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell beside the way, and the birds came and devoured it. And other seed fell on the rocky place, where it did not have much earth, and immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of earth. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered.” We can pray something simple without much doctrine and without “ministering a message” in our prayer. Spontaneously we may say, “Lord, I praise You that You are the sower and You are the seed. O Lord, You have sown Yourself into me. Oh, the seed! You are the seed.” Sometimes we may repeat several times, “O Lord, You are the wonderful seed.” Then we may come to our spouse and say, “Dear wife, the Lord is the seed!” We can also turn to the enemy and say, “Satan, do you not know that the Lord is the seed within me?”
This is a simple and living way to pray without many words. Sometimes our prayers are too wordy. Many words are piled together, but there is nothing of substance. Our prayer over Mark 4 can simply be, “Lord, You are the living seed, the seed of life that has been sown into me. I praise You that by Your mercy I am not beside the way. I am afraid, though, that I may have some stones. My heart may be the stony earth. Lord, show me the stones and take them away. Grant that You may grow deeply within me.” Such a prayer is living; it is not in the exercise of the mind. We have to exercise our spirit to say something to the Lord in a living way from deep within. This requires our practice.
We need to change our way of reading the word. We must take the word as truth, not merely as knowledge, and realize that the word must be transferred into the Spirit. This is the right principle. In order for the word to apply to us, we have to know the way to transfer the word into the Spirit. Many people read the Bible but receive no supply. They increase in knowledge but have no growth in life. In order to have the growth in life, we must realize the proper way to transfer the word into the Spirit. Eventually the Bible will truly be open to us in the way of life. It will become a different book to us. Brother Watchman Nee once said that different people have different Bibles. It is not that the Bible changes; the Bible is the same. Yours has sixty-six books, and so does mine. Yours begins with Genesis and ends with Revelation, and mine does too. However, our experience of the Bible is different. The kind of Bible we have depends on what kind of person we are and how we read it.
I heard Brother Nee speak this word a long time ago, but gradually in my experience I have come to realize that it is true. Once a brother came to me and said, “The Bible is truly good.” I asked him, “What do you mean?” He said, “In the whole world there is not another book like this which teaches that wives have to submit to their husband.” I found out that this brother had a problem with his wife. He always expected his wife to be submissive to him, and he became a Christian for this purpose. He told us that we should send some sisters to his home to help his wife with this teaching. This illustrates that if we are a certain kind of person, the Bible will be a certain kind of book to us. What kind of Bible we have depends on what kind of person we are. The same Bible may have been a certain book to us five years ago and be another kind of book today. If we practice the proper way to pray with what we read, the Bible will “change” after only six months. It will be another book. We need this practice in order to receive the word in the way of life.
Certain parts of the word are a promise. Isaiah 54:1 and 2 are a promise to the barren. They say, “Give a ringing shout, O barren one, you who have not borne; / Break forth into joyful shouting and cry out, you who have not been in labor; / For more numerous are the children of the desolate one / Than the children of the married woman, says Jehovah. / Enlarge your tent site, / Let them stretch out the curtains of your habitations; / Spare not; / Lengthen your cords, / And strengthen your pegs.” When we read this, we may pray in a brief way with a strong spirit to take the Lord’s promise: “Lord, I take Your word as a promise to me. I myself cannot break forth into joyful shouting, but You can do it. My tent site is my spirit. Lord, enlarge it. Enlarge it and stretch out the curtains of my habitations.” Keep this word as the promise of the Lord and spend some time to pray over it. If we deal with the Lord in this way, the Holy Spirit will give us living utterances. Then the more we speak them, the more we will taste, enjoy, and absorb not mere knowledge but the Lord Himself as life and nourishment.
This is the right way to read the word. It is absolutely something different from the old way. The old way to read is the natural way, the way in which people read any common, published material. The way that the children of God read the living word must be different. It must not be natural and religious but spiritual and living.
We may further illustrate reading the word by praying with Isaiah 15:1. This verse begins, “The burden concerning Moab: / Indeed in a night it is devastated.” When we read this, again we may pray: “Lord, I do not know what Moab is, but I know that the city in which I presently live can be like Moab. Lord, grant me a burden for this city.” We can simply pray to the extent of our spiritual understanding. Then the Scripture will not be only a word or some knowledge but something living. Many times through this kind of prayer the Lord will do something. The Lord will hear and answer our prayer and grant us to be burdened for the city in which we live. From that time on we will have a real burden day by day. Even while we are working or driving, we will pray with tears for our city.
There is a great difference between the way of knowledge and the way of life to realize the word, to make the word living in the spirit. What we have is the living word of God. To come to the word properly always paves the way for the Holy Spirit to come in. If we practice to come to the word properly, the Holy Spirit will come in, and many things will result in a living way. Let us open the way for the Holy Spirit to do many wonderful things. What we are reading is not the word in dead letters; it is something living.
First Timothy 6:1 says, “As many as are slaves under the yoke should regard their own masters as worthy of all honor, lest the name of God and our teaching be blasphemed.” Since we are not this kind of slave, we may have no inspiration to pray with this verse. We should not force ourselves to get something from it. Rather, we may leave this verse for now and continue to read. However, sometimes we may be inspired by this kind of passage. We may have the realization that the Lord is the Master; we have to serve Him honestly and faithfully. If we have this kind of sense, we should turn it into prayer. Again I say, do not formulate a prayer. Instead, simply have a spontaneous talk with the Lord. If we compose a prayer, we will drift into the mind. We must always avoid exercising our mind in this way. We should be simple to speak from the depths of our being, to say something from the spirit. We may say, “O Lord, although I am not this kind of slave, I am Your slave, and You are my Master. I want to serve You honestly.”
Someone may ask, “If I do not compose a prayer, how can I pray?” This requires our practice. Eventually we will arrive at the point when we simply pray without composing. When we have a family talk, we do not compose anything; we simply talk. We need to practice talking to the Lord while we read His word. Without thinking, considering, or composing we simply speak from the spirit: “O Lord, I do not have an earthly master, but I do have You as my Master.”
With everything there is the need of practice, and this matter is no exception. We need to practice to exercise our spirit and train our faculties to be accustomed to this kind of reading and praying. We look to the Lord. From now on we all have to learn this way to contact the word and to transfer the word into the Spirit. Then we will enjoy the Lord and always pray in the spirit. Our spirit will be strengthened, enlarged, and enlivened. Then when we come together to meet, we will have a strong, living spirit and the accumulation of divine content within us.
