Welcome back to a new week on the Ask Pastor John podcast with long time author and pastor

John Piper.

Thanks for making us a part of your day.

Today is episode 999 and our question today comes from a listener named Dallabor.

I think that name is Czechoslovakian, Dallabor.

Pastor John, can you give an example or two on how to pray the scriptures?

This seems right, but also foreign to me.

How do I read in such a way that the words become alive and speak to me here and now?

How do my feelings reflect or align with the text I'm reading now?

Even better perhaps, would you be willing to pray through a section of scripture with us

and for us?

I love this question because praying the scriptures is so important in the Christian life.

If we don't form the habit of praying the scriptures, our prayers will almost certainly

degenerate into vain repetitions that eventually revolve entirely around our immediate

private concerns rather than guard God's larger purposes.

So let me try to help Dallabor see this as less foreign.

He said it felt foreign to him.

Let me see if I can help make it feel less foreign.

We should notice that the early church prayed the scriptures in Acts 4, 24 following.

In fact, they explicitly quote scriptures.

So the threats have been made against them and it says they lifted their voices together

to God and said, sovereign Lord who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything

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