Praying the Scripture

How sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth! PSALM 119:103

If Madame Guyon had left us only one practical counsel, it would be this one, and it would have been enough to earn her a place among the teachers of prayer. She called it meditative reading. Her readers have since given it a plainer name: praying the Scripture. It is the first door she opens for beginners, and for many who have never gone further it has remained the most useful room in the house.

Two or three lines at a time

Her instructions in A Short and Easy Method of Prayer are brief and concrete. Take some truth, she says, and read two or three lines, seeking to enter into the full meaning of the words. Go no further so long as you find satisfaction in them. Leave the place only when it becomes insipid. Then take another passage and do the same, not reading more than half a page at once.

That is all. It could be written on a card. But it reverses the way most of us read the Bible. We read to cover ground: a chapter a day, the whole book in a year, the passage for Sunday. There is nothing wrong with reading widely, and a Christian who never reads the Bible through will have a lopsided knowledge of it. But she is pointing to something else. There is a reading that informs and a reading that feeds, and the second requires that we stop.

Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart. JEREMIAH 15:16

Her image for it is one of the best in the book. “The bees can only draw the juice from the flowers by resting on them, not by flying round them.” Those who get through a great deal, she says, do not profit from it. It is not so much the amount read as the manner of reading.

Tasting and swallowing

She presses the image of eating further. When the heart has been touched by what it has read, she says, it must be allowed to rest in it — to swallow what it has tasted. A person who only chewed an excellent meal and never swallowed it would taste it but not be nourished. So it is with the soul. If, when our affection has been stirred by a phrase of Scripture, we immediately hurry on to stir it again with the next, we put out the fire we have just lit. We must, she says, swallow by a loving repose what we have tasted.

O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him. PSALM 34:8

This is the heart of the matter. Praying the Scripture is not reading followed by praying, as though the two were separate exercises. It is reading that becomes prayer. A phrase is read — the Lord is my shepherd — and the reader stops. The words are turned over. They become a thanksgiving, a confession, a longing, a quiet trust. When the sense of them fades, the reader goes on to the next phrase: I shall not want. And so on, slowly, for as long as the time allows.

She worked this out on the Lord’s Prayer, and her example is worth following exactly. We say Our Father, and think that God is indeed our Father, and pause a few moments in silence. We ask that His kingdom come, and yield Him the right He has over us. We ask that His will be done, and give Him our heart and liberty. If at any point we feel drawn to peace and silence, we do not hurry on, but remain there as long as it lasts. It is the Lord’s Prayer prayed, not recited.

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. MATTHEW 6:9

Why this helps

Three things happen when we read like this, and all three are worth having.

First, the Word gets inside us. Hurried reading leaves the text on the surface of the mind; slow reading lets it sink. The psalmist did not say he had read God’s word, but that he had hid it in his heart.

Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee. PSALM 119:11

Second, prayer gets its matter from God rather than from us. Many people give up on prayer because they run out of things to say, or find themselves saying the same few things every day. Praying the Scripture gives the heart something to answer. God speaks first, in His Word, and we reply. That is the right order.

Third, distraction is reduced. She observes that the reading fixes the attention. The mind that wanders when left to itself will often settle when given a single phrase to rest upon.

A caution and a correction

Two cautions belong here, and she would not resent either.

The first is that she speaks of reading truths, doctrinal or practical, and of reading spiritual books in this way; she does not confine it to the Bible. In her own practice she read the Scriptures constantly, and her long commentaries on them show it. But the method is only as good as what is read. Slow reading of a poor book will feed us poorly. The Protestant readers who loved her were right to apply her counsel first and chiefly to the Scriptures, which alone are given by inspiration of God.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. 2 TIMOTHY 3:16

The second is that meditative reading does not replace the study of Scripture. We must also read whole books, follow arguments, compare passage with passage, and learn what the words meant to those who first received them. Otherwise we will taste phrases torn from their setting and make them mean what we please. Her way of reading is a way of praying, not a way of interpreting. The two belong together: study that we may understand, and pray that what we understand may become our own. The Bereans are praised for searching the Scriptures, and searching is not the same as savouring.

These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so. ACTS 17:11

With those cautions, her counsel stands. There are Christians who have read the Bible for decades and have never once stopped long enough to be fed by it. For them this chapter of her book is a gift.

Beginning tomorrow

The method is so simple that it is easy to agree with and never try. So choose a passage now: a psalm, a few verses of the Gospel of John, the Sermon on the Mount. Give it ten minutes. Read a line and stop. Turn it into prayer. Go on only when the line has nothing more to give you that morning. If you reach the end of ten minutes having read three verses, you have not failed; you may have prayed for the first time in weeks.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Be honest about how you usually read the Bible: to cover ground, to find something to say, or to be fed?

2. Tomorrow, take Psalm 23 and pray it phrase by phrase for ten minutes, going on only when a phrase is spent.

3. Pray the Lord’s Prayer slowly once this week, pausing after each petition as she suggests.

4. Keep a separate time for studying Scripture — a book read through, with its context — so that savouring rests on understanding.

5. Choose one verse that fed you this week and carry it through the day, returning to it whenever you remember.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have flown round Your Word like a hurried bee and wondered why I came away empty.

Teach me to rest on it, to taste it, and to let it sink into my heart.

Speak to me in Your Scriptures, and give me grace to answer You with my whole heart.

Guard me from twisting Your words to my own liking, and feed me with the truth as it is in Jesus. Amen.