Bible Vs Prayer!

At the youth group I help out at we have a question can where high school kids can ask any question they would like about the Bible, life, or anything under the sun. These questions are normally answered in a discussion on Sunday morning. I though that I should answer the questions a little more in-depth on my blog. I hope to highlight blogs and other resources that I find and know.

1st Question: What is better to do "Pray" or "Read your Bible?"

This is a question that I think the answer is simply drawn with little thought. I prayed and though about this through the lenses of a person who is trying to develop a walk with Christ as a center part of there life.

I think I need to answer the question before I show my study on this. I would say that you need one, just as much as you need the other. You need prayer while reading the Bible and you need the Bible to know how to pray. I would say it is like a car you need tires and a engine to drive with out one the other will not work. The next steps will be looking at the importance of the Bible and how prayer relates.

I want to start off looking at why we uses the Bible and then I will show some verses that amplify prayer. "... let the Bible be the Bible, and so to let God be God—and so to enable the people of God to be the people of God, his special people, living under his authority, bringing his light to his world."(NT Wright) There are many discussions that tear down the Bible but I want to look at it as the authoritative word of God. We are Christians and the book we follow to find out who God is and what he has done is the Bible. As John Piper would explain that our feet have to be planted in the text and we need to hang on to every sentence of the Bible to learn how to walk in our life. N. T. Wright compares the Bible to a five act play. The first act is the story of Scripture is creation, then “fall,” then Israel, then Jesus, and finally the church. Act five is unique in that it is an unfinished narrative. Its opening scene began with the apostolic age that we find storied in the New Testament, and will reach its consummation in the final scene as evidenced in such passages as: Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, and parts of Revelation. Currently, we are living as part of the fifth act, in the age of the church, which remains open-ended. In this scenario, biblical authority would be expressed through the imagination of the actor based on the scripts of the first four acts of the story. Such improvisation unleashes the postmodern imagination to dream about how “my small story” can matter within the “big story” of God. 


You need prayer to keep this conversation going. You need to know what Jesus is doing in your life and what he has done in the past. the Bible is the most important way to do it.

We need to understand the Bible to continue to be apart of the Biblical tradition. We need to see what the people in the Bible are doing. These people are interacting with the God who they(and I) believe created them. The Jewish culture wrote an entire collection of Prayers which is now called Psalms. This is an example of what a whole community could say to their God.(Goldingay 21) Psalms like Psalms 91 explains characteristics of God which helps us understand the God whom we are following. Jesus the God-man even prayed to his father who was God. This is important because this is the defining figure of the Christian faith and he is praying. Several times Jesus leaves to pray by himself, and Jesus shows his disciples how to pray. I believe that Jesus is the best example of prayer that we have. http://marshill.com/media/pray-like-jesus This link is a great series of Jesus praying and how we should follow his prayers.

Like I said before the Bible is important and it shows us how to pray. Which in turn we need to read the Bible to pray. It is not a question in which we should or should not do but rather how we can use the other to compliment.




If you have more questions about the Bible please post!


How do you pray?


What are your stories of prayer answered?


How has the Bible help you get closer to God?