10. A Powerful Pattern for Prayer
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Answer me when I call to you,
O my righteous God.... Be merciful to me and hear my prayer.
Psalm 4:1
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LTHOUGHwe know that every Christian’s “job” is to pray,
many of us would rather do something more dramatic or
important. To us prayer sometimes seems very small on the scale of
Christian accomplishments. But Jesus does not see it that way. To
him prayer is everything: “a duty as well as a privilege, a right as well
as a responsibility.”^1
How many times I have heard people say, “The least we can do is
pray.” Just the opposite is true. The most we can do is pray. So why
is it that many of us have developed such anemic prayer lives? Per-
haps it is because no one has taken the time to teach us.
I have found Pastor Bill Hybels’s simple formula for prayer a help-
ful one. He based it on the acronym ACTS. Each letter represents a
recommended ingredient of our daily prayer time.
Astands for adoration.In his book Too Busy Not to Pray,Hybels