Faithful Steward Ministries and FSM Women's Outreach

We continue our series of excerpts from “Matthew Henry on a Practical Method of Daily Prayer.” These will be without the usual comments and study references. My hope is that people will be like the Bereans, as described in Acts 17:11, and will put Henry’s writing to the test.

Cut & Paste or Type Method of Daily Prayer in the search box to see the previous post in this series.

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A Method for Praying the Scriptures

When a Christian devotes himself to prayer, whether privately or publicly, his prayers should be many because his burdens, concerns, needs, desires, and sins are many, and God’s mercies are great, Henry said. This commends the use of some method in prayer. To be sure, there are times when a Christian’s heart is so lifted up in prayer that a method is a hindrance. But those times are rare; ordinarily our prayers require method, for we do not want to speak rashly before “the glorious Majesty of heaven and earth.” The Bible shows us that our prayers should consist of short, clear, potent sentences, such as those found in the Lord’s Prayer, rather than a rambling stream of consciousness (or semi-consciousness) in which you forget what you are saying before your prayer is ended.

To help us form prayers that are better focused, Henry directs us to the source that is sufficient for every good work: the Holy Scriptures. He said, “Hear [God] speaking to you, and have an eye to that in every thing you say to him; as when you write an answer to a letter of business, you lay it before you. God’s word must be the guide of your desires and the ground of your expectations in prayer.”34

At the heart of Henry’s method is praying in the words of Scripture—that is, praying God’s Word back to God. O. Palmer Robertson wrote that “prayer in this form is nothing more and nothing less than what the old Puritans called ‘pleading the promises.’ God has made promises to his people. His people respond by redirecting those promises to the Lord in the form of prayer.” Henry did not restrict himself entirely to Bible promises, however. Ligon Duncan notes of Henry, “He ransacks the Scriptures for references to God’s attributes and turns them into matters of adoration.” In every respect, Henry sought to fill the mouth of God’s people with God’s own words, although he acknowledged that “it is convenient, and often necessary, to use other expressions in prayer besides those that are purely Scriptural.”37

Henry’s method included adoration, confession, petition for ourselves, thanksgiving, intercession for others, and a conclusion. This pattern generally follows the Westminster Directory for Public Worship (1645). In each section, Henry briefly introduced the focus and gave an outline of its parts. Each point of the outline includes Scripture after Scripture woven together as possible expressions of prayer. Henry guarded readers against merely reading these prayers aloud without meditation, saying, “After all, the intention and close application of the mind, the lively exercises of faith and love, and the outgoings of holy desire toward God, are so essentially necessary to prayer, that without these in sincerity, the best and most proper language is but a lifeless image [i.e., a dead idol].” Henry clearly believed that our prayers should be expressed in words and phrases from the Bible that have penetrated our hearts.

Let us consider a small sample of Henry’s method. He was first concerned that we pray in the fear of the Lord, saying, “In every prayer remember you are speaking to God, and make it to appear you have an awe of him upon your spirits. Let us not be ‘rash with our mouth; and let not our heart be hasty to utter any thing before God;’ but let every word be well weighed, because ‘God is in heaven, and we upon earth,’ Eccl. 5:2.” Henry introduced the reader to the adoration of God:

Our spirits being composed into a very reverent serious frame, our thoughts gathered in, and all that is within us charged, in the name of the great God, carefully to attend the solemn and aweful [awe-inspiring] service that lies before us, and to keep close to it; we must—with a fixed intention and application of mind, and an active lively faith—set the Lord before us, see his eye upon us, and set ourselves in his special presence; presenting ourselves to him as living sacrifices, which we desire may be holy and acceptable, and a reasonable service; and then bind those sacrifices with cords to the horns of the altar, with such thoughts as these.…

….. Let us now with humble boldness enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, in the new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us through the veil.

Joel R. Beeke, “Matthew Henry on a Practical Method of Daily Prayer,” in Taking Hold of God: Reformed and Puritan Perspectives on Prayer, ed. Brian G. Najapfour (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 152–154.