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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Still under the larger heading of A Method of Praying the Scriptures

In adoration of God’s power, he wrote, “We know, O God, that thou canst do every thing.… Power belongs to thee; and with thee nothing is impossible. All power is thine, both in heaven and on earth. Thou killest and thou makest alive, thou woundest and thou healest, neither is there any that can deliver out of thy hand. What thou hast promised thou art able also to perform.”

Other sections such as confession and petition also have detailed outlines. Henry’s method would give remarkable depth and variety to our prayers if we consulted his book regularly for guidance. His method would deliver our prayers from bland repetition and thoughtless irreverence. It would help us become more specific as well as more brokenhearted in our confession of sin, leading us to pray: “We have not had the rule we ought to have over our own spirits, which have therefore been as a city that is broken down and has no walls. We have been too soon angry, and anger hath rested in our bosoms: and when our spirits have been provoked, we have spoken unadvisedly with our lips, and have been guilty of that clamour and bitterness which should have been put far from us.”

Henry’s words of confession are humbling. In our glib and frivolous day, we might hesitate to give such careful thought to confessing our sins. But Duncan writes, “Henry understood that without the inclusion of sufficient confession of sin in our prayers, we will never attain a real and right sense of divine forgiveness and reconciliation.… We will be burdened by unresolved guilt—or else cope with that nagging guilt through denial, delusion, and self-deception.”

Our intercessions for the church would likewise be more pointed and powerful if we used words such as these: “Let pure religion, and undefiled before God and the Father, flourish and prevail everywhere; that kingdom of God among men, which is not meat and drink but righteousness and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. O revive this work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make it known, and let our times be times of reformation.” We might then cry out with scriptural boldness, “Let no weapon formed against thy church prosper, and let every tongue that riseth against it in judgment be condemned.”49

Henry also marshaled Scriptures for our intercession for the lost world and the propagation of the gospel to all nations. He called us to pray for all men, to cry out that the nations would praise the Lord and sing for joy, to pray for the conversion of the Jewish people, for the suffering churches in Islamic nations, and for the conversion of atheists and deists. He instructed his readers to pray, “O give thy Son the heathen for his inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession; for thou hast said, It is a light thing for him to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel, but thou wilt give him for a light to the Gentiles. Let all the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of the Lord, and of his Christ.” Praying the Scriptures back to God will certainly lead us to pray for missions.

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), 156–158.