aker Publishing Group - 100 Prayers Every Christian Should Know

The very nature of prayer, words spoken to God, ensures that most of them last only a blink, a moment. Some are spoken in the depths of night by worried parents awake, minds racing for what awaits their children. Some are shouted in praise at moments of triumph and victory. Some are just spoken in amazement or wonder or even fear at the glory of the Almighty. Sometimes congregations read words of prayer together from a screen, but then the next slide comes up and the words have entered silence and the prayer is gone.

But we know God collects them. We know He hears and is presented with our words through His Son, in a tradition echoing back through the generations.

But the words themselvesso many of them have vanished, which makes the ones that have lasted through the generations all the more critical.

This book is an effort to collect some of the words that have remained. It is also designed to introduceor reintroduceyou to some of the men and women who have spoken those words throughout history, because the hearts of believers today and millennia ago beat astoundingly the same.

A great cloud of witnesses.

When the writer of Hebrews sought to encourage members of the early Church, he reminded them of the lives of faith of those who went before. Men and women whose godly lives were captured in the Bible. Abraham and Isaac and Moses and David and Solomon and another and another. Drawing on hundreds of years of history and innumerable stories of faith, the writer creates an image of countless lives before us that point the way to God and serve as examples.

Since then, hundreds of years have passed, and more and more lives have been added to the great cloud. Writers and pastors and missionaries and politicians and mothers and fathers and artists and simple men and women. As we run the race given to us, its natural, then, to turn to these lives in the same way the writer of Hebrews urged. Not as perfect examples of unblemished faith, for there is no such thing outside of Jesus himself. Instead, for encouragement that, in word and deed, others have run the race before us, and the path is not one we need tread alone.

Perhaps no area of faith is as personal or instructive as prayer. The chance to speak directly to God, to present prayers and petitions to our Lord and Creator, is a sacred opportunity, a holy obligation. But sometimes the words we want to say feel inadequate or like something weve said a million times before. There are lessons we can learn in prayer, too, from those who have come before.

This is a book of some of the most famous and world-changing prayers in history, though we admit to being a little generous with the definition of the word prayer . Youll find a few hymns and a few poems in here. Some articles of faith from the history of the Church. All, however, are directed to God and offer a glimpse at the span of Church history and the concerns of the hearts of those whove lifted their voices and thoughts.