In the first volume of Bible Doctrine Made Easy, I dealt with the subject of the Elements of the Gospel. We covered the basic foundational doctrines leading right up to salvation.

Now as we come to this second volume of teachings, we are going to be looking at a different set of elements: The Elements of Spiritual Life. This includes everything that you need to know, now that you have accepted the Lord and experienced the new birth.

So we are going to start with probably the first and most important thing that we need to learn about which is the Doctrine of Prayer.

You say, “Do you mean to tell me that there is a Doctrine of Prayer?”

Well if you consider that the word doctrine means teaching, do you think you need some teaching on prayer? There are many books out there that have been written on prayer. And people are still writing new books all the time, because prayer is a much bigger subject than you realize.

You say, “Well prayer is easy. Prayer is bringing your requests to God and asking Him to do things for you.”

No, prayer is a lot bigger than that. And I would like to show you in this e-book all the basics of what is involved in prayer. I am just going to touch the surface and lay a little foundation for you, because after all this is Bible Doctrine Made Easy. I want to keep it as easy and simple for you as possible, and teach you about prayer in such a way that anybody can use what I’m teaching.

Whether you have just been born again today or yesterday; whether you have been a Christian for a while or for many years, I believe that the principles that I will share on prayer are still as relevant to everybody, and still should be easy enough for us to understand.

And yet as simple and easy as what they are, you would be amazed at how many Christians who have been saved for 20 or 30 years, still don’t know the basics of prayer.

I am going to start by looking at exactly what prayer is. Then I’m going to explain to you the three main different kinds of prayer. Well I could probably give you 8, 9 or 10 different kinds. There are so many varieties that are involved in prayer that you could make as many lists as you like.

But I believe that there are three main kinds of prayer that we should start getting involved in right away and that all believers should be doing. We will be looking at that as part of this doctrine.

What Prayer Is

Let’s start firstly with what exactly prayer is. From the moment you are born again, one of the first things that should become your daily experience is the practice of prayer. Most people only pray when they are in trouble don’t they? When things start to go wrong suddenly they realize,

“There is nobody else out here to help me. There is only one person left and that is God.”

So we look up, and we cry out to God in prayer and say,

“Oh God, please help me.”

Have you heard the story of the atheist who didn’t believe in God? He fell into a raging torrent of water and was starting to drown. In his desperation he realized that there was only one person he could cry out to. So he cried out and said,

“Help me God.”

As he said that he saw a big log floated towards him that he could grab hold of. As he saw it he said,

“Oh never mind.”

He missed the log, and the log floated down the stream and he drowned.

Now I am not saying that this is a true story, but I thought it was such a beautiful illustration of how people often do the Lord. They say that they don’t believe in Him, and they don’t want anything to do with Him until they are in trouble. Then suddenly they want to cry out to God.

But God is not just a fire escape. And prayer is a lot more than just crying out to God when you are in trouble. Prayer should be the daily experience of every believer. It should be like eating or breathing. It should be a practice that we do and carry out every day of our spiritual lives.

Different Pictures of Prayer

Now if I were to ask a group of people what is involved in prayer, I’ll guarantee that each person probably has a very similar picture of what prayer is.

The more religious people will think in terms of getting down on their knees, folding their hands together and muttering a few words in prayer. It is the old standard religious teaching and there is the famous painting of the praying hands.

The Muslims have their way of praying on their prayer mats. And the Israelis go to the Prayer Wall and they wail. That is why it is called the Wailing Wall. There are all these different ways of praying.

But here is the mistake that everybody makes, and that causes them to get it all wrong where prayer is concerned. It is caused by a faulty understanding of who God is and how we should approach Him.

In the first module on the Elements of the Gospel, I clearly described and showed you the nature of God. I showed you how God relates to us as human beings, and how we enter into a relationship with Him through the salvation experience.

We saw that God is manifested as the Father who fills the universe, and who is the big, austere God ready to pass His judgment. He is the originator of all things. We saw that God also manifested Himself in awesome, dynamic power by the Holy Spirit.

And then we saw that God manifested Himself in human form in the Lord Jesus Christ. He was the loving, caring person who went around reaching out, healing the sick and ministering love, and ultimately giving His life for us to bring us back to God.

Now most people make this mistake when they come to prayer. We all have this idea that if we are to pray, we are to pray to God. Well where is God, who is He and what does He look like? Perhaps He is an old man up there somewhere with a long beard.

Wrong Ways of Reaching God

How do you picture God? The most common idea that we have is that God is up there in the sky. Have you ever stood on a starry night and looked up into the stars, the galaxies and the planets out there and thought to yourself,

“Where out there is God? I wonder where He is. Which planet is He on? How far do we have to find Him?”

Have you ever thought that? Well you know when we come to pray we kind of do the same thing. We think,

“I need to pray, and somehow I need to launch one of these little rockets, to get it to go way up into the sky, high enough to reach God so that He will hear my prayer. Hopefully my prayer will reach Him, He will hear it and He will answer it.”

Experience shows however that most of our prayers don’t have enough rocket fuel in them to reach God. Quite clearly He never heard them, because He doesn’t respond does He? But we keep trying in hope.

Sometimes we have this idea, that in order to get the rocket to go up, we need to fire the fuel for as long as possible. So we must pray long prayers repetitively, over and over again and eventually it will get through to Him. Or we feel that we have to raise our voice and really pray loud with great emotion, to get that rocket up to Heaven.

Have you seen people who pray like that?

Of course some people have the religious idea that you have to sit and mutter to yourself. And some people think that you are not even allowed to pray out loud. You must just pray in your mind, because God can read your mind and He knows.