He Prayed for a City Out of a Book He Was Reading

Somebody asked me once, honestly and without embarrassment, what a person is supposed to actually say.

He had heard the encouragement to pray for something bigger than himself. He agreed with it. He had tried it twice. And both times he had got about eleven words in and run completely out.

He said: I can pray for my mother's hip for four minutes because I know what I want. I do not know what I want for a country. I do not even know what I would ask for.

That is not a small problem and I do not think it is a spiritual one. It is a vocabulary problem, and there is a man in Scripture who solved it in the most ordinary way available, which is that he read something and prayed it back.

What set him off was arithmetic

Daniel is an old man in a foreign administration. He has been in that empire since he was a boy. And the ninth chapter opens with him reading.

In the first year of his reign I Daniel understood by books the number of the years, whereof the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah the prophet, that he would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem. (Daniel 9:2, King James Version)

Understood by books. He was reading Jeremiah, he found a number, and he did the arithmetic on his own situation.

For thus saith the LORD, That after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place. (Jeremiah 29:10)

Now watch what he does with that, because it is the opposite of what most of us would do. He has just discovered that God has promised it. And he does not conclude that the matter is settled and no prayer is needed. He sets his face to pray.

You have not been given a promise as a substitute for asking, and Daniel treated one as the reason to start rather than the reason to stop, and Daniel 9 puts the reading and the praying in the same paragraph, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a text a person has read into something they can say.

The prayer is almost all quotation

Read the prayer itself and something becomes obvious very quickly. It is stitched together out of older Scripture.

The language of the covenant and the mercy comes from Deuteronomy. The confession echoes Leviticus. The appeal to God's name and reputation comes out of the Exodus story where Moses argues the same way. Almost every phrase in it has a home somewhere else.

And it ends with a short burst that has nothing clever in it at all.

O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord, hearken and do; defer not, for thine own sake, O my God: for thy city and thy people are called by thy name. (Daniel 9:19)

Six imperatives and one reason, and the reason is not that the people deserve it. The reason given is God's own name.

You have a way of praying for something enormous that does not require you to invent anything, and Daniel 9 is a worked example of a man praying almost entirely in borrowed sentences. The same Spirit is the one who wrote the sentences a person is borrowing.

Nehemiah does the same thing a century later, and he says so out loud in the middle of his own prayer.

Remember, I beseech thee, the word that thou commandedst thy servant Moses. (Nehemiah 1:8)

Remember the word. He is not informing God. He is standing on something already said, which is what a person does when they have run out of their own material.

Why borrowing is not cheating

There is an objection worth answering, because thoughtful people feel it.

If I am praying somebody else's sentences, am I praying at all, or am I reciting?

Two answers. The first is that this is exactly how a person learns any language. Nobody invents their first sentences. A child says what they have heard until the words become theirs, and there is a point in the middle where it is both.

The second answer is more important. The words a person is borrowing here are not somebody else's opinions about God. They are what God has said about Himself and about what He intends, which means praying them back is not flattery and it is not a technique. It is agreement.

You have been handed His own wording to use, and that was done on purpose rather than as a convenience for the inarticulate (Isaiah 62:6), and the Spirit is the one who breathed those sentences before anybody thought to borrow them.

You are agreeing with something already spoken rather than persuading somebody reluctant, and Daniel 9:19 asks for God's sake rather than for the people's, and it is the Spirit who makes agreement out of what would otherwise be recitation.

I will add one honest guardrail. This does not turn a text into a lever. Nothing in this makes God obliged, and Daniel does not talk that way at any point. He confesses at length, he claims nothing on merit, and he asks. The praying is confident about God and makes no claim at all about the one praying.

I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, which shall never hold their peace day nor night: ye that make mention of the LORD, keep not silence. (Isaiah 62:6)

Keep not silence. That is an instruction to people whose whole assignment is to keep saying it.