I don’t learn about you, but one among the things that captures my heart concerning the TV series The Chosen is the straightforward morning and evening prayers Jesus and his disciples offer consistently.
In the morning, they are saying something along the lines of, “Thank you, living and enduring King, for you may have mercifully restored my soul inside me. Great is your faithfulness.” And once they prepare for sleep, they provide something like, “Blessed are you, Lord our God and King of the Universe, who brings sleep to my eyes and slumber to my eyelids. May it’s your will, O Lord and God of my ancestors, that I lie down in peace and arise in peace.”
Both are traditional Jewish prayers—a variation of the Modeh Ani within the morning and the Shema within the evening—and remind me a little bit of the straightforward prayer I used to be taught to wish as a bit of girl: “Now I lay me all the way down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to maintain, may angels watch me within the night, and keep me in thy blessed sight. Amen.”
The beautiful thing about authentic Christianity is there isn’t any single perfectly correct method to pray. We know the Lord urges us to “rejoice at all times, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for that is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 NIV), and prayer can look different for everybody.
Still, some mornings and nights are harder than others. Perhaps we’re grieving, depressed, or exhausted, and praying feels incredibly hard. Or perhaps we crave a bit of guidance on what to say as we discover our own unique manner of authentic prayer.
If that’s what you’re looking for, I offer a group of 4 morning and 4 evening prayers to aid you in your personal journey.
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