In a previous post, using Paul’s example of prayer in Philippians 1, we saw how we should not be afraid of praying vague prayers. Meaning, we shouldn’t feel that all our prayers need to be about specific persons or specific situations. The biblical writers and apostles prayed for overarching Christians realities (such as more love, trust, knowledge, grace, perseverance, righteousness), and then trusted that God would specifically answer the prayers as he saw fit.
In this post, I want to elaborate some on that idea. As I was meditating on the thought of vague and specific prayers, I started to see that there’s a spectrum we all fall into in our prayers. And I think that many of us frequently end up too far on either end of the spectrum. And although, as we’ll see, this not “wrong,” doing so may prove hurtful to us praying more consistently.
The Specific End of the Spectrum
On the specific end of the prayer spectrum is mainly praying extremely specific prayers. This is where we primarily pray for specific people and specific circumstances. Is praying like this a bad thing? Not at all! It’s biblical and can bolsters our faith in God as we pray for specifics and look for specific answers.
Yet as good as specific prayers like this can be, as we saw in the previous post, this is not the only way to pray, nor do we need to think that less specific prayers will have less specific answers. God may decide to display a specific answer to a specific prayer (as he often does to prove his faithfulness and fuel our trust in him). But he may also answer specifically our broader prayers, even if we don’t see how or when he does so.
As for who usually ends up on this side of the spectrum, it seems that once we as Christians become strong in our faith, we usually lean more towards mainly praying specific prayers like this. Why? Because we start praying for people who request prayers, and we begin keeping prayer lists, praying for specific things in our lives and others’.
Again, this is a very good thing, but it also might lead us to go so far that we never pray prayers for general love, good works, righteousness, and humility, because we subtly believe God won’t specifically answer them (even though we know he’s big enough to do so).
The Vague End of the Spectrum
The other end of the prayer spectrum is primarily praying extremely vague prayers. We’ve all prayed some examples of these: “God be with [insert name],” “God bless [insert name].” These type of prayers have very little specific content at all, except maybe a name and a situation.
But here’s the really ironic part about these extremely vague prayers: It’s oftentimes those who pray mainly specifically that, when they don’t have something specific, pray these vaguest prayers. We’ve all experienced this. We swing on the spectrum, because without having specifics—and usually specific situations or illnesses—our prayers become very vague. We start praying over and over that God would “be with” other people, or that God would “bless” me. When we often resort to this type of vagueness, we show we haven’t developed the habit to pray for general Christian ideals—like love, joy, peace, righteousness—like the biblical authors do.
The same specific-then-vague swing often occurs in church prayer meetings. In a church meeting we’ll pray through a list (often specifically for situations or illnesses). But then for everyone else it’s often a vague “God be with…” or “God bless…”
Now, are these bad prayers? Absolutely not. God hears and answers them. But once again, perhaps we’re missing the biblical middle ground—a place on this vague-specific spectrum where we’d do well to live more often in our prayers.
More Praying in the Middle
What, then, does this biblical middle ground on the prayer spectrum look like? To be clear, I think we should feel more than comfortable praying vague prayers (God still hears and answers our “God-be-with” prayers), and we certainly must keep praying for specifics. But we must also feel free—more so, empowered—to pray in the middle of the spectrum: praying prayers for general Christian ideals for ourselves and others. This is a recurring biblical model and middle ground on the prayer spectrum where we’d do well to petition more frequently.
This isn’t easy at first, however. Unfortunately, doesn’t it sort of seem strange, at least in our current Christian culture, if you or I were to pick a person on our prayer list and start praying for something like righteousness? Or if we were to pray that they may develop Christian fruit, or generally that they may abound in love? But ask yourself: Why is that middle-ground type of prayer strange to us? It’s strange only because we often live on the extremes of the vague-specific prayer spectrum. We think that we should either pray for specific things to be done in their life, or we just resort to a general “God-be-with” prayer.
But the middle-ground type prayer should excite us. With this biblical model of prayer, we can pray for massive, important Christian virtues and ideals for ourselves, for our fellow brothers and sisters, and for the Christian church at large, and then we can trust God to answer them. We can pray for our culture and our neighbors in overarching ways, and then trust God to answer. We can pray generally for the gospel to spread, into people groups and nations (using books like Operation World), and then believe that God will answer our prayers for the missionaries and untold millions in his own specific way.
Praying like this will not only bear much fruit, but as an added bonus, it will also make prayer more attainable. We won’t have to always pray list-specifics, nor will we resort to praying the same phrase. We’ll have an abundance of middle-ground biblical ideals and virtues and goals and gospel-advancements to pray for, and then we’ll confidently trust our big God to answer them as he sees fit.
Therefore, let’s not only not be afraid to pray vague prayers. Let’s also pray more frequently in the middle of the vague-prayer spectrum.
