How to pray when you're bored reading the Bible

You're four verses in and you've stopped reading. Your eyes are still going along the lines but you're thinking about something else — a message you need to send, something someone said yesterday, nothing important. You go back to the top of the paragraph and do it again and the same thing happens.

It isn't hard. It isn't upsetting. It's just dull. You'd rather be doing almost anything else, and the honest version is that you'd rather be on your phone, and you know that while you're sitting there with the book open.

So you finish the chapter because you said you would, and you get up, and you couldn't tell anyone what was in it. And what stays with you isn't the passage. It's that you were bored by it. That the word of God was in front of you and you wanted it to end.

Nobody says that out loud. You can admit to struggling. You can admit to being busy. You can't really admit that you find it boring.

Here's why that one doesn't get prayed.

Because it feels like the one thing you can't take to him. You could bring him a sin, or a fear, or a mess. But this is about him — about his own word not holding your attention — and telling him that seems like the insult itself. As if saying it out loud makes it worse.

So you decide it's a discipline problem. You'll get up earlier. You'll try a different translation, a different plan, a different time of day. All of which might help, and none of which touches the thing, because the thing isn't your schedule. It's that your heart is pointed somewhere else and you can't turn it round by deciding to.

And so the actual state you're in — bored by the thing you're meant to love — never gets said to anyone at all.

There's a stanza in the longest psalm in the Bible for exactly this. Psalm 119. The whole thing is written by a man who loved the Scriptures more than most people ever have. And in the middle of it, this.

Teach me, Yahweh, the way of your statutes. I will keep them to the end. Give me understanding, and I will keep your law. Yes, I will obey it with my whole heart. Direct me in the path of your commandments, for I delight in them. Turn my heart toward your statutes, not toward selfish gain. Turn my eyes away from looking at worthless things. Revive me in your ways. Fulfill your promise to your servant, that you may be feared. Take away my disgrace that I dread, for your ordinances are good. Behold, I long for your precepts! Revive me in your righteousness.

Look at what every single line is doing. Teach me. Give me. Direct me. Turn my heart. Turn my eyes. Fulfill. Take away. Revive me.

Eight verses, and every one of them is a thing he is asking God to do to him. Not one of them is a promise to try harder. This is a man who spent his life on the Scriptures, and when he sits down with them he asks God to make him able to want them.

That's the whole shape, and it's worth stopping on, because it's the opposite of how you've been handling this. You've been treating your boredom as something to fix by effort. He treats it as something to ask God for.

Then verse thirty-six. Turn my heart toward your statutes, not toward selfish gain.

Turn my heart. He is saying his heart points the wrong way by itself. He is not pretending otherwise, and he is not apologising for it either. He's telling God the direction it's facing and asking him to move it. You can pray that sentence this morning and it will be completely true of you.

And then verse thirty-seven, which is the one that will land. Turn my eyes away from looking at worthless things.

He had worthless things too. Whatever they were for him — they weren't in his hand with a screen on. But the man knew what it was to have his attention going somewhere thin while the good thing sat in front of him. That's in the book. Named, to God, as a thing he needs help with.

Now, one honest bit. Verse thirty-five says, for I delight in them. And you might not be able to say that today. You might read that line and think, well, that's him, that isn't me.

You don't have to be able to say verse thirty-five to say verse thirty-six. The asking is the part that's available to you. He can say he delights in them and still need his heart turned; you can be unable to say it and ask for the same turning. Same prayer.

And notice how he ends. Twice he says revive me. Which is a word for something that isn't currently alive. He isn't finishing in a better state than he started. He's finishing by asking, again.

So here's the one thing.

Before you read tomorrow, say one sentence out loud, with the book still shut.

God, I'm bored by this, and I'd rather be somewhere else. Turn my heart toward it. I can't.

Then open it and read, whether anything comes or not.

And if your own words won't come, use his. Verse thirty-six and thirty-seven. They were written down and kept so that people who couldn't say it themselves could borrow the words. Read them out and mean them at him.

You may be just as bored tomorrow. The psalm doesn't promise the feeling changes, and the man who wrote it was still asking to be revived at the end of the stanza. What's different is that the dullness has been said to him, out loud, instead of being managed quietly by you.

Turn my heart toward your statutes, not toward selfish gain. Turn my eyes away from looking at worthless things.

That's in the book. Said to God, by a man who loved it, and nobody corrects him for saying it.

Revive me in your ways.