Habakkuk wrote a prayer and he assumed that God’s people would use it in their worship; that it would be prayed again. If you say written prayers, I immediately think of dead prayers. There is just no spontaneity in it...And that can be the case, especially if you do not mean them when you say them. You have to be very careful with this. But you see, Habakkuk joins a whole tradition of prayers. What we are saying here is that people have prayed before you have prayed, and in the Scriptures especially they have recorded their prayers. So you have the prayer of Abraham the patriarch, in Genesis 18:1–33; and of Moses the mediator, in Exodus 32:1–35; and of Solomon the king, in 1 Kings 8:1–66; Elijah the prophet, later in the 1 Kings 8:1–66; Nehemiah the politician, in Nehemiah 1:1–11; and in Habakkuk 1:1–17, Habakkuk the prophet, and Jesus, the Saviour.

Folks have prayed prayers and they have written them down to be passed on and used as a part of a tradition. We have the whole book of Psalms, don’t we? There is a massive number of prayers in those Psalms. But we also have the epistles of the New Testament, Philippians 1:1–30, Colossians 1:1–29, where there are excerpts of the apostles' prayers. Why? They were intended for us to use. You might say I prefer to pray myself, just spontaneously and freely; I do not like to use written prayers. Well, there are times where you may be forced to use written prayers. And there is a value in prayers that other folks have had recorded and it is valuable for you to use them. In what sense? Well, there are times when you may be so overwhelmed and so confused that you cannot pray. Have a look at Romans 8:26 if you want to see a text for it. But if you have these prayers in the Scriptures, then you have prayers already written, that give you words to pray when you do not have words, and you cannot form your own petitions.

So you go to the Psalms, for example...and choose a psalm that is a prayer and a cry to God, and essentially begin and say, Lord, I just cannot pray. I ask that this be my prayer today. I am going to read it out loud from my Bible and these are my petitions.

If you do that, what kind of prayers will you be praying? Oh, you will be saying things like: why O Lord, do you stand far off; why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? Or you might be saying: how long, Oh Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? Or: I love you, Oh Lord, my strength! My God is my rock; in him I take refuge! Do not put down written prayers, especially the tradition of prayer in the Scriptures. You may need to pray these yourself because you will not have the words in your own difficulty.¹

Ralph Davis