A Practical Guide to Prayer

From http://www.str.org

Many Christians find prayer difficult. I do. Often my prayers seem rudderless and fairly quickly my thoughts wander off in other directions. So I've found this practical program for prayer helpful.

Martin Luther's barber asked him for some guidelines on prayer, so Luther wrote him a short booklet offering specific suggestions and exhortations. The entire guide is called A Simple Way to Pray. Here is a summary of Luther's pastoral advice to improve our prayer.

He counseled using the Lord's Prayer, the Psalms, and also the Ten Commandments and the Apostle's Creed as models and guidelines for how to structure our prayers and as a way to connect Christian teaching with our spiritual disciplines. He also gives plenty of examples of how to do this.
1. The Lord’s Prayer and the Psalms were tools which Luther considered most important for any Christian’s prayer life. “A Christian has prayed abundantly who has rightly prayed the Lord’s Prayer.” The Lord’s Prayer is the model prayer of Christianity and it is not essentially a prayer of one individual, but a common prayer that binds all Christians together, uniting us with all believers, past, present and future, whether in Heaven, or on earth, in a Biblical Kingdom focused prayer....
Luther didn't suggest repeating the Lord's Prayer, but using it as a model for petitions to bring before God, an outline of sorts.

2. Luther taught that praying the Psalms brings us: “into joyful harmony” with God’s Word and God’s Will. “Whoever begins to pray the Psalms earnestly and regularly will soon take leave of those other light and personal little devotional prayers and say, ‘Ah, there is not the juice, the strength, the passion, the fire which you find in the Psalms. Anything else tastes too cold and too hard.’”...

3. Luther warned: “I do not want you to recite all these words in your prayer. That would make it nothing but idle chatter and prattle. Rather do I want your heart to be stirred and guided concerning the thoughts, which ought to be comprehended, in The Lord’s Prayer. These thoughts may be expressed, if your heart is rightly warmed and inclined toward prayer, in many different ways than with more words or fewer.

4. Luther taught that in praying through The Ten Commandments “I think of each Command as first, instruction , which is really what it is intended to be and consider what the Lord demands of me so earnestly. Second, I turn it into a thanksgiving; third a confession ; and fourth a prayer .”

5. In his preface to the “Larger Catechism,” Luther wrote: “We know that our defence lies in prayer. We are too weak to resist the devil and his vassels. Let us hold fast to the weapons of the Christian; they enable us to combat the devil… our enemies may mock at us. But we shall oppose both men and the devil if we maintain ourselves in prayer and if we persist in it.”

6. Luther taught the importance of Spiritual disciplines, including solitude, silence, listening, meditation, journaling, praying and obeying.