How to Pray in Times of Trouble

God Hears and Understands

One of my favorite promises in the Bible is this: When we cannot articulate our prayer requests to God, when all we can do is groan about our circumstances, the Holy Spirit understands our groanings and translates them into intelligible prayers that God the Father can understand and will answer in the name of God the Son.

One of the things we should do when we’re in trouble is just pray as well as we can and even when we can’t pray very well, God understands that and will answer our prayers a lot better than we can pray them.

Another thing we can do when we’re in trouble is ask other people to pray for us. It’s such a blessing to just share the burdens and troubles that you have and then have a thoughtful, wise, mature, caring friend then turn those into the prayers that seem wise to them. I absolutely trust the promise of God that the prayer of a righteous person is powerful as it is working, and I’ve experienced that in my own life.

So, pray as well as you can when you’re in trouble and ask other people to pray as much as they can—that’s the best thing to do.

Philip Graham Ryken (DPhil, University of Oxford) is the eighth president of Wheaton College. He preached at Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church from 1995 until his appointment at Wheaton in 2010. Ryken has published more than fifty books, including When Trouble Comes and expository commentaries on Exodus, Ecclesiastes, and Jeremiah. He serves as a board member for the Gospel Coalition and the Lausanne Movement.