Talking Prayer with Jon Dillon, The Two Trees Podcast
Biblical prayer is a God-shaped practice as taught in the Lord’s Prayer, where the primary purpose is not persuading God to act but allowing him to transform the one who prays. True prayer begins with adoration, hallowing God’s name by beholding his holiness through Scripture, song, and thoughtful words that shape both private and corporate worship. Confession follows as specific, situational honesty that leads to sanctification and real change, moving naturally into thanksgiving for the gospel—Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and reign—through which all other blessings flow. Supplication is framed as daily reliance on God’s provision, training the heart to trust him with necessities so that when greater trials come, faith endures. Whether asking for bread, interceding for others, or seeking strength in hardship, prayer is shown to be less about securing outcomes and more about communion with God, forming believers into the likeness of Christ.
Transcript:
Jon Dillon: Hello my friends and welcome to the Two Trees Podcast. I am Jon Dillon, and I am without my usual friends. Martin is at work and I don’t know where Rose is, but I am in the bunker recording with my friend Anthony Delgado from the far side of the country. Anthony, welcome to the Two Trees Podcast.
Anthony Delgado: Thank you for having me, Jon. Glad to be on again. It is always fun to talk with you, brother. I think you bring an intellectual view and a pastor’s heart, and that is a good combination. But not just for chatter—I think the reason I want to talk to you today is because you have gifted the church another book. You’re on a roll.
Anthony Delgado: I love to write, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say there’s already another in the works. But I really want to write something useful for the church at large.
Jon Dillon: I found this one particularly helpful. Not that The Watchers and the Holy Ones isn’t—it just piques my interest to talk about the esoteric and high theology and those kinds of things. And The Gospel is Bigger Than You Think was a massive topic, and you did a great job with it.
But in this book you really zero in, and you have written God-Shaped Prayer, which as a pastor I found super refreshing. You are dealing with incredibly practical comments and topics, while also giving great background and information. The way you laid the book out I found super helpful. But my friend, why did you choose the name God-Shaped Prayer? What’s going on there?
Why God-Shaped Prayer?
Anthony Delgado: At the end of the day, one of the things we deal with in ministry is always wanting to make prayer central. We pray as we prepare for a service. We pray as we prepare to write a sermon. We teach our congregations how to pray. But I find, as I talk with people, that not everybody is clear on why we pray. Many would just say, “Of course Christians pray, because that’s what we see in the Bible, and that’s what the church has always done.”
I wanted to take a biblical-theological look at it, and at times a bit of a systematic approach too. Going to the source material—Jesus and the Lord’s Prayer—that’s central. I wanted to ask: what is prayer about? Why are we doing this? What I found is that prayer is very much about what it does in us and to us as much as it is about communion with God.
Probably one of the less significant aspects of prayer is actually asking. We treat prayer as if it is only asking. Somebody has something going on in their life or some kind of need and we say, “Have you prayed about it?” We use the word pray to mean asking, and etymologically the word really does mean to ask. But as we approach prayer in the Bible, we see that God gives a lot of instruction on it. Jesus, specifically in the Lord’s Prayer, gives very poignant instruction that is dense with theology and points us to different parts of the biblical narrative so that we understand why we are praying.
At the end of the day, I believe prayer is first and foremost about how God is changing us. The reason I chose God-Shaped Prayer for the title is that I want to talk about how our prayers are shaped by God. I should point to some of the ambiguity in that wording. It’s not that our prayer is shaped like God, but that God is the one who dictates how our prayer functions.
If you look at the landscape of Christian denominations right now, you see many different patterns and ideas about what prayer should look like. I think it’s not a free-for-all. It’s probably best that we ask the Scriptures, ask God himself, how he would form our prayers so that through them he can form us as individuals, form us as churches, and form our relationship with him. That’s really what the title is about.
Wrestling with God in Prayer
Jon Dillon: I really love that concept, and it speaks to my background growing up. I always viewed prayer as wrestling with God. I had an idea, and I wanted him to do it—like, this person is sick, how do I unlock healing for that person? I viewed prayer as a way to force God into acting.
What happened was I ended up with a view that God was distant and recalcitrant, that he wasn’t going to be helpful unless I convinced him to be helpful. As I grew in my faith, I realized this was unhealthy and didn’t resemble the prayer offered in the Bible.
Years ago, I read C. S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm. He talks about using the Lord’s Prayer, and it revolutionized the way I view prayer. I began to see it as a pathway to being with God, not just giving him a list of things I wanted him to change.
Your opening chapter in this book talks about adoration and adoring God. Each chapter starts with a section of teaching and then moves into how to pray with adoration, or how to pray with supplication. I thought that was super helpful. But here you also talk about something I emphasize at our church: using Scripture in prayer. The idea of reading a Bible verse—like Psalm 145, or Isaiah 6, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is filled with his glory”—and then letting your mind rest on that and talking with God about it. So, could you teach us how to adore God in prayer?
Hallowing God’s Name
Anthony Delgado: Absolutely. The Lord’s Prayer begins, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” I’ve spent a lot of time pondering what it means to hallow God’s name. That’s not verbiage we normally use, and different translations of the Bible render it in ways that try to make it clearer. But those don’t usually get to the heart of the meaning.
The word hallowed is related to holy. Yet we’re not asking God to become more holy—he is already completely holy in every sense. To hallow God’s name is more like praying, “May I behold you as holy in my own heart and in my witness to the world.”
If that’s the case, then I need to know who God is. It becomes an exercise in exploring the attributes and character of God. When we pray “hallowed be your name,” we should understand what is being prayed so it inspires us to pray these kinds of prayers contextually—shaped by our experience of God, the testimony of other Christians in Scripture, and our walk with him. The way we hallow God’s name is by adoring him.
That’s why the first chapter is titled Adoration and subtitled God-Centered Prayer. The idea is that we look to who God is.
Scripture and Adoration
Anthony Delgado: There are many ways we do this, but central among them is through understanding the Scriptures. Not every Christian will grasp the Bible at a “Two Trees Podcast” level when they read it. But as we listen to pastors, teaching elders, and read great books about who God is and what he’s doing in the world, then when we open the Word ourselves we begin to see those truths reflected. The Scriptures remind us of who God is, and that should move us to adoration—even in private prayer.
I remember hearing preachers often say that our daily routine should begin with prayer and Scripture reading. Many encourage putting Scripture first, because it moves your heart to adore who God is. You begin to see his character, his righteous judgment, and his majesty. Looking at Scripture becomes a very practical way to approach God in prayer, and it probably should be the first step.
Knowing Who God Is
Anthony Delgado: If we think about prayer as asking—what I call supplication in the book—then we must ask: who even is this God we are asking? Pagan religions, both ancient and modern, don’t worship a deity who is both almighty and personal. Instead, there’s blind hopefulness that maybe the god is powerful enough to respond, or prayer becomes like magic—saying the right words so the deity is compelled to act. Or the deity is treated like a stubborn genie who must be convinced.
If we don’t know who God is rightly, we might think fervency in prayer is what convinces him to act. But what we actually have is an almighty, all-powerful, sovereign God who presents himself to us as our Father. He is in heaven—transcendent, wholly other, the Creator of all things who exists beyond, before, and apart from them. Yet on every page of Scripture, he steps into creation, personally interacting with it.
He is not a deistic God who wound up the world and left it. He steps into the grand narrative of redemptive history to interact with us as his children.
If that is who God is, then I have a God who both cares enough to answer my prayers and is powerful enough to answer them. He is sovereign to command prayer and sovereign to answer in ways that I, in my limited and sinful self, might not foresee as best. Understanding who God is shapes how we understand prayer. That is why we begin with adoration—so that we recognize who he is.
Scripture and Prayer Together
Jon Dillon: There are a couple of things about adoration that have revolutionized the way I experience prayer. The first has to do with Bible reading. It shifted from, “Alright, I now know a truth about the Bible,” to, “This is a place where I am meeting God and calling out his glory.”
I might read about the plagues of Egypt, something that happened to David, or Peter being freed from prison in the New Testament, and I want to join in praising God about those things. For a long time, I treated prayer and Scripture reading as though they were separate. But when I am in a healthy frame of mind and praying out of my Scripture reading, the two stop being different. They become natural extensions of one another.
In your book, you lay out several patterns or characteristics of God. As I read, I found myself going through those passages and praying them—letting them be the script for how I was speaking to God. I also took time to be quiet and listen, reaching out to God. As someone who stinks at small talk, even with God, I found it freeing and helpful. It gave me something worth talking about, something I was excited about.
It moved prayer from being passive into being active. I wasn’t just handing God a list of sick people, as if he didn’t already know, but participating in the story and in the worship taking place. In our culture, we’ve divided these things into three distinct categories: prayer, teaching, and singing. Teaching is where we hear the Word, singing is where we put prayers to music, and prayer itself becomes its own category. But as I read your book, I kept sensing the implication that these are all the same thing—different expressions of reaching out to God.
Prayer, Song, and Word
Anthony Delgado: Yes, and in fact those are the three things I intentionally brought together. I don’t think it’s an accident that what we do in our liturgy at church—if listeners don’t like the word liturgy, call it your order of worship—is exactly that. We go to the Word through preaching, we go to song through singing, and we go to prayer through praying.
We do those three things every week. But especially in contemporary evangelical churches—and I say this as someone who pastors one—we have a tendency to separate them. Yet what we do in our services is supposed to train us for what we do in our private life.
Back to the practical—let me give an example from the book. I recommended three ways of thinking about God: his attributes, songs, and Scriptures. I give a list of God’s attributes—not exhaustive, since not all lists are the same, but the common ones. For example, one attribute I highlight is God’s immutability.
God’s Immutability in Practice
Anthony Delgado: This is also how I construct our church’s liturgy. I take an attribute, then pair it with a song and a Scripture. For immutability, I turn to Malachi 3:6: “For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.” That verse shows us that we are protected because God doesn’t change. He is immutable—unable to change.
Then I think of a song. My heart goes to Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise. So in liturgy we have a prayer based on God’s unchanging nature, paired with a Scripture to read and a hymn to sing. It becomes a point of worship. But we can do the same in our private prayer lives. If we are willing to be thoughtful, even planning a bit like we do for church services, then we can structure our prayers this way.
In the chapter I provide lists of attributes, pointing readers to Scriptures and songs so these can inform prayer. Let me read an example prayer connected to immutability, Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise, and Malachi 3:6.
Example Prayer
Anthony Delgado: I wrote this as an example of what you can pray:
“You can pray, Yahweh God, Lord God unchanging, I am your child through Christ, and you are my Father in heaven. I adore you for your unchanging nature. We as humans blossom and flourish like leaves on a tree, then wither and perish, but you never change because you are consistent. I, your child, will not be consumed. That is your promise in Malachi 3:6.”
So we can adore God in a practical way, in a way that points us to who we are before him as his children.
Written Prayers and Hymns
Jon Dillon: I love it. For me, it was a missing piece. I grew up in a very conservative, traditional evangelical framework, and we didn’t do written prayers. That was taboo. But we were all about the hymns. Then I began to realize—these are written prayers, and we’re praying them with music.
I saw that I didn’t have to compose every prayer originally. I could rest in the words, think about them, and read them to God. My mind would then be drawn into other passages or thoughts. I’ve seen artists add drawing or sketching, and poets add writing. There are so many ways to incorporate this. But the whole premise is not ticking off a box—it’s reaching out to God.
I loved this chapter. You sent the chapters out for people to read, and I read a later one. But after I read this, I thought, “Oh man, this is the one I wanted,” though someone else got it. That’s okay. There’s so much to meditate on here. As a pastor, what advice would you give to someone whose church doesn’t think this way, who doesn’t hear the word liturgy, or isn’t sure how to start?
Advice for Getting Started
Anthony Delgado: In the conclusion of the book, I give some of that advice, and it’s basically twofold. First, don’t be afraid of scripted prayers. Use the examples in the book, use the Lord’s Prayer, and bring them into your prayer life. Just don’t treat them as magic words. See them as tools to form your voice for praying more profoundly.
Second, even if your church doesn’t use a formal liturgy, you can still practice adoration. Pay attention to any Scriptures that are read. Pay attention to the wording of the songs. Now, that one can be tricky—people often say songwriters today aren’t theologians, and I’m not sure they always were. Some certainly were. But pay attention to whether the songs reflect Scripture and exalt God. That will point your heart toward him. Even in a church without an intentional liturgy, you are still singing songs that exalt Christ. You can bring that language into your own prayer life.
Capturing Lines and Thoughts
Jon Dillon: I agree. Write them down when you hear a great line. Put it in a notebook and treasure it. When a song pops into your head—whether from church, the radio, or something you downloaded—make it a practical step to capture it and return to it.
I think of written prayers more like a road I’m going down than the prayer itself. They guide my thoughts and move me in a direction.
Using Written Prayers Practically
Anthony Delgado: Sometimes when I’m praying through written prayers, I even use my own examples from the book. On mornings when my brain feels like mashed potatoes but I still want to pray, I’ll use one of those written prayers.
I often find that praying a single line inspires my own thoughts. It doesn’t have to stay formal. If you had something important to ask your earthly father, you might write a note card to keep yourself on task. That doesn’t make it less profound—it makes it more profound, because you took time to prepare.
Most of us are not proponents of spontaneous preaching. We believe the Holy Spirit works in preparation and study. In the same way, the Holy Spirit is at work when you prepare to approach your Father in heaven.
A Needed Correction
Jon Dillon: If I could put that in bold print, I would. That’s a huge misunderstanding people are stuck in. They feel like, “I didn’t have a great speech for God today, so this wasn’t a good prayer.” Or, “I didn’t feel an emotion, so it didn’t count.”
The step of adoration is my favorite. It changed my approach to prayer when I discovered it in C. S. Lewis, then again in my own studies, and now through your writing. The prayers and guided meditations in this book are stellar. You need this book—it will be helpful to your prayer life. And it’s not a big book. Was it difficult to put all your thoughts on prayer into just about a hundred pages? I feel like you could have gone on for ten or twelve times that long.
How the Book Came Together
Anthony Delgado: Yes, it was challenging, especially because of how the book came together. The book was inspired by three sermons I preached on the Lord’s Prayer. In those sermons I talked a lot about our church’s liturgy, because our church is aware of it. I wanted to show how corporate spirituality trains personal spirituality.
I began with the sermon transcripts and broke them into four main chapters. Then I edited and re-edited. This could have been a very long book, but just as those sermons were meant to be practical and helpful, I wanted the book to be practical and helpful. A lot of the theological content was moved to the end of each chapter in short systematic theology sections—three to five paragraphs each. I wanted to give theological thinkers somewhere to go, but keep the main content accessible and practical.
When I did the final edit, I asked: on every page, is there something practical here? If not, is this necessary to the agenda of the book? That’s how I kept it to about 126 pages. I wanted it to be accessible so almost anyone could read it.
Keeping It Accessible
Jon Dillon: I think it was important to keep it short. Sometimes there are books I really love, but when I hand them to someone, their eyes bulge—“I don’t have five years to read this.” But your book is approachable. It’s fast-moving, on point, and has no fluff.
This is the kind of book that keeps you steadily moving on a thought without chasing rabbit trails. It’s well designed and laid out. You mentioned it’s broken into four parts. The first is adoration. The next is confession. Now, confession is a word that stirs up Catholic and Protestant feelings. As our nation struggles with its past and present, when you call us to confession, what are you doing? What is the takeaway here?
The Role of Confession
Anthony Delgado: As a Protestant, I still consider all authentic Christians—Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant—to be followers of Christ. I don’t think confession to a priest is necessarily wrong. In fact, Scripture says to bring our sins to our elders so they can pray for us, because the prayer of a righteous person accomplishes much.
Even though I don’t call myself a priest, I do think if someone is really struggling with sin, they should go to their pastors so they can pray for them. That prayer may also lead to advice and Scriptural direction.
Confession is dangerous, though. Earlier I said the primary purpose of prayer is that who God is changes who I am. Confession is central to that. If any part of prayer sanctifies and alters who I am, it’s confession. It takes humility. We don’t need to be morose, but we do need to pray specifically about our struggles.
It’s not enough to say, “Lord, forgive me my sins.” Even saying, “Forgive me for being lustful,” is still too general. If we really want to be changed, we need to ask God for victory in specific situations. If you constantly fall into sin at work, name the pattern: “Every time I see this person, rage fills me, and I say hurtful things. Lord, forgive me, and change me.”
That type of confession changes us more than vague prayers. When we pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors, and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil,” we are confessing that we want to endure trials and be delivered from the evil one. He would deceive us into thinking our anger, lust, greed, or passions of the flesh are justified. But we want to come out holy on the other side of that prayer.
That’s what Jesus models in the Lord’s Prayer. We can’t escape it. Prayer is not just about free grace and forgiveness. Jesus didn’t die only to forgive us—he died so that we might be changed, radically conformed into the likeness of Christ. And confession, if done well, is central to that.
Confessing Weakness
Jon Dillon: I like that concept of not just confessing, “I messed up here,” but sometimes confessing inadequacy: “God, I’m struggling. I don’t feel up to this.” Confession is acknowledging truth in order to draw closer to God. It isn’t about beating ourselves up.
As someone who has struggled with depression my whole life, this part comes naturally to me. I can list the things wrong with me for days. I sometimes go to God that way. But what I struggle with is moving beyond the acknowledgement of my flaws into actual praise of God—communion with him that pulls me beyond sin, failure, and struggle.
Transformation Through Confession
Anthony Delgado: I appreciate you being vulnerable about that. You’ve mentioned it on the podcast before, and it’s so real. I think it resonates with more people than we like to admit. That’s exactly it—if you’re praying only for forgiveness and not acknowledging God’s promises, then you’re missing that he intends, by his Spirit and by the renewal of your mind, to transform you.
I use this illustration in the book: think of Adam and Eve in the garden. When Eve picked the fruit and the serpent said, “You can be like God, knowing good and evil,” what if Adam had stepped in? The text says he was right there with her. What if he had protected his wife, taken the fruit, thrown it down, and cast the serpent out? That’s the story I want to tell.
Now, that’s not how it happened, but imagine if it had. You would still be Jon Dillon, and our listeners would still be who they are—but they would be the righteous, holy versions of themselves. When we pray prayers of confession, we’re saying, “God, I am not who I should be.” But we’re also recognizing that we can be who we should be, and we’re looking forward to being transformed.
That’s why we pray confession daily and regularly. We want victory over sin. Not just forgiveness, but victory. We want to conquer, endure, and become more Christlike. So we ask the Holy Spirit to change and transform us as we look forward with hope.
Confession as Hope
Jon Dillon: That’s the word—hope. It’s a longing. Confession isn’t just acknowledging a flaw; it’s pushing past it. It’s saying, “I give this to you, God. I lay this down. I’m moving beyond it.”
It’s like taking a shower. I don’t want to sit and think about all the mud that was on me from working outside. I let it go. The whole point is moving beyond it. That was a helpful emphasis you brought out in this chapter—confession isn’t limited to what we were trained to think. It’s deeper.
And to our listeners, if you struggle with this, this book will help you. There’s tremendous beauty here, and it comes from the heart of a pastor. It’s worth a spot on your shelf.
But before I confess all my sins, I want to move to the opposite of confession: thanksgiving. Do you struggle in prayer with changing gears from one element to another? Do you stall out like a teenager learning to drive a stick shift, or are you able to move seamlessly into thanksgiving?
Moving From Confession to Thanksgiving
Anthony Delgado: What’s funny about that is when I was training people for our church’s liturgy, I struggled with this. I don’t personally lead our liturgy—I coordinate it on the back end. Members of our church lead it, and almost everyone writes their prayers. I never asked them to, but they do. They receive a Scripture and a song, and then they write the prayer to go with it.
During confession time, I tried to get people to leave thanksgiving for later—for the Eucharist, when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. That’s when I wanted us to talk about redemption, forgiveness, and transformation. But I couldn’t get them to separate the two. Eventually, I stopped asking. And I realized they were right.
When they confessed, they were so moved by God’s grace that they naturally shifted into praising him for forgiveness and transformation. So I don’t struggle with the transition. I think if we truly understand our sinfulness and the hope of who we’re becoming, thanksgiving naturally follows confession.
The Center of Thanksgiving
Anthony Delgado: I should clarify something. When I say thanksgiving, secondarily I mean giving thanks for things in daily life. That’s how I was taught to pray—write down what you want or need in a journal, then later note when God answers, and thank him for it. That’s a beautiful practice, and it trains us to see God’s hand in everyday life.
But primarily, thanksgiving is rooted in the gospel. God answering daily prayers is profound only because he first did the greatest work of all: sending his Son. Jesus lived a perfect life, died on our behalf as propitiation and expiation for our sins, rose from the dead, ascended to the Father’s right hand, and reigns as King until he returns to consummate his kingdom.
That’s the gospel. That’s what stands front and center when we come to thanksgiving. And if that is central, then moving from acknowledging sin to rejoicing in who we will be in Christ’s kingdom is natural. That’s what I hope comes through clearly in the chapter.
From Confession to Thanksgiving
Jon Dillon: It does. That’s what I was hoping you’d say—that on paper, it looks like, “Okay, clear division, next chapter, now onto thanksgiving.” But in practice, it’s different. Go confess your sins and try not to praise God afterward. It’s hard. For someone truly reaching out to God and acknowledging sin, thanksgiving flows naturally.
Anthony Delgado: Exactly. To divide the two, you’d almost need a broken view of the gospel. You’d have to not believe that Jesus rescues you in order to create that separation.
Jon Dillon: To me, that’s evidence of who you’re talking to. I’m not talking to myself about myself—I’m talking to God, the one who bore my sins on the cross. I acknowledge my sins, but I also hope and long for redemption. On paper, it looks like a checklist: one, two, three, four. But in practice, it’s natural. Confession pulls you into thanksgiving. The Spirit of God stirs you into those moments.
And if you’re reading Scripture along with prayer, the stories bolster what you’re doing. You might be in Paul’s letters, or in the story of Moses in the wilderness, and those things shape your prayers. You’re in the text, reaching out to God. Prayer becomes so much more than convincing God to act—which, I’m afraid, is how we’ve cheapened it. Prayer is bigger than you think, to borrow a line from another book of yours.
Do you still make a practice of writing down answers to prayer?
Recording Answers to Prayer
Anthony Delgado: Not so much anymore. I found I never looked back at what I wrote. So I haven’t kept that practice of recording answered prayers.
But I have developed a different practice, shaped by Paul’s words to “pray without ceasing.” I try to thank God in the moment when a prayer is answered. I remind myself that the Holy Spirit is in me, and therefore Christ is with me. Through him I have access to the Father every moment of every day.
So whether I wake up in the middle of the night from a strange dream, or walk through my day and see something beautiful, or notice an answer to prayer, I immediately turn to God. He is with me. That has become the better rhythm for my prayer life.
Many people tell me they struggle to sense God’s presence. They know it’s true theologically but don’t always feel it. If that’s you, then keeping a prayer journal becomes very important.
Prayer as Battle
Jon Dillon: I think I’d fall into that category. My depression and anxiety give Satan leverage—he can whip me around. It takes purposeful effort to claim the truth and proclaim it over my life. I use the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23 almost as a call to battle: “I will not fear death. I will not fear this.”
Whether I feel God’s presence or not, I reach for him. And that leads to the next part of prayer—supplication. As we thank him for what he has done, we also bring requests to him. We live in a broken world.
Is there a role for supplication? Do I have to convince God to heal sick people? How do you see the function of prayer when it comes to asking God for something?
Supplication: Asking According to God’s Will
Anthony Delgado: Back in Matthew 6, Jesus told us to pray, “Your will be done.” He modeled that in Gethsemane, when he asked the Father to take away the cup of wrath—“if it is your will.” And he added, “Not my will be done, but yours.”
Jesus himself had to wrestle with this. So when he tells us to pray within God’s will, the promise is that when we pray in God’s will, it will be done. That raises theological questions. If I don’t pray, does God still do his will? And if he does, why pray at all? The answer goes back to the purpose of prayer: it’s more about God transforming us through communion with him than about getting him to do what he was already going to do.
Take this illustration. My oldest daughter is in college, and I help with tuition. One day a tuition payment was due, and there was something strange about it. I already knew, because I get the emails from the college. My daughter came to me and said, “What are we going to do?” She explained how much she could pay and asked about the rest. I told her, “That’s okay, I already got the email. I’ve got it under control. Here’s how we’re going to handle it.”
I was going to handle it whether she asked or not. She could have just trusted. But by coming to me, she felt reassured—we were on the same page. That’s what happens when we pray. For example, I might pray, “Lord, I’m so sick of my car breaking down. Please provide a new car so I can get to work.” The next day, my car might completely break down, with no new car in sight, and now I’m riding a bike to work. If I pray, “Your will be done,” I learn to accept, “This is what God thinks is best for me.”
Jesus also teaches us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” The key word is daily. That is hard for us in the modern world. We plan around monthly paychecks, mortgages, and budgets, so it feels like we are providing for ourselves. We forget that all things are God’s gift. When we treat prayer only as special requests outside our control, we miss the point.
Bread in the prayer represents the bare necessities of life. Every meal, every mortgage payment, every tank of gas—these are good and perfect gifts from God. By praying for daily bread, we train ourselves in daily reliance on him. That prepares us for bigger moments. When a cancer diagnosis comes, when tragedy strikes—if we haven’t trained ourselves to walk faithfully in daily supplication, we’ll be unprepared and hopeless.
So no, it isn’t wrong to pray for a new car. It might be selfish to pray for a Maserati, but not for a Honda Civic. Still, the heart of supplication is training ourselves to trust God with daily survival and necessities. That sanctifies us and prepares us to persevere when the real trials of life come.
Supplication and the Body of Christ
Jon Dillon: I think supplication also pulls me out of myself. It’s a way of standing with my brothers and sisters. I’m not the only one with needs. Praying for the sick, the unemployed, or the searching helps me rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.
As I read your book, I loved how organized it was, but also how you emphasized that this isn’t a manual. It’s practice. Don’t get stuck in one part—keep moving, keep praying. You mentioned earlier “pray without ceasing.” Toward the end of the book, you bring up the Jesus Prayer, which has been powerful for me.
I pray a version that says, “Jesus, Savior, friend of sinners, have mercy on me.” I pray it constantly, and it flavors my thoughts as I pray. What led you to end your teaching by focusing on this simple, beautiful, short prayer?
Closing
Jon Dillon: Well, we seem to have lost the good Anthony Delgado. If you want the answer to that question, you’ll need to pick up his book God-Shaped Prayer.
As I reflect on this conversation, I’ll leave you with this: Jesus is the God of gods, the Lord of lords, mighty and awesome.
