How To Pray Boldly
We clasp our hands together and drop to our knees in prayer only to be hit in the face with awkward silence. Our goal is to pray boldly, but instead our prayers sound weak, wimpy, and disconnected. Instead of prayer making us feel heard and comforted, it leaves us feeling powerless before God and still overwhelmed by our problems.
We feel tongue-tied and weak when it comes to talking with God about our life issues and it becomes easy to rely on inauthentic, pretty sounding prayers. Praying should feel like our life-line, but sometimes it feels too hard and becomes a source of anxiety. Praise God, we don’t have to stay that way.
Are you secretly struggling with your prayer life? Is it non-existent, confusing, boring, or ineffective? Let’s identify specific truths from God’s word on how to pray boldly to our Heavenly Father. Are you ready to turn pretty prayers into intimate conversations with your Creator?

1.) Prayer is about God’s power, not ours.
There was a time in my life when praying felt a lot like going to the dentist to get a tooth fixed. The sense of necessity and dread were all jumbled into a nice big ball of anxiety. I knew in my burdened heart of hearts a repair job was necessary, but I dreaded the remedy more than the ache. I had been in church all of my life and never felt confident in praying. Have you ever felt this way or said these things?
“If I tell God what is really going on, will He smite my life with something horrible as a punishment? ”
“I have begged Him for ________ and He seems to be silent. He must have better people to listen to.“
I was depending on pretty prayers to get me through big problems and it wasn’t working. In fact, I was more focused on making a pretty looking war binder than actually praying. I cared more about my fluency, accuracy, and results than I was about building a relationship with God.
Pretty prayers are as useful as showing up to a house fire with a squirt gun. And the enemy knows it.
Our adversary delights in keeping our eyes focused on ourselves rather than on the finished work of Christ. His goal is to make sure God stays much smaller while our problems, griefs, and trials become larger than life.
God initiates our desire to talk to Him because He knows He is able to handle every situation. He wants to prove Himself faithful to us in every situation. The Holy Spirit moves, compels, and causes us to seek our Heavenly Father by highlighting areas of pain. Whether the pain comes from a sinful past, a present loss, or a rough relationship, God uses each one to help us rely on Him.
Praying boldly begins when we realize prayer isn’t about the outcome as much as it’s about His process.
God grants us the privilege of two-way communication to get us through this life. Prayer is His ear bending down to hear our cries and our ears opening to gain His knowledge, wisdom, and relationship.
He uses our weakness in prayer to make us more bold in relationship to Him. The weaker we are, the more boldly we approach His throne because we need Him.
God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent which means nothing we say in prayer shocks, perplexes, or defeats Him. He’s the one who pokes the conscience, opens eyes, and tenderly jabs at the soft spots of our hearts.
To pray boldly, we must shift our mindset from our ability to pray nice prayers to God’s ability to intervene and answer the messy ones.
In order to pray boldly, we must rely on the merits of God and not our own.
God uses stammering lips from a faithful heart to moves mountains. Is anything too hard for God?

2.) Prayer is about God’s truth, not ours.
The majority of my prayers typically were centered on what I thought and felt about my situations rather than on the truths of who God is and what God had to say. I petitioned all of heaven to help me with my emotions and feelings. Our God calls us to cry out with our emotions, but we can’t limit our prayers to only that endeavor.
I was using my prayers to process my thoughts and make God reinforce my beliefs rather than letting the Holy Spirit mold, rebuke, or even offend me.
The Holy Spirit’s job is to convict us of sin, and yet most of our prayers come from a demanding heart instead of a humble and moldable spirit.
Praying boldly requires us to grasp and proclaim God’s truth and reject any lies our hearts or minds are believing. It requires humility to admit we don’t have all the facts that God has. We aren’t telling Him our big surprise by informing Him of our situation, but instead He is trying to draw us into alignment with His truth.
Boldly praying is done in humility with a sense of reverence mixed with child-like faith. God doesn’t change, we do.
The enemy loves to make us feel, but God wants us to grow our faith.
Bold prayers call each of us to spill our hearts before Him and allow the Holy Spirit to speak truth back to us. Studying and meditating on God’s word is the perfect way to measure our emotions and line them up with His reality.
Our truths will always deceive us, His truth never has and never will.
We must position ourselves to hear Him speak, open our hearts to His correction, and boldly come to Him in faith. When we do, He will reveal to us what He already knows to be true about our situations.
His heart is always ready and able to rescue, restore, and redeem. Hearing truth through bold prayers will stabilize our emotions, clear our minds, and shift our hearts toward His will.
As we pray and petition our Heavenly Father, we begin to trust what He is doing and turn our thoughts and attention to His will.
Bold prayers aren’t necessarily loud decrees or glamorous declarations. Prayers that go straight to His throne must humbly trust and faithfully believe His truths will not only stand the test of time, but practically apply to our lives.

3.) Prayer is about God’s perspective, not ours.
My finite mind can’t wrap around an infinite God. I used to be like a hamster on a wheel when it came to confronting issues with God. I would rehearse the ten best ways to work out a specific problem, take my list to God, and pray I could deal with the one He chose. When He didn’t bow to my wish list, I would get perturbed with Him for putting me between a rock and a hard place. Prayer isn’t pressuring God.
We can’t box God in.
God works outside of time, space, and matter. What feels and seems impossible to us, is easy for God. He has a million ways to work out every issue for our good and His glory. Our problem is we tend to fixate on our limited knowledge base as the only solution which keeps us blinded from God’s reality.
His goal is to conform us into His image and He knows exactly what it will take to get us there.
God’s wants open dialogue about that very process.
God is Sovereign and He doesn’t mind letting us wrestle with difficult perspectives. While our hearts long for stability, ease, and calm waters, He is busy exposing every area of our hearts which requires His healing.
In His goodness and mercy, our pain has a sovereign purpose.
His perspective of who we are and where we are is vastly different than what our earthly eyes can see. While we are wrestling in prayer, we can find comfort knowing His unmatched grace covers our confusion, disillusion, and questioning.
Prayer is about His sovereign power to see the unseen and for us to trust His ways are higher than our own. As we boldly pray, our hearts will naturally cry out, “Lord, I want more of You, and less of me.”
Maybe the boldest prayer we can pray is “Lord, I want more of You, and less of me. Not my will, but Thine.”
Let’s pray: “God, Your ways are so much higher than my ways. I know You are intimately acquainted with my sorrow, pain and suffering. You have felt every heartbreak and dried endless streams of my tears. Give me eyes to see and ears to hear You moving. Strengthen my faith! Make me bold enough to get real with You, and yet quiet enough to hear Your still small voice gently washing over my wounds. You are good and You are able. Lord, I want more of You and less of me. Give me the grace as I obey your will. In Jesus name, Amen.”
8 Bible Verses for How to Pray Boldly
- Psalm 61:2: “When my heart is overwhelmed; lead me to the Rock that is higher than I.”
- 1 Peter 6:6:“Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that He may lift you up in due time.”
- Psalm 46:1-4: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change and though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea; Though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains quake at its swelling pride.”
- 1 Corinthians 1:25: “For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”
- Proverbs 19:21: “Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.”
- Psalm 145:14: “The Lord sustains all who fall and raises up all who are bowed down.”
- Isaiah 55:10-11: “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”
- Psalm 139:1-4: “O LORD, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You understand my thought from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down, and are intimately acquainted with all my ways. Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, O LORD, You know it all. You have enclosed me behind and before, and laid Your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is too high, I cannot attain to it.”
Meet the author
Sheryl Aeschliman
Sheryl Aeschliman loves being a Midwest farmer’s wife, mom, and grandma. As an author, teacher, and leader in women’s ministry, she draws from over thirty years of experience in helping women of all ages discover Biblical truth. Her calling and passion to equip Christian women led her to create Simply Scripture to help others find their identity in Christ. Sheryl writes and teaches online Bible studies designed to guide women into the grace that is only found in Jesus.