Pray the Jesus Prayer so that breath becomes Life centered in Him

God be merciful to me a sinner; Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. (Luke 18:13, 38; (see also Matthew 20:30).

Blind men, lepers and sinners cried out to God for the mercies of forgiveness and healing. They recognized Jesus as Messiah, the Anointed King, Son of David. Their faith revealed Him and received Him as the Son of God. Their simple prayer was of faith that “made them well.”

From earliest times the church has prayed the simple Jesus prayer, as easily as breathing in and out, in a short or longer form: “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. Visit and heal my infirmities for your name’s sake.”

(The following is excerpted and edited from John Michael Talbot’s, The Ancient Path. He describes a way to “pray without ceasing.” I use a simple cross and beads to help me in the night, while driving, while sitting in a meeting, or watching a movie, etc. This practice helps me meditate on Him, intercede for others and overcome anxiety. If interested in beads or a cross ask me.)

The Desert Fathers had encouraged the use of aspirations, and Augustine had counseled a busy widow in his parish to imitate the Egyptian hermits in this way. Nor was devotion to the name of Jesus anything new. Saint Paul had long before told the Philippians: “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (2:10). And the pages of the Acts of the Apostles are replete with the primitive Church’s devotion to the holy name (see, for example, 2:38, 3:6, 4:10, 8:12, 9:27, etc.). From the first generation, the Church had prescribed Jesus’s name for the expulsion of demons, the healing of ailments, and the correction of error.

A way to pray without ceasing in our busy lives

If our goal is to make Jesus the single focal point of life, and to make our prayer to him as constant as breath try this: 

Breathe in: Lord.

Breathe out: Jesus.

It’s not mechanical. It’s not magical. It’s love. People do heroic things for love. They give up drinking or drugs or gambling, but the way they overcome is by keeping their beloved in mind when faced with temptation. So they’re faced with a stark choice between the loved one or the vice. If our prayer is Jesus, we will have him always before us. We will have the habit of preferring nothing to him. And, like the apostles, we can do all things in him who strengthens us (Philippians 4:13) and in his holy name.

The Jesus prayer became a compact creed: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” That simple formula includes elements of adoration, contrition, and supplication. It confesses Jesus’s divinity and our own sinfulness. It’s as hard as diamond, but it rises lightly as breath. It has sustained the inner life of ascetics and ordinary folk in the Eastern churches for well over a millennium…

300 knots of prayer

Eastern Christians sometimes pray the Jesus Prayer while they count the recitations on a string of beads or knots. Pastor Dennis Cole wears an elastic band of beads around his wrist to help him pray. I was showing my little string of beads to Bob Johnson, my spiritual director, and he agreed with how helpful it is, then he opened his desk and pulled out a string with 300 knots in it. It was a good reminder to me that I am a novice in prayer and not a spiritual giant.

How can we pray when there’s so much else we have to get done?

The Eastern Fathers offered a way to approach the problem. We can key our prayer to our every breath. The Eastern (Orthodox) Fathers tell us to invoke the name and person of Jesus with every breath we take. Think about it: breathing is the one thing we do without ceasing. If we’re living, we’re breathing. When we stop breathing, we’re dead.

I am learning to “ask for His grace to pray with His effect in me

I try to begin prayer times by asking God’s grace to help me pray and that my prayer have a good effect in me. I ask the grace to know Jesus, love Him and bring him glory to him in prayer and through the day. It is humbling to admit that I need supernatural and present assistance to praise, worship, pray and read the Scripture into my mind and heart. Paul wrote that prayer is a work of the Spirit (Rom 8:26-27). Prayer is not something we could do on our own. God is transcendent. He is wholly “other” from us. But he gives us his Spirit to pray within us, so we can say with Jesus, “Abba! Father!” (Rom 8:14; Gal 4:6).

In both Hebrew and Greek, the word for “breath” and “Spirit” is one and the same—in Hebrew, ruah; in Greek, pneuma. Prayer is possible because we have the breath of God. The Fathers tell us to unite every breath to God.

Preparing a room for God or for sin

John Michael Talbot learned that he could not keep parts of life “purely for himself, apart from God. If I did that, I was preparing a room for sin. If I could pray from the heart, if I could pray with every breath, I would leave myself no opportunity to build a reservation for self and sin. I would sooner stop breathing. I would sooner die.”