The Lord Is My Light: Interview with Trevin Wax

Trevin Wax has spent his career thinking about how to encourage believers to delight in both reading the Bible and in engaging in daily prayer. As it happens, both are areas in which many believers regularly say they do need more encouragement. Even some believers who read the Bible daily struggle with prayer—and some who love prayer find it difficult to really love some parts of the Bible. What if a liturgy could offer integrated support for both of these essential practices—and show how integrally connected they are? 

In the introduction to his new liturgy, The Lord Is My Light, Trevin explains his vision: “The Lord Is My Light is a structured plan for prayer and Bible reading that arranges biblical texts to highlight themes and connections in God’s Word and then surrounds them with confessions and prayers offered up from men and women throughout church history.”

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Nadya Williams: You’ve mentioned that you first got the beginnings of the idea for this book during your time as a missionary in Romania. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Trevin Wax: More than twenty years ago now, I was a young evangelical studying at a Christian university in Romania, doing cross-cultural ministry in villages and cities with Romanians and the Roma people. I can’t say I got the idea for this book back then. But I did discover the ancient Christian tradition of praying with the church in a more formal way—making the words of forefathers and mothers in the faith my own—and leaning into the riches of The Book of Common Prayer. 

At first, praying the words of saints from years gone by made me feel like a child trying on his parents’ shoes. They felt too big and clunky. But over time, I could feel my heart expanding toward the intensity and clarity I found in those old words. That set me on a course of collecting prayers from church history and seeking spiritual benefit from prayers and practices from various traditions.

This project got going when readers of my In 30 Days series (a daily office for praying three times a day through the Psalms, the life of Jesus, and the letters of Paul) asked for a once-a-day rhythm that would take them through the whole sweep of Scripture, with a podcast version also. 

I see The Lord Is My Light as a gift for the Christian who loves the Bible but struggles to pray, and for believers from free-church traditions who are curious about liturgy but don’t know where to start.

Nadya Williams: Of course, there are many other daily liturgy resources—some Christian traditions have historically been very liturgical. How is your book different from these other liturgy collections? Why do evangelicals need this particular resource—and who do you think would especially benefit from it?

Trevin Wax: I’m grateful for the traditions that have provided helps for Christians in prayer, and this book draws deeply from them—often, in fact! I recently pointed to a few of my favorite resources and how I am indebted to them.

But anyone who has picked up a prayer book for the first time knows what it’s like to flip between sections and wonder which psalm goes with which day, or what the Bible reading is supposed to be, or what season of the church year it is. 

In The Lord Is My Light, everything you need is on the page, every word of the liturgy from start to finish. Even the elements that recur daily (the Lord’s Prayer, the Gloria) are printed in full—every time. 

The book is saturated with Scripture. Most of the words come straight from the Bible. (A sidenote: we dropped verse numbers from the biblical texts, so the readings feel like a Reader’s Bible.) The readings are arranged to highlight themes and connections in God’s Word, and so that participants can hear from every biblical author over a year. 

Many Christians are all about reading the Bible. Give us a reading plan, a study Bible, and a couple of commentaries, and we’re set. Prayer is harder. Consistent prayer that goes beyond a few minutes of repeating the same requests is a challenge. I know that feeling well. This book starts where many of us already are, with the Bible open, but then surrounds the day’s reading with confessions of faith and prayers from men and women throughout church history. It helps us set our personal requests within the larger story of redemption, unfolding daily through the structure of a liturgy.

Nadya Williams: Who were your sources and inspiration for this book? And what are your absolute favorites in this project?

Trevin Wax: Thomas Cranmer and the English prayer book tradition shaped a lot of it, of course, especially the confessions of sin and the collects. But I wanted to showcase a wide range of men and women from across time and from various parts of the world whose prayers have been recorded: the earliest Christians like Clement of Rome, African church fathers like Athanasius and Augustine, medieval voices like Anselm, Reformers like Martin Luther, preachers like Charles Spurgeon. You’ll come across prayers from the Anabaptist martyr Anna of Freiburg, the novelist Jane Austen, the social reformer William Wilberforce, the missionary Amy Carmichael, and the slave-turned-church-founder Richard Allen. The confessions of faith stretch from the Apostles’ Creed to selections from the Lausanne Covenant.

As for favorites, there are too many to count! Some of the collects are dear to my heart. Is there any prayer that better expresses what we want when we read the Scriptures than the one asking God to let us “hear them, read them, mark them, learn them, and inwardly digest them”? St. Patrick’s breastplate prayer is another favorite, for sure, as is the opening to Augustine’s Confessions. Those are well-known, deservedly so. 

A personal favorite that’s lesser known comes from Columbanus, an Irish monk and missionary who carried Celtic Christianity into the heart of Europe. I love how the prayer progresses. A single flame is first kindled in the soul, it makes the body a temple, then leaps outward to brothers and sisters and finally to the whole world. One small fire becomes, line by line, a lit landscape.

Lord, I pray that you may be a lamp for me in the darkness. Touch my soul and kindle a fire within it, that it may burn brightly and give light to my life. Thus my body may truly become your temple, lit by your perpetual flame burning on the altar of my heart. And may the light within me shine on my brothers and sisters that it may drive away the darkness of ignorance and sin from them also. Thus let us be lights to the world, manifesting the bright beauty of your gospel to all around us.

Nadya Williams: This is just such an ambitious liturgy, and there is a lot going on—but there is a method to it too. Could you tell a bit about the organization—what are the key themes, and what would someone get from persevering and going through this entire liturgy in a year?

Trevin Wax: Each day follows the same flow of ten elements: a Call to Prayer, a Confession of Faith, a Confession of Sin with a word of assurance, a Canticle (usually a psalm), the day’s Reading, the Gloria, the Lord’s Prayer, Intercessions and Personal Requests, the Prayer of the Church, and a Blessing from Scripture. Some elements (such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed) repeat every week or two weeks to encourage memorization. But there’s a lot of variety, too. Trying to keep the experience both familiar and fresh requires a delicate balance, something of a dance.

The year follows the broad contours of the church calendar, so every year we walk again through the life of Jesus. We begin Advent with prophecies of the Day of the Lord and New Testament readings that point to Christ’s return. Christmas celebrates his first coming while looking ahead to his second. Epiphany showcases his glory in his earthly ministry. Lent leads us in repentance as Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem. Holy Week takes us to the cross and the grave. Then comes Easter’s fifty days of celebration, the Ascension, Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday. In Ordinary Time, we follow the early church and then journey through the main storyline of the Old Testament.

By the end of the year, you’ll have heard from every biblical author and prayed at least a portion of all 150 psalms. You’ll have the creeds and some of the church’s most beautiful prayers in your heart and mind. And I hope you’ll have spent a year drawing near to God with these words and readings, so that he can shape your heart and desires according to his Word.

Nadya Williams: What would you tell someone who says they don’t like written prayers?

Trevin Wax: I understand the concern. It’s possible to treat a daily liturgy as a formula, a bargaining chip to secure God’s blessing. In our fallenness, we can turn prayer into a way of evading God, saying the right words while we keep him at a distance. Our practices can become a mask.

But spontaneous prayer isn’t immune to that danger. I like how the singer songwriter Andrew Osenga compares a lot of evangelical praying to a jam band. In youth group, he talks about knowing a few of the right phrases. He could sound deep and worshipful even when his heart wasn’t in it. His prayer was “spontaneous,” but that didn’t make it genuine. He just played the licks he knew. I suspect many of us pray that way.

Of course, Scripture itself gives us written prayers. The psalms were Jesus’s prayer book, and he’s the One who gave us the Lord’s Prayer: “Whenever you pray, say . . .” If prayer is only about voicing what we already feel, then of course we’d never borrow someone else’s words. But prayer also forms the feelings we want to have. Written prayers and spontaneous prayers can go together. The written ones can elevate our spontaneous prayers, and the spontaneous ones breathe life into structures that could grow stale. And in the end, whatever patterns we pick, we trust the Spirit to form us.

Nadya Williams: How do you envision people using this daily liturgy—did you have individuals in mind? Or families? Small groups? Churches? All of the above?

Trevin Wax: All of the above. Most people will pray it on their own, and they’ll finish in ten to twenty minutes. Those who want to spend more time in intercession may take half an hour. 

The podcast version features more than 100 voices from across the country and around the world: pastors and laypeople, young and old, men and women, singers and songwriters. Some are names you’d recognize, but no one is credited. I asked everyone not just to recite the words but to address God, so the recording captures real prayer. Each episode opens with a melodic line from a hymn suited to the season, then settles into an ambient soundscape. The Scripture reading has no music at all, so you hear only God’s Word. The result is a 10–12-minute audio sanctuary.

For families, I’ve included a responsive way to pray the liturgy in the introductory material. A small group could open its weekly meeting with the day’s liturgy, or decide together to do it day-by-day, whether or not they’re together physically. Pastors can use it to shape a prayer meeting or service, adding songs between the elements, a sermon after the reading, and the Lord’s Supper after the Lord’s Prayer. 

However it’s used, my prayer is the same: that people will receive this liturgy as a gift, placing themselves before God day after day with open hands.

Trevin Wax is vice president of resources and marketing at the North American Mission Board and a visiting professor at Cedarville University. A former missionary to Romania, Trevin is a regular columnist at The Gospel Coalition and has contributed to Mere Orthodoxy, World, and Christianity Today. He is the author of The Gospel Way Catechism, The Thrill of Orthodoxy, and Rethink Your Self.