How do people in the Bible pray?
Thanksgiving for his brothers - Paul thanks God always for everyone in the church of the Thessalonians, constantly mentioning them in his prayers. This is the church that received his preaching in such power their turn to God became an example to the whole region. Specifically, he remembers their faith, love, and hope and runs up these streams to the fountain of God's love and eternal election.
(Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible: Complete and Unabridged by Hendrickson Publishers, Inc, 2003. Page 2338)
We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers, remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction. (1 Thessalonians 1:2-3)
God hears all prayers, even the prayers of ravens
I remember saying something on this subject on one occasion in a certain Ultra-Calvinistic place of worship. At that time I was preaching to children, and was exhorting them to pray, and I happened to say that long before any actual conversion I had prayed for common mercies, and that God had heard my prayers.
This did not suit my good brethren of the superfine school; and afterwards they all came round me professedly to know what I meant, but really to cavil and carp according to their nature and wont. “They compassed me about like bees; yea, like bees they compassed me about!” After awhile, as I expected, they fell to their usual amusement of calling names. They began to say what rank Arminianism this was; and another expression they were pleased to honour with the title of “Fullerism;” a title, by the way, so honourable that I could heartily have thanked them for appending it to what I had advanced. But to say that God should hear the prayer of natural men was something worse than Arminianism, if indeed anything could be worse to them.
They quoted that counterfeit passage, “The prayer of the wicked is an abomination unto the Lord,” which I speedily answered by asking them if they would find me that text in the Word, of God; for I ventured to assert that the devil was the author of that saying, and that it was not in the Bible at all. “The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination unto the Lord” is in the Bible, but that is a very different thing from the “prayer of the wicked;” and moreover there is a decided difference between the word wicked there intended and the natural man about whom we were controverting.
I do not think that a man who begins to pray in any sense, can be considered as being altogether among “the wicked” intended by Solomon, and certainly he is not among those who turn away their ear from hearing the law, of whom it is written that their prayer is an abomination.
“Well, but,” they said, “how could it be that God could hear a natural prayer?”
And while I paused for a moment, an old woman in a red cloak pushed her way into the little circle round me, and said to them in a very forcible way, like a mother in Israel as she was, “Why do you raise this question; forgetting what God himself has said l What is this you say, that God does not hear natural prayer? Why, does not he hear the young ravens when they cry unto him, and do you think they offer spiritual prayers?” Straightway the men of war took to their heels; no defeat was more thorough; and for once in their lives they must have felt that they might possibly err.
(Spurgeon's Sermons on Prayer by Charles H. Spurgeon (2007). Page 17-30., https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/the-ravens-cry/#flipbook/)