I’m only through 25%, 2 of 5 parts, of this book but it’s one of those you don’t want to put down. Long ago I loved Richard J. Foster’s book on prayer. Later I learned some of the issues with Foster and regretfully had to stop recommending it. Then I fell in love with two of E.M. Bounds books on prayer, classics to say the least (although he was a Methodist, but we all love John Wesley right?). However, Keller’s book has addressed questions I have had all my life. I read it with great anticipation and excitement, looking forward to grow in the hotness of my personal prayer life. As a full time missionary I view this as a grave responsibility, and a great joy!
Here is a short excerpt my wife Lera and I found especially motivating:
“…my wife urged me to do something with her we had never been able to muster the self-discipline to do regularly. She asked me to pray with her every night…she said something like this:
Imagine you were diagnosed with such a lethal condition that the doctor told you that you would die within hours unless you took a particular medicine— a pill every night before going to sleep. Imagine that you were told that you could never miss it or you would die. Would you forget? Would you not get around to it some nights? No— it would be so crucial that you wouldn’t forget, you would never miss. Well, if we don’t pray together to God, we’re not going to make it because of all we are facing. I’m certainly not. We have to pray, we can’t let it just slip our minds.”
You and I have been diagnosed with this lethal condition, or at least things are so serious as though we have been.
*My personal comments are bold and italicized
DOG EARS Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God
Should prayer be quiet, inward and contemplative, or outward, doctrinal and spoken? Should prayer be more cognitive or have more of a mystical and experiential dimension?
“…the Bible gives us theological support for both communion-centered and kingdom-centered prayer. A little reflection will show us that these two kinds of prayer are neither opposites nor even discrete categories. Adoring God is shot through with supplication. To praise God is to pray “hallowed be thy name,” to ask him to show the world his glory so that all would honor him as God. Yet just as adoration contains supplication, so seeking God’s kingdom must include prayer to know God himself.”
“…prayer is both conversation and encounter with God. These two concepts give us a definition of prayer and a set of tools for deepening our prayer lives. The traditional forms of prayer— adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication— are concrete practices as well as profound experiences. We must know the awe of praising his glory, the intimacy of finding his grace, and the struggle of asking his help, all of which can lead us to know the spiritual reality of his presence.”
“…most modern biblical commentators generally agreed that these verses [Romans 8:15-16] describe, as one New Testament scholar put it, “a religious experience that is ineffable” because the assurance of secure love in God is “mystical in the best sense of the word.” Thomas Schreiner adds that we must not “underemphasize the emotional ground” of experience. “Some veer away from this idea because of its subjectivity, but the abuse of the subjective in some circles cannot exclude the ‘mystical’ and emotional dimensions of Christian experience.”
“[John Owen] exhorted his hearers to “get an experience of the power of the gospel. in and upon your own hearts, or all your profession is an expiring thing.”
“John Murray, who provided one of the most helpful insights of all: It is necessary for us to recognize that there is an intelligent mysticism in the life of faith . . . of living union and communion with the exalted and ever-present Redeemer. . . . He communes with his people and his people commune with him in conscious reciprocal love. . . . The life of true faith cannot be that of cold metallic assent. It must have the passion and warmth of love and communion because communion with God is the crown and apex of true religion.”
“’Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy.” The older King James version calls it “joy unspeakable and full of glory.” Some translate it “glorified joy beyond words.” As I pondered that verse, I had to marvel that Peter, in writing to the church, could address all his readers like this. He didn’t say, “Well, some of you with an advanced spirituality have begun to get periods of high joy in prayer. Hope the rest of you catch up.” No, he assumed that an experience of sometimes overwhelming joy in prayer was normal. I was convicted.”
“We are not called to choose between a Christian life based on truth and doctrine or a life filled with spiritual power and experience. They go together. I was not being called to leave behind my theology and launch out to look for “something more,” for experience. Rather, I was meant to ask the Holy Spirit to help me experience my theology.”
What is prayer? What is it for? What does it do?
“Prayer is the only entryway into genuine self-knowledge. It is also the main way we experience deep change— the reordering of our loves. Prayer is how God gives us so many of the unimaginable things he has for us. Indeed, prayer makes it safe for God to give us many of the things we most desire. It is the way we know God, the way we finally treat God as God. Prayer is simply the key to everything we need to do and be in life. We must learn to pray. We have to.”
“In [Eph 3] verse 17 [Paul] writes: “I keep asking that . . . you may know him better.” It is remarkable that in all of his writings Paul’s prayers for his friends contain no appeals for changes in their circumstances…”
“To have the “eyes of the heart enlightened” with a particular truth means to have it penetrate and grip us so deeply that it changes the whole person. In other words, we may know that God is holy, but when our hearts’ eyes are enlightened to that truth, then we not only understand it cognitively, but emotionally we find God’s holiness wondrous and beautiful, and volitionally we avoid attitudes and behavior that would displease or dishonor him. In Ephesians 3: 18, Paul says he wants the Spirit to give them “power . . . to grasp” all the past, present, and future benefits they received when they believed in Christ. Of course, all Christians know about these benefits in their minds, but the prayer is for something beyond that— it is to have a more vivid sense of the reality of God’s presence and of shared life with him.”
“Most contemporary people base their inner life on their outward circumstances. Their inner peace is based on other people’s valuation of them, and on their social status, prosperity, and performance. Christians do this as much as anyone. Paul is teaching that, for believers, it should be the other way around.”
“If we give priority to the outer life, our inner life will be dark and scary. We will not know what to do with solitude. We will be deeply uncomfortable with self-examination, and we will have an increasingly short attention span for any kind of reflection. Even more seriously, our lives will lack integrity. Outwardly, we will need to project confidence, spiritual and emotional health and wholeness, while inwardly we may be filled with self-doubts, anxieties, self-pity, and old grudges. Yet we won’t know how to go into the inner rooms of the heart, see clearly what is there, and deal with it. In short, unless we put a priority on the inner life, we turn ourselves into hypocrites.
The seventeenth-century English theologian John Owen wrote a warning to popular and successful ministers: A minister may fill his pews, his communion roll, the mouths of the public, but what that minister is on his knees in secret before God Almighty, that he is and no more.
To discover the real you, look at what you spend time thinking about when no one is looking, when nothing is forcing you to think about anything in particular. At such moments, do your thoughts go toward God? … If you aren’t joyful, humble, and faithful in private before God, then what you want to appear to be on the outside won’t match what you truly are.”
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”#3184f7″ class=”” size=”16″]The infallible test of spiritual integrity, Jesus says, is your private prayer life Share on X[/pullquote]“The infallible test of spiritual integrity, Jesus says, is your private prayer life (Matt 6: 5– 6). Many people will pray when they are required by cultural or social expectations, or perhaps by the anxiety caused by troubling circumstances. Those with a genuinely lived relationship with God as Father, however, will inwardly want to pray and therefore will pray even though nothing on the outside is pressing them to do so.”
“A pastor and friend of mine, Jack Miller, once said he could tell a great deal about a person’s relationship with God by listening to him or her pray. “You can tell if a man or woman is really on speaking terms with God,” he said… You can’t manufacture the unmistakable note of reality that only comes from speaking not toward God but with him. The depths of private prayer and public prayer grow together.”
“I can think of nothing great that is also easy. Prayer must be, then, one of the hardest things in the world. To admit that prayer is very hard, however, can be encouraging. If you struggle greatly in this, you are not alone.”
“The first thing we learn in attempting to pray is our spiritual emptiness— and this lesson is crucial. We are so used to being empty that we do not recognize the emptiness as such until we start to try to pray. We don’t feel it until we begin to read what the Bible and others have said about the greatness and promise of prayer. Then we finally begin to feel lonely and hungry. It’s an important first step to fellowship with God, but it is a disorienting one. … In the beginning the feeling of poverty and absence usually dominates, but the best guides for this phase urge us not to turn back but rather to endure and pray in a disciplined way, until, as Packer and Nystrom say, we get through duty to delight.”
“To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule— it is a failure to treat God as God. It is a sin against his glory. “Far be it from me,” said the prophet Samuel to his people, ‘that I should sin against the Lord by failing to pray for you…’”
“In the book of Acts, prayer is one of the main signs that the Spirit has come into the heart through faith in Christ. The Spirit gives us the confidence and desire to pray to God and enables us to pray even when we don’t know what to say. Christians are taught that prayer should pervade their whole day and whole life— they should “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5: 17). Prayer is so great that wherever you look in the Bible, it is there. Why? Everywhere God is, prayer is.”
“Nothing but prayer will ever reveal you to yourself, because only before God can you see and become your true self. To paraphrase something is to get the gist of it and make it accessible. Prayer is learning who you are before God and giving him your essence. Prayer means knowing yourself as well as God.”
“Through prayer, which brings heaven into the ordinary, we see the world differently, even in the most menial and trivial daily tasks. Prayer changes us.”
“Prayer is awe, intimacy, struggle— yet the way to reality. There is nothing more important, or harder, or richer, or more life-altering. There is absolutely nothing so great as prayer.”
“…some of the Psalms do speak about a calm contemplation of God’s beauty (Ps 27: 4) or of his glory and love (Ps 63: 1– 3). In Psalm 131: 2, David speaks of deep spiritual contentment in God: “I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content.” Someone like Jonathan Edwards— very much more in the Protestant “prophetic” than the Catholic mystical tradition of prayer— can nonetheless speak of being “emptied and annihilated” in prayer. In his “Personal Narrative,” a kind of diary of Edwards’s spiritual experiences, he wrote:
Once . . . anno 1737 . . . [in] divine contemplation and prayer, I had a view that for me was extraordinary, of the glory of the Son of God, as Mediator between God and man, and his wonderful, great, full, pure and sweet grace and love, and meek and gentle condescension. . . . The person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent with an excellency great enough to swallow up all thought and conception . . . which continued as near as I can judge, about an hour; which kept me the greater part of the time in a flood of tears, and weeping aloud. I felt an ardency of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone; to love him with a holy and pure love; to trust in him; to live upon him; to serve and follow him; and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure, with a divine and heavenly purity.
Anyone at all acquainted with Edwards’s theology knows that he is not
speaking of becoming merged with the Godhead, nor of a pantheistic dissolution of the boundaries between the self and the universe. Heiler is right to point out that the mystics were often seeking a kind of self-salvation through meditation, and that is as far as can be from Edwards’s understanding of redemption through faith alone and grace alone. Nevertheless, his experience of fellowship with God sounds similar to many of the experiences of deep love and delight in the accounts of the mystical writers.
Why, then, can Edwards talk about prayer to a personal, transcendent God with such mystical overtones? Because, while the biblical God is not Same-as-Me, he is also not utterly, inaccessibly Far-from-Me. Christian believers have “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1: 27) through the Holy Spirit. Also, God has given us his Word, the Scriptures, and because God is divine, the Bible is not just a repository of information but a dynamic spiritual power. Edwards wrote:
I had then, and at other times, the greatest delight in the holy scriptures, of any book whatsoever. Oftentimes in reading it, every word seemed to touch my heart. I felt a harmony between something in my heart, and those sweet and powerful words. I seemed often to see so much light exhibited by every sentence, and such a refreshing food communicated, that I could not get along in reading; often dwelling long on one sentence, to see the wonders contained in it; and yet almost every sentence seemed to be full of wonders.
This is deeply mystical and richly prophetic— at once. Edwards is not going down into himself to touch the impersonal ground of being. He is meditating on the words of God in the Scriptures, and the resulting experience is not one of just wordless tranquility. This is not the “pure awareness” that gets beyond predication and rational thought. In fact, Edwards is overwhelmed with the power of the words and the reality to which the words point.”
Are we praying to an abstract or knowable God and if He is knowable how do we know Him and how does He communicate with us?
“The knowledge of God for instinctive prayer comes intuitively and generally through nature (Rom 1: 20). What Christians know about God comes with verbal specificity through the words of the Scripture and its main message— the gospel. In the Bible, God’s living Word, we can hear God speaking to us and we respond in prayer, though we should not call this simply a “response.” Through the Word and Spirit, prayer becomes answering God— a full conversation.”
“All prayer is responding to God. In all cases God is the initiator—“ hearing” always precedes asking. God comes to us first or we would never reach out to him. Yet all prayers are not alike or equally effective in relating to God. The clearer our understanding of who God is, the better our prayers.”
“The goal is not just the sharing of ideas but also of ourselves. Communication can lead to two-way personal revelation that produces what can only be called a dynamic experience. J. I. Packer, in his famous work Knowing God, writes:
Knowing God is a matter of personal dealing. . . . Knowing God is more than knowing about him; it is a matter of dealing with him as he opens up to you, and being dealt with by him. . . . Friends . . . open their hearts to each other by what they say and do. . . . We must not lose sight of the fact that knowing God is an emotional relationship, as well as an intellectual and volitional one, and could not indeed be a deep relationship between persons if it were not so.
What is prayer, then, in the fullest sense? Prayer is continuing a conversation that God has started through his Word and his grace, which eventually becomes a full encounter with him.”
“The more clearly Job saw who God was, the fuller his prayers became— moving from mere complaint to confession, appeal, and praise. In the end he broke through and was able to face anything in life. This new refinement and level of character came through the interaction of listening to God’s revealed Word and answering in prayer. The more true his knowledge of God, the more fruitful his prayers became, and the more sweeping the change in his life.
The power of our prayers, then, lies not primarily in our effort and striving, or in any technique, but rather in our knowledge of God. You may respond, “But God spoke audible words to Job out of a storm. I wish
God spoke to me like that.” The answer is— we have something better, an incalculably clearer expression of God’s character.”
“When we look at Jesus Christ as he is shown to us in the Scriptures, we are looking at the glory of God through the filter of a human nature. That is one of the many reasons, as we shall see, that Christians pray “in Jesus’ name.” Through Christ, prayer becomes what Scottish Reformer John Knox called “an earnest and familiar talking with God…”
What role do words play in prayer? What role do God’s words play?
“If God were impersonal, as the Eastern religions teach, then love— something that can happen only between two or more persons— would be an illusion. We can go further and say that even if God were only unipersonal, then love could not have appeared until after God began to create other beings. That would mean God was more fundamentally power than he was love. Love would not be as important as power. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity, however, teaches that there is one God in three persons who have known and loved one another from before the dawn of time. If God is triune, then words and language are seen in a new light. In John 14– 17 Jesus refers to his life within the Godhead before he came to earth, speaking of “the glory I had with [the Father] before the world began” (John 17: 5) and of “the words” he has received from the Father (John 17: 8). Within the Trinity from all eternity, there has been communication by words— the Father speaks to the Son, the Son speaks to the Father, and the Father and the Son speak to the Spirit. In John 17, we get a glimpse of this speaking in Jesus’ prayer to his Father. It is divine discourse.”
“…since the Godhead contains a community of persons, and because language is intrinsic to personal relationship, there is every reason to expect that God communicates through words. Therefore, Christian prayer is not plunging into the abyss of unknowing and a state of wordless hyperconsciousness. That condition is created not by words per se but by sounds. “The techniques that prepare for [the mantra meditation state of samadhi] feature repetitive sounds, sights, or actions. Analytical thought is mesmerized to favor intuitive awareness, a relaxed state in which one’s consciousness of individual identity is suspended.” Rather, Christian prayer is fellowship with the personal God who befriends us through speech. The biblical pattern entails meditating on the words of Scripture until we respond to God with our entire being, saying, “Give me an undivided heart, that . . . I may praise you, Lord my God, with all my heart” (Ps 86: 11– 12).”
Speech-act theory makes a convincing case that our words not only convey information, they get things done. However, God’s words have a power infinitely beyond our own. Timothy Ward’s book Words of Life argues that God’s words are identical with his actions. He quotes Genesis 1: 3, “‘ Let there be light,’ and there was light.” Ward observes that the passage does not say that first God spoke and then he proceeded to do what he said he would do. No, his word itself brought the light about.”
“…what God’s voice does, God does. God’s speaking and acting are equated. Isaiah 55: 10– 11 puts this theological principle most powerfully: As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”#3184f7″ class=”” size=”16″]The God of the Bible is a God who “by his very nature, acts through speaking. Share on X[/pullquote]We humans may say, “Let there be light in this room,” but then we have to flick a switch or light a candle. Our words need deeds to back them up and can fail to achieve their purposes. God’s words, however, cannot fail their purposes because, for God, speaking and acting are the same thing. The God of the Bible is a God who “by his very nature, acts through speaking.”
When the Bible talks of God’s Word, then, it is talking of “God’s active presence in the world.” To say that God’s word goes out to do something is the same as to say God has gone out to do something. To break one of God’s commands or words is to break one’s relationship with him. “Thus (we may say) God has invested himself with his words, or we
could say that God has so identified himself with his words that whatever someone does to God’s words . . . they do to God himself. . . . God’s . . . verbal actions are a kind of extension of himself.”
The implications of this basic teaching of the Bible about itself are immense. One of them directly relates to the subject of prayer. “More mystically minded people sometimes suppose that words by their very nature are an obstruction to the goal of a deep communion with God, but that is just not so.” If God’s words are his personal, active presence, then to put your trust in God’s words is to put your trust in God.
“Communication from God is therefore communion with God, when met with a response of trust from us.” Of course, there can be, in prayer, times of simple stillness in his presence, but even at the human level, “a man and a woman sitting in a restaurant gazing silently into each other’s eyes . . . are engaging in a much more genuine relationship if they are doing so with twenty years of conversation-filled marriage behind them, than if they are on their first date and have not yet spoken to each other.”
How are we to receive God’s words? They come to us in the Scripture. The Bible says that God will put his words in the mouths of the prophets (Deut 18: 15– 20; Jer 1: 9– 10). Once a prophet receives God’s words, they can be written down and can effectively be read as God’s speech when the prophet is not present or even after he is dead and gone (Jer 36: 1– 32). The Bible, then, is God’s Word written, and it remains God’s Word when we read it today.
The conclusion is clear. God acts through his words, the Word is “alive and active” (Heb 4: 12), and therefore the way to have God dynamically active in our lives is through the Bible. To understand the Scripture is not simply to get information about God. If attended to with trust and faith, the Bible is the way to actually hear God speaking and also to meet God himself.”
“…our prayers should arise out of immersion in the Scripture. We should “plunge ourselves into the sea” of God’s language, the Bible. We should listen, study, think, reflect, and ponder the Scriptures until there is an answering response in our hearts and minds. It may be one of shame or of joy or of confusion or of appeal— but that response to God’s speech is then truly prayer and should be given to God. If the goal of prayer is a real, personal connection with God, then it is only by immersion in the language of the Bible that we will learn to pray, perhaps just as slowly as a child learns to speak. This does not mean, of course, that we must literally read the Bible before each individual prayer. A sponge needs to be saturated in water only periodically in order to do its work. We can cry out to God all during the day as long as we regularly spend time with his Word.”
“If you have a personal relationship with any real person, you will regularly be confused and infuriated by him or her. So, too, you will be regularly confounded by the God you meet in the Scriptures— as well as amazed and comforted. Your prayer must be firmly connected to and grounded in your reading of the Word. This wedding of the Bible and prayer anchors your life down in the real God.”
“Catholic author Thomas Merton writes, “The mystical knowledge of God . . . is above concepts. It is a knowledge that registers itself in the soul passively without an idea.” The mystic wants to attend strictly to God, not to words and ideas about God. Rationality is seen as a limitation, a barrier between the heart and God. Yet Paul calls Christians to keep their rationality as they pray. “I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my understanding; I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my understanding.”
“[J.I. Packer] goes on to say that a “non-cognitive closeness to God in which the mind is emptied of all personal thoughts about him, and indeed of all thoughts whatsoever,” is Eastern “mysticism in [W]estern dress.” However, Packer reminds us that “there is [indeed] a place for silence before God . . . after we have spoken to him, while joy at God’s love invades the soul.” It is appropriate some time to admire and adore God silently because “when two people love each other there are times when they smilingly look at each other in silence, not needing to speak, simply enjoying their close rapport.” Yet even people who are deeply in love will instinctively search for words and exclamations of wonder to convey and express what they feel. Therefore, he concludes, ‘wordless prayer is not the pinnacle . . . but the periodic punctuation of verbal prayer.’”
“Some prayers in the Bible are like an intimate conversation with a friend, others like an appeal to a great monarch, and others approximate a wrestling match. Why? In every case the nature of the prayer is determined by the character of God, who is at once our friend, father, lover, shepherd, and king. We must not decide how to pray based on what types of prayer are the most effective for producing the experiences and feelings we want. We pray in response to God himself. God’s Word to us contains this range of discourse— and only if we respond to his Word will our own prayer life be as rich and varied.”
“…in Anne Lamott’s book on prayer entitled Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. She declares up front that your view of God is not really important for prayer:
Let’s say [prayer is to] what the Greeks called the Really Real, what lies within us, beyond the scrim of our values, positions, convictions, and wounds. Or let’s say it is a cry from within to Life or Love, with capital L’s. Nothing could matter less than what we call this force. . . . Let’s not get bogged down on whom or what we pray to. Let’s just say
prayer is communication from our hearts to the great mystery, or Goodness . . . to the animating energy of love we are sometimes bold enough to believe in: to something unimaginably big, and not us. We could call this force Not Me . . . or for convenience we could just say “God.”
It may be that she is simply trying to invite people unsure of belief in God to begin reaching out to him. If understood in this way, Lamott’s book is a disarming invitation to the doubter to pray, but that can only at best serve as a provisional first step. Telling someone to pray and not worry about who God is or what we believe about him cannot serve as a sustaining operating principle of prayer, because you cannot grow in a relationship with a person unless you learn who he or she is.
Lamott memorably names three of the traditional categories of prayer: Help (supplication), Thanks (thanksgiving), and Wow (adoration). It is striking, though, that the book leaves out one of the most crucial classical categories of prayer, namely confession and repentance. If we contrast Lamott’s short book with similar-length treatises on prayer by Augustine and Luther, and with the Lord’s Prayer itself, the lack of emphasis on confession is a glaring omission. My guess is this is because she uses a starting point that is not the knowledge of God in the Bible. We should not get “bogged down” in who God is. We should just pray. The problem is that if God is not the starting point, then our own perceived emotional needs become the drivers and sole focus of our prayer. That will inevitably narrow prayer down from its full biblical spectrum.
Edmund P. Clowney wrote, “The Bible does not present an art of prayer; it presents the God of prayer.” We should not decide how to pray based on the experiences and feelings we want. Instead, we should do everything possible to behold our God as he is, and prayer will follow. The more clearly we grasp who God is, the more our prayer is shaped and determined accordingly.
Without immersion in God’s words, our prayers may not be merely limited and shallow but also untethered from reality. We may be responding not to the real God but to what we wish God and life to be like. Indeed, if left to themselves our hearts will tend to create a God who doesn’t exist. People from Western cultures want a God who is loving and forgiving but not holy and transcendent. Studies of the spiritual lives of young adults in Western countries reveal that their prayers, therefore, are generally devoid of both repentance and of the joy of being forgiven. Without prayer that answers the God of the Bible, we will only be talking to ourselves.”
“God will not merely build us a house, he will make us his house. He will fill us with his presence, beauty, and glory. Every time Christians merely remember who they are in Christ, that great word comes home to us and we will find, over and over again, a heart to pray.”
“The primary theological fact about prayer is this: We address a triune God, and our prayers can be heard only through the distinct work of every person in the Godhead.”
“The implications of the Triunity of God for prayer are many. It means, to begin with, that God has always had within himself a perfect friendship. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are adoring one another, giving glorifying love to one another, and delighting in one another. We know of no joy higher than being loved and loving in return, but a triune God would know that love and joy in unimaginable, infinite dimensions. God is, therefore, infinitely, profoundly happy, filled with perfect joy— not some abstract tranquility but the fierce happiness of dynamic loving relationships. Knowing this God is not to get beyond emotions or thoughts but to be filled with glorious love and joy.”
If God did not need to create other beings in order to know love and happiness, then why did he do so? Jonathan Edwards argues, in A Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, that the only reason God would have had for creating us was not to get the cosmic love and joy of relationship (because he already had that) but to share it. Edwards shows how it is completely consistent for a triune God— who is “other-oriented” in his very core, who seeks glory only to give it to others— to communicate happiness and delight in his own divine perfections and beauty to others.
As Augustine wrote in his great work On the Trinity, our ability to love other persons is just an image of the internal Trinitarian love that we were created to reflect. We can see why a triune God would call us to converse with him, to know and relate to him. It is because he wants to share the joy he has. Prayer is our way of entering into the happiness of God himself.”
“Jonathan Edwards says that “prayer is . . . only the voice of faith.” Anyone with real faith will desire to pray because, through the Spirit, prayer is faith become audible.”
“The Spirit gives believers an existential, inward certainty that their relationship with God does not now depend on their performance as it does in the relationship between an employee and a supervisor. It depends on parental love. The Holy Spirit takes a theological proposition and turns it into an inner confidence and joy. You know that God responds to your cry with the intense love and care of a parent responding to the cry of pain of his or her child— because you are in Jesus, the true Son. You can go to God with the confidence of receiving that kind of attention and love. Put another way, the Holy Spirit gives us a confident faith that turns naturally into prayer.
This confidence was the heart of Martin Luther’s powerful theology and practice of prayer. Well-known for praying at least two hours a day and emerging with great boldness, Luther told any Christian to begin to pray by saying the following to the Lord:
Although . . . you could rightly and properly be a severe judge over us sinners . . . now through your mercy implant in our hearts a comforting trust in your fatherly love, and let us experience the sweet and pleasant savor of a childlike certainty that we may joyfully call you Father, knowing and loving you and calling on you in every trouble.”
“The Spirit, however, makes our groaning his groaning, putting his prayers to the Father inside our prayers. He does so by placing within us a deep, inexpressible longing to do God’s will and see his glory. This aspiration— this “groaning” desire to please him— comes through in our petitions to God. In every specific request, then, the Father hears us praying for what is both truly best for us and pleasing to him…”
How can God be our friend if He is so transcendent and “other” than us? What is God’s truest identity, in relation to us, and what is our truest identity, in relation to Him, and how does that play into our prayer life?
All ancient lands and cultures had temples, because human beings once knew innately that there was a gap, a yawning chasm, between us and the divine. God is great and we are small— God is perfect and we are flawed. Temples were places where an effort was made to bridge that gap. Sacrifices and offerings were made and rituals observed by professional “mediators” (priests) who sought to bring the remote divinity near. All such efforts were understood to be partial and fragmentary. No religion claimed that the gap could be closed. Aristotle, for example, said that while it might be possible to venerate and appease the gods, actual intimate friendship with a god was impossible. The philosopher reasoned that friendship requires that both parties share much in common as equals. They must be alike. But since God is infinitely greater than human beings, “the possibility of friendship ceases.”
Here, then, is a claim that Aristotle— indeed, all the other philosophers and religious teachers of the world— would find outrageous. How could God be our intimate friend? How could we approach him with complete confidence? It is because God became like us, equally mortal and subject to suffering and death. He did it so we could be forgiven and justified by faith apart from our efforts and merits. That is why we can draw near.
Because in Jesus God became human, he is not only the God on the other side of the chasm, he is the bridge over the gap.”
“Jesus taught his disciples that they must always pray in his name (John 14: 13– 14; 15: 16; 16: 23– 24). ‘Prayers in his name are prayers . . . in recognition that the only approach to God . . . the only way to God is Jesus himself.’”
“Galatians 4: 6– 7 says that the Spirit leads us to call out passionately to God as our loving Father. Paul refers to this experience as “knowing God” (4: 8). That’s the ground motive of Spirit-directed, Christ-mediated prayer— to simply know him better and enjoy his presence.
What do/should our prayers primarily consist of? How does prayer change us?
Consider how different this is from the normal way we use prayer. In our natural state we pray to God to get things. We may believe in God, but our deepest hopes and happiness reside in things as in how successful we are or in our social relationships. We therefore pray mainly when our career or finances are in trouble, or when some relationship or social status is in jeopardy. When life is going smoothly, and our truest heart treasures seem safe, it does not occur to us to pray. Also, ordinarily our prayers are not varied— they consist usually of petitions, occasionally some confession (if we have just done something wrong). Seldom or never do we spend sustained time adoring and praising God. In short, we have no positive, inner desire to pray. We do it only when circumstances force us. Why? We know God is there, but we tend to see him as a means through which we get things to make us happy. For most of us, he has not become our happiness.”
“When we grasp his astonishing, costly sacrifice for us, transfer our trust and hopes from other things to Christ, and ask for God’s acceptance and grace for Christ’s sake, we begin to realize with the Spirit’s help the magnitude of our benefits and blessings in Christ. Then we begin to want almost desperately to know and love God for himself. His love and regard make popularity and worldly status look pale and thin. Being delighted in him and delighting him become inherently fulfilling and beautiful.
To see the law by Christ fulfilled
And hear his pard’ning voice
Transforms a slave into a child
And duty into choice.
—William Cowper, Olney Hymns”
In the next three sections Tim Keller covers:
3: Learning Prayer
4: Deepening Prayer
5: Doing Prayer
Appendix: Some other patterns for daily prayer
Why not pick it up now and use it to deepen and enrich your prayer life?
Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God by Timothy Keller
What are your thoughts on what Keller is saying?
