Prayer
Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God
By: Timothy Keller
“Prayer is the way to experience a powerful confidence that God is handling our lives well, that our bad things will turn out for good, our good things cannot be taken from us, and the best things are yet to come.”
“You should not begin to pray for all you want until you realize that in God you have all you need.”
There was a time when I refused to pray.
Yes, we all have seasons where prayer is hard to remember to do or feels hard to fit into our day in a meaningful way. I think we will always have these seasons because of our sinful nature pulling us away from our life source.
But there was a time when I adamantly said, “No. I’m not going to pray. What’s the point? I’m mad at God. He didn’t answer the prayer that meant the most to me. If I pray for something, God will twist my words and give me what I want but then take something else away. It’s just a game. And I don’t think God really cares what I want.”
I had just miscarried in my first pregnancy after many hard months of trying to get pregnant in the first place. This miscarriage came between my sister and friend’s miscarried firsts. Why would God do that? All I wanted was to be a mom and God took that away from me. I don’t want to pray to him.
It was during that time of wrestling with God’s goodness and prayer that I read this book.
It is one of the best books I have read that addresses prayer. He answers every question, concern, and objection to prayer. He explains what it is, why we do it, and how we do it.
During my time of pain and struggling, it wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to hear, but it was what I needed to hear. It is a truthful and caring reminder to see God and our relationship to him in the proper standing.
Even as we enjoy intimacy with God, knowing he loves us and desires good things for us, that we get to talk to him as a friend, we must also simultaneously recognize his superiority. He is God and we are not. Our prayers must also be in reverence and respect to his authority, trusting the way he answers our prayers and relinquishing our desire to claim God owes us anything.
[I must disclaim here that my questions of God’s goodness and love were addressed in this book in a small way, but I also worked through them and grew substantially in this aspect of my faith outside of this book that influences my ability to write this review years after first reading it. They are big questions that are worth thinking about.]
You, like me, may have grown up knowing the acronym for prayer: ACTS (adoration, confession, thankfulness, supplication). Keller mentions it as a proper understanding and progression of prayer and, essentially, this book expounds on each of those tenets, going deeper than any Sunday school class we may have learned them in. Whether you think you know how to pray or not, this book will benefit you.
As to the organization of this book, Keller has divided his chapters into five parts:
- Desiring Prayer
- Understanding Prayer
- Learning Prayer
- Deepening Prayer
- Doing Prayer
The first two sections focus on what prayer is, why it’s necessary and great.
In his section on learning to pray he lays out the thoughts of three of the greatest teachers in history of the Christian church— St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin— all of whom have written much about prayer.
The last two sections offer examples of how to structure prayer, ideas of what we can thank or praise God for, and how to use Scripture to help us pray. He fleshes out this table:
Prayer:
What it is: work, word, balance
What it requires: grace, fear, helplessness
What it gives: perspective, strength, spiritual reality
Where it takes us: self-knowledge, trust, surrender
Two particular ways of praying Keller mentioned that I found helpful were:
Thomas Cranmer’s prayer structure:
1. The address- a name of God
2. The doctrine- a truth about God's nature that is the basis for the prayer
3. The petition- what is being asked for
4. The aspiration- what good result will come if the request is granted
5. In Jesus' name- this remembers the mediator role of Jesus
and,
The Lord’s Prayer:
Jesus taught us how to pray in Matthew 6. Keller goes through each phrase of this prayer and expands on its meaning and what we’re saying with each section.
It was this exercise that inspired me to rewrite the Lord’s prayer in my own words, from my own pain and struggle with praying. It was a healing and biblical way to process my feelings.
You can read my somewhat unconventional version of the Lord’s Prayer (from 2015) on this website by clicking HERE.
Prayer often seems an inconsequential thing, but it is a vital part to our faith and relationship with God. We must do it even if we don’t feel like doing it.
Keller gives practical examples of how we should properly meditate on Scripture and how that leads us into prayer. He offers suggestions on how to stay in focused prayer. And he centers everything on the gospel and how Jesus’s sacrifice is what has torn the curtain, what has removed the separation of us being able to approach a holy God. That is not insignificant.
This book is a fantastic resource on prayer that I know I will read more than once. The appendix, endnotes and selected annotated bibliography at the end are all helpful and in-depth additions that give credibility and further study on all levels.
Many people like to use prayer journals. Writing down prayers or prayer requests can help us see God’s faithfulness over a period of time.
This prayer and gratitude journal from The Christian Journal Co. is a great option to use if you’re not sure where to start. Not only does it have areas to write down prayer requests, but there is a section for writing down things we are thankful for. Gratitude is such an important part of prayer and our relationship to God so I love that they include this. There isn’t a lot of space for extended prayers in this journal but it can be easily paired with a notebook.
Keller references the subtitle of J.I. Packer’s book on prayer: “Finding Our Way through Duty to Delight.” Prayer is, indeed, a struggle and a journey, but the end is delighting in the Lord, honoring the Lord, and trusting in the Lord.
If you have ever questioned prayer or rejected it altogether, this book is for you and I see no other outcome than for it to change you and enrich your life like it did for me. To know our God is to communicate with him. We can’t shut down prayer.
“Meditation is taking the truth down into our hearts until it catches fire there and begins to melt and shape our reactions to God, ourselves, and the world.”
"No matter how much we suffer, no matter our doubts, no matter how angry we get, no matter how many times we have asked in desperation 'how long?', prayer develops finally into praise. Everything finds its way to the doorstep of praise.... It may take years, decades even, before certain prayers arrive at hallelujahs...but prayer is always reaching toward praise and will finally arrive there." - Eugene Peterson
“The teaching is that our prayers matter- ‘we have not because we ask not’ and yet God's wise plan is sovereign and infallible. These two facts are true at once, and how that is possible is a mystery to us… If we believed that God was in charge and our actions meant nothing, it would lead to discouraged passivity. If on the other hand we really believed that our actions changed God's plan- it would lead to paralyzing fear. If both are true, however, we have the greatest incentive for diligent effort, and yet we can always sense God's everlasting arms under us. In the end, we can't frustrate God's good plans for us.”
Further Reading:
The Songs of Jesus by Tim Keller — a year long journey through Psalms, would be a great way to pray through a book of the Bible
If You Will Ask: Reflections on the Power of Prayer by Oswald Chambers
Praying: Finding Our Way through Duty to Delight by J.I. Packer & Carolyn Nystrom
(in regards to questioning God’s goodness:)
How Long, O Lord: Reflections on Suffering and Evil by D.A. Carson
Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of God for Sinners and Sufferers by Dane Ortlund
If God is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil by Randy Alcorn
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