What Is Prayer?

Why Prayer?

I started thinking about doing a blog series on prayer back in 2021.  I gathered resources that then just sat on my bookshelves for the next few years.  Other ideas came to me, and I ran with those instead.  The topic of prayer always sat in the back of my mind, though.  

During Christmas break, I looked ahead to the coming year to plan upcoming projects, schedule family commitments, anticipate goals I wanted to make progress on, and, most of all, plan my writing projects for the year.  The last few blog projects have all been series that required a great deal of planning and research.  Two things I love, don’t get me wrong.   But I wanted to have space for other writing projects this year, and I knew I needed a break for my mental health as well.  So I wasn’t planning on doing a series at all.  

Yet here we are, at the beginning of a year-long series on prayer.  God brings things around at just the right time.  I’ve been hesitant to approach the series because I just do not feel equipped to even broach the subject.  Prayer should be a regular practice in the life of a Christian, but while it’s easy to say just talk to God, the practice is a little more difficult.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll get distracted, feel like I don’t have enough time, or feel like all I do is ask for things or complain.  It seems like prayer should be more than that.

One lesson I’ve been learning recently (don’t worry, this will probably be a lifelong lesson for me) is that I don’t need to have it all together all the time.  It seemed like God was suggesting the same for this series, so the prayer series is a discovery series.  You and I will be learning together about this simple yet mysterious practice.

For this first post, I will share some key takeaways from Timothy Keller’s book Prayer.  Then I will share a prayer practice based on themes and ideas from the book: praying the Lord’s prayer.

The Book

Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God by Timothy Keller (2014)

The book is broken into five parts: Desiring Prayer, Understanding Prayer, Learning Prayer, Deepening Prayer, and Doing Prayer.  

One idea that stood out to me early on was when Keller examined some of Paul’s letters and the prayers he prayed for his friends and the churches.  Many of the believers in Paul’s time faced extreme persecution and dire circumstances, but Paul never prayed for those circumstances to change.  Instead, Paul prayed that they might know God better.

This idea resonated deeply with me, possibly because that was the whole premise of my covenant series.  The covenants were promises God made with humans, so that we might know Him.  Additionally, I was forced to examine my own prayer life, and I knew I did not pray with the focus of knowing God better.  Keller writes, “[P]rayer is simply a recognition of the greatness of God” (26).  

Prayer seems to be instinctual for humans.  We see the practice in religions worldwide, and even non-believers or non-religious people will pray.  Prayer is an attempt to communicate with the divine, but it is also more than that.   

Keller’s definition tells us that prayer is a “personal, communicative response to the knowledge of God” (45).  Thus, our knowledge of God impacts the way we pray.  Keller goes on to describe prayer as a “continuation of a conversation God has started” (50).  He started the conversation when He revealed Himself to us through creation itself and more specifically through His Word.  We cannot separate knowing God and talking with God from His Word.  

Why does God want to talk to us, though? The thought is truly mind-boggling.  The idea comes down to the fact that our God is relational.  The trinitarian unity within Himself shows us that He is relational.  He wants to share a relationship with us.  I love how Keller says that “[God] wants to share the joy he has.  Prayer is our way of entering into the happiness of God himself” (68).  I won’t lie–that sounds amazing.  

Through the Advent and Christmas seasons, I kept coming back to Psalm 16:11: “You reveal the path of life to me;/In your presence is abundant joy/at your right hand are eternal pleasures.”  This verse immediately came to mind while reading Keller’s thoughts on prayer.  In God’s presence is abundant joy, and how do we enter into the presence of God? Through prayer.

Keller continues his discussion of prayer by reviewing the work of theologians such as Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin.  For these, Keller describes how they describe prayer and what they suggest for how to pray.  He repeatedly returns to Martin Luther’s example of praying through the Lord’s Prayer, and we will look at this in the practice section.

Keller ends his book by examining the three basic kinds of prayer: (1) praise and thanksgiving, (2) self-examination and confession, and (3) supplication and intercession.  He describes praise as motivating all the other types of prayer (189).  He describes the progression of prayer this way: “The more we attend to God’s perfect holiness and justice, the more readily we will see our own flaws and confess them.  Seeing God’s greatness also leads to supplication.  The more we sense his majesty and the more we realize our dependence on him, the more readily we will go to him for every need” (189-190).  To approach God in prayer, we need a right understanding of our own state.

The book of Psalms has long been used as the church’s prayer book, and for good reason.  We can find every imaginable emotion and state in the psalms.  Regardless of what we face, we can find comfort in the psalms.  When we struggle to find words of our own, we can borrow the psalmists’ words. King David writes in Psalm 51: “Lord, open my lips,/and my mouth will declare your praise./You do not want a sacrifice, or I would give it;/you are not pleased with a burnt offering./The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit./You will not despise a broken and humbled heart, God” (15-17). We see how we need to approach God in prayer–with a humble attitude and knowledge of our own sin before the holiness and might of God. Because of Christ, we are not merely allowed to draw near to God, but encouraged as dearly loved children. 

We start with praise because through praise and adoration, we can love Him more rightly and completely.  Thanksgiving is a branch of praise that reminds us of our dependence on God.  We must praise and thank God because if we do not, we would “rob God of the glory due him, but the assumption that we are keeping our lives going robs us of the joy and relief that constant gratitude to an all powerful God brings” (197).  Praise and thanksgiving help us to put ourselves and God in the right perspective.

Following praise is self-examination and confession.  We must recognize our own sin, but it need not lead to self-punishment.  Instead, we can know that because Christ died for us, we are no longer condemned for our sin.  Sin has a cost, and it is death.  We cannot forget the gravity of that. Yet we can still rejoice because through Christ, we are brought into a relationship with God.  Remembering the cost of our sin, though, can help us confess our sins and reject them, leading to transformed lives.

The final form of prayer is supplication, wherein we pray for ourselves, others, and the world. We must be careful not to tell God how we think things should be done.  This type of prayer, though, can also be how we “participate with God in his work in the world” (223).  We are allowed to ask God for our desires, but we need to remember this is still a conversation. We can talk about the reasons for our desires, but we also need to humbly place our trust in God because ultimately, what He wills is infinitely better than what we can imagine.  Keller suggests, “we should discipline ourselves to connect each petition to what we know about God, but we should also ask ourselves what our petition tells us about our own motives, our own loves, and even our own sins and weaknesses” (229).  We can ask, then rest in confidence that God truly wants what’s best for us.

A Practice - Praying the Lord’s Prayer

Saying the Lord’s Prayer in church is one of my earliest memories of church.  It is one of the first things I ever memorized. I love how it sounds when the church as one prays these words back to God.  But the prayer’s very familiarity can work against us.  

Below, I have Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer.  For each line of the prayer, I will outline ways you can use the format to guide your own prayer, drawing on Timothy Keller’s ideas and also MaryKate Morse’s (A Guidebook to Prayer).

“This, then, is how you should pray:

‘Our Father in heaven,

-Pray in God’s name, remembering His position as our Sovereign Lord and also Loving Father.

hallowed be your name, 

-Pray that God be glorified throughout the world. Keller writes, “It is a request that faith in God would spread throughout the world, that Christians would honor God with the Christ-likeness or holiness of their lives, and that more and more people would honor God and call on his name” (111).

your kingdom come,

-Pray for God’s rule in our lives, that we love and obey Him.  Pray for the future kingdom where God renews all things under His perfect rule.

your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

-Pray with humility to submit to God’s will rather than trying to control all things. Pray for obedience to His will.

Give us today our daily bread.

-The previous three requests recognize God “as our true food, wealth, and happiness” (114).  Now, we pray for our needs before God with a heart centered on Him.

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

-Morse writes, “Receiving forgiveness…then reciprocating by freely offering it to others is the most radical idea in God’s kingdom.  Forgiveness is not just a right.  It is a responsibility” (96).  

-Our confession should increase our confidence and joy because it relies on God’s grace working in our lives.

And lead us not into temptation,

-Pray to not entertain the idea of sin and entering back into it.  This does not mean that God is the one tempting us. This is a prayer for “deliverance from the remaining evil inside us” (117).

but deliver us from the evil one.’”

-Pray “for protection from evil outside us, from malignant forces in the world, especially our enemies who wish to do us harm” (117).

~Matthew 6:9-13