Tim Keller: Prayer

Tim Keller - Prayer

Notes & Quotes from Tim Keller’s book on prayer

Part 1: Desiring Prayer

ONE: The Necessity of Prayer

On the significance of prayer from Keller’s marriage.

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 is 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 cain. I’m certainly not. We have to pray, we can’t let it just slip our minds.

12 years later and they’ve never once gone a day without praying together. 

Flannery O’Connor the Southern writer was 21 and studying in Iowa, she sought to deepen her prayer life. Over time O’Connor learned that: 

prayer is not simply the solitary exploration of your own subjectivity. You are with Another, and he is unique. God is the only person from whom you can hide nothing. Before him you will unavoidably come to see yourself in a new unique light. Prayer, therefore, leads to a self-knowledge that is impossible to achieve any other way.

What is prayer?

Prayer is the only entryway into genuine self-knowledge. It is also the main way we experience deep change - the reordering of our loves.

On the greatest gift of prayer:

It is remarkable that in all of his writings Paul’s prayers for his friends contain no appeals for changes in their circumstances. 

Why? Paul recognised that the thing his friends needed most, the best and most important thing God could give them - was to know God better:

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 behaviour that would displease or dishonour him.

What we need:

Knowing God better is what we must have above all if we are to face life in any circumstances. 

The integrity of prayer:

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. 

John Owen wrote 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.

Jesus on personal integrity:

The infallible test of spiritual integrity, Jesus says, is your private prayer life.

The Centrality of prayer

In Exodus, prayer was the way Moses secured the liberation of Israel from Egypt. The gift of prayer makes Israel great: ‘What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near is whenever we pray to him?’ Deut. 4:7

On failing to pray:

To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule - it is a failure to treat God as God.

TWO: The Greatness of Prayer

Prayer’s greatness:

Prayer is so great that wherever you look in the Bible, it is there. Why? Everywhere God is, prayer is. Since God is everywhere and infinitely great, prayer must be all-pervasive in our lives. 

Prayer is:

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. 

Part 2 : Understanding Prayer

THREE: What is Prayer?

One 2004 study found that nearly 30% of atheists admitted they prayed ‘sometimes’ (bbc, 2004, feb) and another found that 17% of non-believers in God pray regularly (Pew Forum on Religion & Publich Life, Oct, 2012 ‘Nones on the Rise’). The frequency of prayer increases with age, even among those who do not return to church or identify with any institutional faith (pew forum, 2010).

Prayer’s global reach:

Efforts to find cultures, even very remote and isolated ones, without some form of religion and prayer have failed. There has always been some form of attempt to ‘communicate between human and divine realms.’ There seems to be a human instinct for prayer. Swiss theologian Karl Barth calls it our ‘incurable God-sickness.’

but how people pray varies:

Is prayer mystical or prophetic? Mystical prayer (often found in Eastern religions) is the sort of prayer that aims to become part of god, to discover the divine within ourselves.

German scholar Friedrich Heiler talks about the two types of prayer:

Mystical prayer emphasizes God as mor immanent than transcendent. He is within us and within all things. The main way then to connect to God is to go down into yourself and sense your continuity with the Divine.

Prophetic prayer by contrast emphasises that God is outside us, transcendent above us, holy, glorious and ‘other’. 

Mystical prayer climaxes in tranquility without words, while prophetic prayer finds its final expression in words of praise and an outburst of powerful emotions. While mystical prayer tends toward the loss of the boundary between the self and God, prophetic prayer leads to a much greater sense of the difference between the self and the majestic God - an awareness of sinfulness. 

Keller’s analysis:

Prayer is ultimately a verbal response of faith to a transcendent God’s Word and his grace, not an inward descent to discover we are one with all things and God.

On the global existence of prayer:

From the biblical point of view, the near-universal phenomenon of prayer is not surprising. All human beings are made in the ‘image of God’. Bearing God’s image means that we are designed to reflect and relate to God.

Jonathan Edwards:

God is sometimes pleased to answer the prayers of unbelievers.

Keller explains:

not because of any obligation but strictly out of his ‘pity’ and ‘sovereign mercy’, citing the biblical example of God hearing the cries of the Nineties in Jonah 3 and even of the wicked King Ahab.

A definition of prayer then:

We can define prayer as a personal. communicative response to the knowledge of God.

C.S. Lewis in ‘That Hideous Strength’ describes the change that occurs in one of the characters when they become a Christian and then returning home: The mould under the bushes, the moss on the path, and the little brick border were not visibly changed. But they were changed. A boundary had been crossed.

Listening & Answering:

for all his complaints, Job never walks away from God or denies his existence - he processes all his pain and suffering through prayer.

Job:

The question of the book of Job is posed in its very beginning. Is it possible that a man or woman can come to love God for himself alone so that there is a fundamental contentment in life regardless of circumstances? By the end of the book we see the answer. Yes, this is possible, but only through prayer.

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. 

Prayer is:

John Knox said - an earnest and familiar talking with God

John Calvin - an intimate conversation of believers with God or / a communion of men with God

Meeting a Personal God:

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.

Meeting God through his Word:

We humans may say, ‘let there be light in this room,’ but then we may 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 to achieve 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.’

Prayer through immersion in God’s word

Eugene Peterson:

Peterson reminds us that ‘because we learned language so early in our lives we have no memory of the process.’ and would therefor imagine that it was we who took the initiative to learn how to speak. However, that is not the case. ‘Language is spoken into us; we learn language only as we are spoken into us; we learn language only as we are spoken to. We are plunged at birth into a sea of language… Then slowly syllable by syllable we acquire the capacity to answer: mama, papa,bottle, blanket, yes, no. Not one of these words was a first word. … All speech is answering speech. We were all spoken to before we spoke.

On the role of the Bible in prayer:

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 individualised prayer. A sponge needs to be saturated in water only periodically in order to do its work.

On relationship with God:

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.

Prayer:

Through the Spirit, prayer is faith become audible.

The Spirit of adoption:

This is no ‘emergency flare’ or desperate anxious gamble. 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.

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 savour of a childlike certainty that we may joyfully call you Father, knowing and loving you and calling on you in every trouble.

Prayer:

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.

Aristotle said of the gap between man and the gods:

While it might be possible to venerate and appeases 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.’

God is ‘not only the God on the other side of the chasm, he is the bridge over the gap.’ 

Beautiful hymn containing some great gospel truth:

To see the law by Christ fulfilled,

And hear his pardoning voice

Transforms a slave into a child

and duty into choice

— William Cowper, Olney Hymns

The Cost of Prayer

Prayer turns theology into experience. Through it we sense his presence and receive his joy, his love, his peace and confidence, and thereby we are changed in attitude, behaviour and character. 

PART 3: Learning Prayer

SIX: Letters on Prayer

Augustine on prayer - 

Augustine however argues not only that we can grow in prayer inspire of these difficulties but because of them. He concludes the letter by asking his friend, ‘Now what makes this work [of prayer] specially suitable to widows but their bereaved and desolate condition?’ Should a widow not, he asked, ‘commit her widowhood, so to speak, to her God as her shield in continual and most fervent prayer?’ What a remarkable statement. Her sufferings were her ‘shield’ they defended her from the illusions of self-sufficiency and blindness that harden the heart, and they opened the way for the rich, passionate prayer life that could bring peace in any circumstance. He calls her to embrace her situation and learn to pray.

Luther on prayer - 

Peter Beskendorf was the barber who shaved Luther and cut his hair. One day Peter asked Luther to give him a simple way to pray. Peter was a devout though flawed man. While intoxicated at a family mean, he stabbed his own son-in-law to death. Partly through Luther’s intervention Peter was exiled rather than executed, but he endured difficult final years. However, he took with him one of the great texts on the subject of prayer in all of Christian history. Luther gave Peter a rich but practical set of guidelines for prayer. 

Luther to Peter: 

Cultivate prayer as a habit through regular discipline. Luther proposes we do it twice daily.

Focus your thoughts to warm and engage our affections in prayer. This balances the practice of prayer as duty. He advises ‘recitation to yourself’ of scripture as a way of focusing the mind. 

He then describes how to do Bible meditation. 

He uses metaphor of a garland. ‘I divide each biblical command into four parts, thereby fashioning a garland of four strands. That is I think of each commandment as first, instruction, which is really what it is intended to be, and consider what the Lord God demands of me so earnestly. Second, I turn it into thanksgiving; third, a confession; and fourth a prayer.’ 

After meditation are we ready to pray? 

We could do yes but Luther shares one more exercise… Spiritual ‘riffing’ on the Lord’s Prayer. 

‘Praying the Lord’s prayer focuses us to look for things to thank and praise God for in our dark times, and it presses us to repent and seek forgiveness during times of prosperity and success. It disciplines us to bring every part of our lives to God.’

Luther’s final piece of advice:

He calls believers to essentially keep a lookout for the Holy Spirit. If, as we are meditating on praying, ‘an abundance of good thoughts comes to us, we ought to disregard the other petitions, make room for such thoughts, listen in silence, and under no circumstances obstruct them. The Holy Spirit himself preaches here, and one word of his sermon is better than a thousand of our prayers. Many times I have learned more from one prayer than I might have learned from much reading and speculation. 

7: Rules for Prayer

John Calvin

Spiritual Insufficiency 

We need to be aware of our flaws and weaknesses. 

Counsellors will tell you that the only character flaws that can really destroy you are the ones you won’t admit. 

What if we ask for the wrong thing?

Ask with confidence and hope. Don’t be afraid that you will ask for the wrong thing. Of course you will! God ‘tempers the outcome’ with his incomprehensible wisdom. Cry, ask, and appeal - you will get many answers.

The Danger of Familiarity 

Imagine you are, for the first time, visiting someone who has a home or an apartment near train tracks. You are sitting there in conversation, when suddenly the train comes roaring by, just a few feet from where you are sitting, and you jump to your feet in alarm. ‘What’s that?’ you cry, Your friend, the resident of the house, responds, ‘What was what?’ you answer, ‘That sound! I thought something was coming through the wall.’ ‘Oh that,’ she says. ‘That’s just the train. You know, I guess I’ve gotten so used to it that I don’t even notice it anymore.’ With wide eyes you say, ‘I don’t see how that is possible.’ But it is.

It is the same with the Lord’s Prayer. The whole world is starving for spiritual experience, and Jesus gives us the means to it in a few word. Jesus is saying as it were ‘wouldn’t you like to be able to come face-to-face with the Father and king of the universe ever day, to pour out your heart to him, and to sense him listening to and loving you?’ We say, of course, yes. 

Jesus responds, ‘It’s all in the Lord’s Prayer,’ and we say, ‘In the what?’ It’s so familiar we can no longer hear it. Yet everything we need is within it.