Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

by Timothy J. Keller

We are told that Jesus Christ stands as our mediator so that we, though undeserving in ourselves, can boldly approach God’s throne and cry out for our needs to be met (Heb 4:14–16; 7:25).

seeking God’s kingdom must include prayer to know God himself.

if we don’t enjoy God supremely with all our being, we are not truly honoring him as Lord.7

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.

To love our success more than God and our neighbor hardens the heart, making us less able to feel and to sense.

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.

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

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.

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.

We cannot go into God’s presence unless we are dependent on Christ’s forgiveness and his righteousness before God, not on our own.

Your prayer must be firmly connected to and grounded in your reading of the Word.

“We must first hear the Word, and then afterwards the Holy Ghost works in our hearts; he works in the hearts of whom he will, and how he will, but never without the Word.”

We would never produce the full range of biblical prayer if we were initiating prayer according to our own inner needs and psychology.

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.

The more clearly we grasp who God is, the more our prayer is shaped and determined accordingly.

God speaks to us in his Word, and we respond in prayer, entering into the divine conversation, into communion with God.

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.

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.

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.

We can only be confident that God is our father if we come to him through the mediation of Christ, in Jesus’ name.

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.

Jesus paid the price so God could be our father.

if we have made God our greatest love, and if knowing and pleasing him is our highest pleasure, it transforms both what and how we pray for a happy life.

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.

We are to trust in him even when things are not going as we wish them to go.

One of the purposes of prayer is to bring our hearts to trust in his wisdom, not in our own.

God invites us to do so and promises to answer prayers—because he is good and our loving heavenly Father.184 Also, God often waits to give a blessing until you have prayed for it.

There are many goods that God will not give us unless we honor him and make our hearts safe to receive them through prayer.

use prayer to enable you to rest in his will.

To pray in Jesus’ name means to come to God in prayer consciously trusting in Christ for our salvation and acceptance and not relying on our own credibility or record.

When we feel most completely helpless, we should be more secure in the knowledge that God is with us and is listening to our prayer.

we are to meditate on the truth until our heart’s affections are stirred and we find ourselves desiring the service of God.

unless we know that God is the one thing we truly need, our petitions and supplications may become, simply, forms of worry and lust.

You can’t delight in the law of the Lord without understanding Jesus’ whole mission.

That is the height of God’s love. He is going to give us the same thing that fills his heart with infallible joy from all eternity. He is going to show us his glory, and he is going to give us that glory.

Jesus fulfilled the conditions of the covenant so we can enjoy the unconditional love of God. Because of the Cross, God can be both just toward sin and yet mercifully justifying to sinners.