More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”
Paul tells us that, rather than fear, the Spirit of God fills Christians with confidence in God’s loving attention, analogous to the trust of a little child toward a parent. The Spirit leads us to “cry”—a Greek word, krazdo, that means a loud, fervent cry, which is often used in the Old Testament to denote fervent prayer, as in “Abba, Father.”
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.
In other words, most of the time, we don’t know exactly what outcome we should pray for.
The Spirit enables us to long for the future glory of God and his will, even though we don’t know the specific thing we should pray for here and now.
at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us” (Rom 8:34)—arguing that Jesus’ “intercession” for us at the right hand of God, securing the Father’s help for our needs because of his atoning work, must not be regarded as “mythical any more than may we regard as mythical the resurrection.”
It is because the Son of God was “made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest”
Thus he is the mediator of a new relationship with God that cannot fail because it is based on his faithfulness, not ours
“Prayers in his name are prayers . . . in recognition that the only approach to God . . . the only way to God is Jesus himself.”152
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 ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
When life is going smoothly, and our truest heart treasures seem safe, it does not occur to us to pray.
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. We therefore pray to procure things, not to know him better.
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
John Calvin argues that you may know a lot about God, but you don’t truly know God until the knowledge of what he has done for you in Jesus Christ has changed the fundamental structure of your heart.
the heart’s distrust is greater than the mind’s blindness.
When the gospel does take root in the heart, the sign of it is that Christians are led to “establish their complete happiness in him.”
That is a vivid way of saying that a Christian who understands the
gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit seeks God not primarily to gain reward or avoid punishment (since both are guaranteed in Christ anyway). Christians seek God for themselves.
How is such access and freedom possible? The only time in all the gospels that Jesus Christ prays to God and doesn’t call him Father is on the cross, when he says, “My God, my God, why have you forgotten me?
“Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will bear me up.”
Through it we sense his presence and receive his joy, his love,
his peace and confidence, and thereby we are changed in attitude, behavior, and character.
From here on in, we will try to answer the practical questions. How do we actually build on this foundation? In God and the gospel we have the spiritual resources to pray, but how do we actually do it?
We must see that our heart’s loves are “disordered,” out of order. Things we ought to love third or fourth are first in our hearts. God, whom we should love supremely, is someone we may acknowledge but whose favor and presence is not existentially as important to us as prosperity, success, status, love, and pleasure. Unless at the very least we recognize this heart disorder and realize how much it distorts our lives, our prayers will be part of the problem, not an agent of our healing.
For example, if we look to our financial prosperity as our main source of safety and confidence in life, then when our wealth is in grave jeopardy, we will cry out to God for help, but our prayers will be little more than “worrying in God’s direction.” When our prayers are finished we will be more upset and anxious than before. Prayer will not be strengthening. It won’t heal our hearts by reorienting our vision and helping us put things in perspective and bringing us to rest in God as our true security.
Because ultimately I don’t need status and comfort—I need you as my Lord.”
Imagine an eight-year-old boy playing with a toy truck and then it breaks. He is disconsolate and cries out to his parents to fix it. Yet as he’s crying, his father says to him, “A distant relative you’ve never met has just died and left you one hundred million dollars.” What will the child’s reaction be? He will just cry louder until his truck is fixed. He does not have enough cognitive capacity to realize his true condition and be consoled. In the same way, Christians lack the spiritual capacity to realize all we have in Jesus. This is the reason Paul prays that God would give Christians the
...more
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. There is every reason to believe she accepted his invitation.
To begin with, Luther counsels the cultivation of prayer as a habit through regular discipline. He proposes praying twice daily. “It is a good thing to let prayer be the first business of the morning and the last at night. Guard yourselves against those false, deluding ideas which tell you, ‘Wait a little while. I will pray in an hour; first I must attend to this or that.’”
The Skill of Meditation
After advising meditation, Luther describes how to do it. He uses the 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 a thanksgiving; third, a confession; and fourth, a prayer.”169 This turns every biblical text into “a school text, a song book, a penitential book, and prayer book.” How does this work?
“I am the Lord your God, etc. You shall have no other gods before me,” etc. Here I earnestly consider that . . . my heart must not build upon anything else or trust in any other thing, be it wealth, prestige, wisdom, might, piety, or anything else. Second, I give thanks for his infinite compassion by which he has come to me in such a fatherly way and, unasked, unbidden, and unmerited, has offered to be my God, to care for me, and to be my comfort, guardian, help, and strength in every time of need. . . . Third, I confess . . . for having fearfully provoked his wrath by countless acts of
...more
The value of this exercise is manifold. It addresses one of the great practical difficulties of prayer—distracting thoughts.
The exercise of elaborating on the Lord’s Prayer commands the full mental faculty, and this helps greatly with the problem of giving God full attention.
Finally, praying the Lord’s Prayer, unlike meditation on a passage of Scripture, is actual prayer. It is address to God—with the authority of Jesus’ own words. It brings boldness and comfort and, of course, warms up the heart to slide right into the most passionate prayer for our most urgent concerns.
To summarize this point—Luther says we should start with meditation on a text we have previously studied, then after praising and confessing in accordance with our meditation, we should paraphrase the Lord’s Prayer to God. Finally, we should just pray from the heart. This full exercise, he adds, should be done twice a day.
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.”
Luther believed that all prayer to our Father is enabled by the Spirit of adoption through the mediation of Jesus, the True Son.
To paraphrase Luther’s little treatise—he tells us to build on our study of the Scripture through meditation, answering the Word in prayer to the Lord. As we do that, we should be aware that the Holy Spirit may begin “preaching” to us. When that happens, we must drop our routines and pay close attention.
Calvin calls Christians first of all to have a due sense of the seriousness and magnitude of what prayer is. It is a personal audience and conversation with the Almighty God of the universe. There is nothing worse than to be “devoid of awe.”
“Rat,” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?” “Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”177
We should come to God knowing our only hope is in his grace and forgiveness and being honest about our doubts, fears, and emptiness. We should come to God with the “disposition of a beggar.”
Until we fully acknowledge the chaos within us that the Bible calls sin, we live in what Calvin calls “unreality.”
Prayer brings you into God’s presence, where our shortcomings are exposed.
Calvin writes: “Those who seek him with all their heart will find him (Jer 29:13–14).
If you are smug, blaming others for your problems rather than taking responsibility for what you have done wrong, you will not be seeking God with all your heart. Prayer both requires and empowers the abandonment of self-justification, blame shifting, self-pity, and spiritual pride.
It is to say, “Here’s what I need—but you know best.” It is to leave all our needs and desires in his hands in a way that is possible only through prayer. That transaction brings a comfort and rest that nothing else can bring.
Also, God often waits to give a blessing until you have prayed for it. Why? Good things that we do not ask for will usually be interpreted by our hearts as the fruit of our own wisdom and diligence. Gifts from God that are not acknowledged as such are deadly to the soul, because they thicken the illusion of self-sufficiency that leads to overconfidence and sets us up for failure.
