Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

by Timothy J. Keller

Cry, ask, and appeal—you will get many answers. Finally, where you do not get an answer, or where the answer is not what you want, use prayer to enable you to rest in his will.

Calvin’s fifth rule is the rule of grace. He urges us to not conclude that following any set of rules could make our prayers worthy to be heard.

The joyful fear, the helplessness yet confidence, are all ways of approaching God that are possible only if our access is not earned but is received as a gift.

If we pray without humility—if we pray filled with demanding impatience—it cuts us off from him. If instead we pray without any confidence or hope of being heard, that also blocks any sense of his presence. Both of these mistakes are failures to pray in Jesus’ name, to come to God on the basis of undeserved mercy. Calvin says this in a passage that has set the course for Christian understanding of prayer for centuries:

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. It is, essentially, to reground our relationship with God in the saving work of Jesus over and over again. It also means to recognize your status as a child of God, regardless of your inner state. God our Father is committed to his children’s good, as any good father would be.

When we pray in Jesus’ name, therefore, we do so with supreme confidence and yet humble dependence on unmerited grace.

Calvin explains that to call God “Father” is to pray in Jesus’ name. “Who would break forth into such rashness as to claim for himself the honor of a son of God unless we had been adopted as children of grace in Christ?”193

Therefore, we should start by asking God to “implant in our hearts a comforting trust in your fatherly love.”194

Luther points to the fact that all baptized Christians have God’s name put upon them. As name bearers they represent a good and holy God, and so we are praying that God keep us from dishonoring the name by which we are called, that he would empower us to become ourselves good and holy.

“What is more unworthy than for God’s glory to be obscured partly by our ungratefulness?” In other words, ingratitude and an indifferent attitude toward God fails to honor his name. To “hallow” God’s name is not merely to live righteous lives but to have a heart of grateful joy toward God—and even more, a wondrous sense of his beauty. We do not revere his name unless he “captivate[s] us with wonderment for him.”198

We are asking God to so fully rule us that we want to obey him with all our hearts and with joy.

Fathers are often inscrutable to little children. A four-year-old cannot understand many of his father’s prohibitions—but he trusts him.

We are not to let our own needs and issues dominate prayer; rather, we are to give pride of place to praising and honoring him, to yearning to see his greatness and to see it acknowledged everywhere, and to aspiring to full love and obedience.

Adoration and thanksgiving—God-centeredness—comes first, because it heals the heart of its self-centeredness, which curves us in on ourselves and distorts all our vision.

Therefore, to pray “give us—all the people of our land—daily bread” is to pray against “wanton exploitation” in business, trade, and labor, which “crushes the poor and deprives them of their daily bread.”

everyone must duck his head and come into the joy of forgiveness only through the low door of humility.

Jesus tightly links our relationship with God to our relationship with others. It works two ways. If we have not seen our sin and sought radical forgiveness from God, we will be unable to forgive and to seek the good of those who have wronged us. So unresolved bitterness is a sign that we are not right with God. It also means that if we are holding a grudge, we should see the hypocrisy of seeking forgiveness from God for sins of our own. Calvin puts it vividly:

Calvin lists two categories of temptations from the “right” and from the “left.” From the right comes “riches, power, and honors,” which tempt us into the sin of thinking we do not need God. From the left comes “poverty, disgrace, contempt, and afflictions,” which tempt us to despair, to lose all hope, and to become angrily estranged from God.213 Both prosperity and adversity, then, are sore tests, and each one brings its own set of enticements away from trusting in God and toward centering your life on yourself and on “inordinate desires” for other things.

American theologian Michael S. Horton has pointed out that Calvin believed “public ministry shapes private devotion, not vice versa.”

Prayer is therefore not a strictly private thing. As much as we can, we should pray with others both formally in gathered worship and informally. Why? If the substance of prayer is to continue a conversation with God, and if the purpose of it is to know God better, then this can happen best in community.

By praying with friends, you will be able to hear and see facets of Jesus that you have not yet perceived.

Augustine came at prayer from the most existential perspective, focusing most on the motives of the heart. This means that the principles of each thinker intersect one another. Also, we must remember Calvin’s own rule against ironclad rules. I fear that many contemporary books on prayer try to give readers a “key” or some kind of experience of “Aha! So that’s the secret of prayer!” Such a thing simply does not exist.

The other extreme is to say only that prayer cannot be reduced to principles, and there’s nothing to say about it other than to try hard and keep at it. But if prayer were completely ineffable, when the disciples asked Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1), Jesus would have responded, “I can’t—it’s just indefinable.”

As we have seen, all prayer is somewhat impure. It is never done with fully proper motives of heart or with language worthy of its object. It is received and answered by God, therefore, only by grace.

Prayer should be done regularly, persistently, resolutely, and tenaciously at least daily, whether we feel like it or not. “The worst sin is prayerlessness,” wrote Peter T. Forsyth.

Prayer is always hard work, and often an agony. We sometimes have to wrestle even in order to pray. “When those hours of the day come in which we should be having our prayer-sessions with God, it often appears as though everything has entered into a conspiracy to prevent it.” We often wrestle in prayer just to concentrate. “Your thoughts flit back and forth between God and the many pressing duties which await you.”226 While God can and will grant times of peace and tranquility, no Christian outgrows the need to struggle and persevere in prayer.

Prayer in Jesus’ name and the power of the Spirit is the restoration of that single most precious thing we had with God in the beginning—free communication with him.

When we comprehend God’s greatness, it leads us to a new grasp of our own sinfulness.

The more we see God’s power, the more we will want to depend on him for our needs.

While it is not at all improper to address the Son or the Spirit, ordinarily prayer will be addressed to the Father with gratitude to the Son and dependence on the Spirit.

One important sign of an engaged heart is awe before the greatness of God and before the privilege of prayer.

This doesn’t mean we can ever take lightly the privilege of approaching “the throne,” however. It is an astonishing right to do so—won at unimaginable cost. This is what we are doing when we pray in Jesus’ name, and we need to remind ourselves of what is happening every time we pray. We should take time and meditate on this truth until it thrills us.

Many of the best books on prayer over the years counsel that, before beginning prayer and meditation, we take ourselves in hand and wake ourselves up to the magnitude of what is going to happen. One suggested we make the following speech to ourselves: God is here, within these walls; before me, behind me, on my right hand, on my left hand. He who fills immensity has come down to me here. I am now about to bow at His feet, and speak to Him. . . . I may pour forth my desires before Him, and not one syllable from my lips shall escape his ear. I may speak to him as I would to the dearest friend I have on earth.

“As far as I can see, prayer has been ordained only for the helpless. . . . Prayer and helplessness are inseparable. Only he who is helpless can truly pray.”

Many people get into situations where they feel so destitute and helpless that they don’t want to pray. Prayer, however, is made for those who have no other recourse, no other resort. In some ways prayer is simply connecting Jesus to your absolute helplessness, your sense of fragility and dependence.

It almost seems that the help of the Spirit is triggered by our helplessness. To pray is to accept that we are, and always will be, wholly dependent on God for everything.

no one even thinks about praying unless God is prompting or leading us to pray by his Holy Spirit.

Merely addressing God verbally about our needs, fears, hopes, concerns, questions, perplexities, and sins almost immediately forces us to think differently about them.

In prayer we may see that we are more loved and cared for than we had felt, and this diminishes our fears. Or we see that we are more foolish and self-absorbed than we thought, and prayer gets rid of our anger and self-pity.

The assurance of God’s love, the promise of the Spirit’s indwelling presence, the knowledge of our pardon, the access to his presence, the power to overcome our sinful habits, the knowledge of our pardon—all these things are abstractions until they are inwardly received for our actual use. They must not only grip our heart but shape our life through the operation of God’s Spirit.

You can’t get more basic than this. Prayer is the way that all the things we believe in and that Christ has won for us actually become our strength. Prayer is the way that truth is worked into your heart to create new instincts, reflexes, and dispositions.

It is fitting, then, that our prayers not be distracted and coldhearted. That is not the best way to honor God.

We have already noted that prayer cannot begin without humility.

Honesty in prayer before an omniscient God would seem to be obvious, but instead we often mouth prayerful platitudes without taking the time or making the effort to expose to God and ourselves our deepest fears, hurts, flaws, and sins.

“Prayer, true prayer, does not allow us to deceive ourselves. It relaxes the tension of our self-inflation. It produces a clearness of spiritual vision. . . . It saps our self-deception and its Pharisaism. . . . So by prayer we acquire our true selves.”

In other words, we cannot truly know God better without coming at the same time to know ourselves better.

If we are not open to the recognition of our smallness and sinfulness, we will never take in his greatness and holiness.

Even our spouse sees only part of who we are. “In relation to God,

however, we are ‘naked and pinned down’ (Heb 4:13). Our masks are gone, pretense is useless: the relationship is not partial, but total.

Prayer is not a passive, calm, quiet practice.