Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

by Timothy J. Keller

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.

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

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.

Prayer is awe, intimacy, struggle—yet the way to reality.

The love of God does not extinguish desire but fulfills it.

Augustine taught that all people seek happiness, and they attach themselves to things they believe will make them happy. That attachment is experienced as love. The main human problem, however, is that, because of sin, we misidentify what will make us happy. As we have discussed before, the result is disordered loves—loves “out of order.” We either love what we ought not to love, or we fail to love what we ought to love, or we love more what we should love less, or love less what we should love more.309