Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

by Timothy J. Keller

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.

Those who believe the gospel—who believe that they are the recipients of undeserved but unshakable grace—grow in a paradoxically loving yet joyful fear. Because of unutterable love and joy in God, we tremble with the privilege of being in his presence and with an intense longing to honor him when we are there.

In fact, those who would pray fruitfully must come with an attitude that is exactly the opposite. We must be ruthlessly honest about our flaws and weaknesses. We do all we can to avoid the “unreality” of putting on our best face. 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.”

prayer both requires and produces this humility. Prayer brings you into God’s presence, where our shortcomings are exposed. Then the new awareness of insufficiency drives us to seek God even more intensely for forgiveness and help.

“Anyone who stands before God to pray . . . [must] abandon all thoughts of his own glory.”

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

If God’s will is always right, and submission to it is so important, why pray for anything with fervor and confidence? Calvin lists the reasons. 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. 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.

Here is an illustration that might help us think about this. When you flick the light switch, the bulbs illuminate. Does the light switch provide the power for the bulbs? No—that comes from the electricity. The switch has no power in itself, but rather it connects the bulbs to the power. In the same way, our prayers have no virtue to procure us access to the Father. Christ has done that.

Prayers that are in accord with a gracious God, however, can connect us to him. 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.

Luther also believed the address was a call to not plunge right into talking to God but to first recollect our situation and realize our standing in Christ before we proceed into prayer. We are to say to God, “You have taught us to regard you and call upon you as one Father of us all . . . although . . . you could rightly and properly be a severe judge over us.” Therefore, we should start by asking God to “implant in our hearts a comforting trust in your fatherly love.”194 Calvin agrees that “by the great sweetness of this name [Father] he frees us from all distrust.”195

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

This, then, is a “Lordship” petition: It is asking God to extend his royal power over every part of our lives—emotions, desires, thoughts, and commitments.

The reign of God on earth is only partial now, but the fullness of the future kingdom is unimaginable. All suffering, injustice, poverty, and death will be ended. To pray “thy kingdom come” is to “yearn for that future life” of justice and peace, and to ask that “your future kingdom may be the end and consummation of the kingdom you have begun in us.”201

“Grant us grace to bear willingly all sorts of sickness, poverty, disgrace, suffering, and adversity and to recognize that in this your divine will is crucifying our will.”

We may be reticent to make such a bold statement, but now we can discern the importance of the initial address. Unless we are profoundly certain God is our Father, we will never be able to say “thy will be done.” Fathers are often inscrutable to little children. A four-year-old cannot understand many of his father’s prohibitions—but he trusts him. Only if we trust God as Father can we ask for grace to bear our troubles with patience and grace.

If we can’t say “thy will be done” from the bottom of our hearts, we will never know any peace. We will feel compelled to try to control people and control our environment and make things the way we believe they ought to be. Yet to control life like this is beyond our abilities, and we will just dash ourselves upon the rocks. This is why Calvin adds that to pray “thy will be done” is to submit not only our wills to God but even our feelings, so that we do not become despondent, bitter, and hardened by the things that befall us.205

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. Now that the prayer is nearly half over, and our vision is reframed and clarified by the greatness of God, we can turn to our own needs and those of the world.

We come with our needs expectant of positive response, but we do so changed by our satisfaction in him and our trust of him. We do not come arrogantly and anxiously telling him what has to happen. Many things we would have otherwise agonized over, we can now ask for without desperation.

If regular confession does not produce an increased confidence and joy in your life, then you do not understand the salvation by grace, the essence of the faith.

If we retain feelings of hatred in our hearts, if we plot revenge and ponder any occasion to cause harm, and even if we do not try to get back into our enemies’ good graces, by every sort of good office deserve well of them, and commend ourselves to them, by this prayer we entreat God not to forgive our sins.211

Augustine indicates that while the sixth petition is for deliverance from the remaining evil inside us, this seventh petition is for protection from evil outside us, from malignant forces in the world, especially our enemies who wish to do us harm.216

Here our hearts can end with “tranquil repose” in the remembrance that nothing can ever snatch away the kingdom, power, and glory from our heavenly, loving Father.217

Therefore in our prayers, “the words may be utterly different, yet the sense ought not to vary.”218 The Lord’s Prayer must stamp itself on our prayers, shaping them all the way down. There could be no better way to ensure that than Luther’s twice-daily exercise of paraphrasing and personalizing the Lord’s Prayer as introduction to more free-form praise and petition.

Work—Prayer Is a Duty and a Discipline 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. “Overt sin . . . or the glaring inconsistencies which often surprise us in Christian people are the effect of this, or its punishment. . . . Not to want to pray, then, is the sin behind sin.”

We should pray even if we are not getting anything out of it. Imagine that you are rooming with someone and he or she virtually doesn’t speak to you. All she does is leave messages. When you mention it, she says, “Well, I don’t get much out of talking to you. I find it boring and my mind flitting everywhere, so I just don’t try.” What will you conclude? Regardless of how scintillating a conversationalist you are, it’s rude for her not to talk to you. She owes it to her suite mate to at least interact face-to-face. Of course rudeness is far too weak a word to use for a failure to directly address your Maker, Sustainer, and Redeemer, to whom you owe your every breath.

Prayer must be persevering. “I urge you,” wrote Paul to the Christians at Rome, “to join me in my struggle by praying to God for me” (Rom 15:30). Prayer is striving. This means sticking with prayer through the ups and downs of feelings. “Do not say, ‘I cannot pray. I am not in the spirit,’” writes Forsyth. “Pray till y...

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.

In the Garden of Eden, God walked with us (Gen 3:8). To “walk with” someone in the Bible is to have a friendship, because people talk as they walk together. 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.

J. I. Packer observes that once we understand prayer as conversation, we must regularly link thoughtful, scriptural meditation with prayer. Meditation is a bridge between biblical interpretation and study on the one hand and free prayer on the other. Packer’s own practice is “reading Scripture, thinking through what my reading shows me of God, and turning that vision into praise before I go further [into prayer].” He adds that this is a vital means for “knowing God.”228

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

This “taking oneself in hand” can proceed by thinking briefly about some aspect of the theology of prayer. Remember, for example, that we are now adopted, loved children going to our Father. Or remember that we have a great High Priest and Advocate at the right hand of God, so we can approach the throne in confidence. Or remember that we have the Holy Spirit within us, prompting us and helping us to pray. This prepares the heart for prayer.

To pray is to accept that we are, and always will be, wholly dependent on God for everything.

In fact, our helplessness can also be a source of confidence. The famous statement of Jesus to the church in Laodicea—“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me” (Rev 3:20)—is often used to call nonbelievers to have faith in Christ. However, an invitation to dining in ancient times was an offer of friendship. Jesus is calling believers to intimate communion with him—to prayer. Prayer, in this image, is a response to Jesus’ knocking.

In short, if you want to pray, you don’t have to be anxious about whether God will listen. You wouldn’t even be feeling helpless and needy toward God unless he was at your side making you capable of feeling that way, leading you to think of prayer. 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.

Prayer in all its forms—adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and petition—reorients your view and vision of everything. Prayer brings new perspective because it puts God back into the picture. Merely addressing God verbally about our needs, fears, hopes, concerns, questions, perplexities, and sins almost immediately forces us to think differently about them.

How do we actually get ourselves ready for life’s battles? How do we get strong in the Lord? How do we become so spiritually sensitive that we can discern what is really going on in complicated situations? How do we get the assurance of God’s wisdom, love, and power so that we can turn to him and rest in him? At the end of the passage, Paul comes out of the metaphor and says, “And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people” (Eph 6:18). Many interpreters try to list prayer as one of the items in the armor, along with truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and the Word of God. That won’t work, however, because every other item is likened to something like a helmet, sword, or breastplate. When he comes to the end, he just says pray, pray, pray in the Spirit, pray with alertness, pray all kinds of ways, pray all the time.

this. Prayer is the way that all the things we believe in and that Christ has won for us actually become our strength.

237 Through prayer our somewhat abstract knowledge of God becomes existentially real to us. We do not just believe in the glory of God; we sense his greatness. We do not just believe that he loves us; we find our hearts flooded with it.

Not only does prayer require the confession of explicit sins and wrongdoing, we are also to uncover the inward postures, attitudes, perspectives, and inordinate desires that lead us to sins small and large.243 It is a simple fact that the nearer we get to supreme beauty or intelligence or purity, the more we are aware of our own unsightliness, dullness, and impurity.

One of the most striking things John Calvin says about prayer is that it is the main way we receive everything there is for us in Christ: “It remains for us to seek in him, and in prayers to ask of him, what we have learned to be in him.”253 Think about it. We cannot receive Christ and believe on his name (John 1:12–13) except through prayer. Martin Luther wrote that “all of life is repentance” and that is how we grow in grace. But that again is prayer. Our “chief end,” says the Westminster Shorter Catechism, is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” All these things are, at their essence, prayer.

PRAYER What It Is Work: Prayer is a duty and a discipline. Word: Prayer is conversing with God. Balance: Prayer is adoration, confession, thanks, and supplication. What It Requires Grace: Prayer is “In Jesus’ name,” based on the gospel. Fear: Prayer is the heart engaged in loving awe. Helplessness: Prayer is accepting one’s weakness and dependence. What It Gives Perspective: Prayer reorients your view toward God. Strength: Prayer is spiritual union with God. Spiritual Reality: Prayer seeks a heart sense of the presence of God. Where It Takes Us Self-Knowledge: Prayer requires and creates honesty and self-knowledge. Trust: Prayer requires and creates both restful trust and confident hope. Surrender: Prayer requires and creates surrender of the whole life in love to God.

Notice that the tree bears fruit only in season, yet it never loses its leaves. Meditation leads to stability—the tree is an evergreen!—but not to complete immunity from suffering and dryness.

Meditation bears fruit, which in the Bible means character traits such as love, joy, peace, patience, humility, self-control (Gal 5:22ff). Real meditation, then, does not merely make us feel “close to God” but changes our life. As Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner observes, “The tree is no mere channel, piping water unchanged from one place to another, but a living organism which absorbs it, to produce in due course something new and delightful, proper to its kind and to its time.”

is possible for Christians to live their lives with a high degree of phoniness, hollowness, and inauthenticity. The reason is because they have failed to move that truth into their hearts and therefore it has not actually changed who they are and how they live.

world. In his father’s arms, the boy was experiencing his sonship. When the Holy Spirit comes down on you in fullness, you can sense your Father’s arms beneath you. It is an assurance of who you are. The Spirit enables you to say to yourself: “If someone as all-powerful as that loves me like this, delights in me, has gone to infinite lengths to save me, says he will never let me go, and is going to glorify me and make me perfect and take everything bad out of my life—if all of that is true—why am I worried about anything?” At a minimum this means joy, and a lack of fear and self-consciousness.

There are three basic kinds of prayer to God. There is “upward” prayer—praise and thanksgiving that focuses on God himself. We could call this the “prayer of awe.” Then there is “inward” prayer—self-examination and confession that bring a deeper sense of sin and, in return, a higher experience of grace and assurance of love. That is the prayer of intimacy. Finally, there is “outward” prayer—supplication and intercession that focuses on our needs and the needs of others in the world. This prayer requires perseverance and often entails struggle.

Years ago I was preaching on the Lord’s Prayer and commented—rather offhandedly—that since adoration comes before asking for “daily bread,” we need to spend time thanking and praising God for who he is before we go to our prayer list of needs. One woman in my congregation took this to heart and a couple of weeks later related what a difference the advice had made. “Before,” she said, “I would run right to my prayer list and the more I went through all the problems and needs, the more anxious and burdened I would get. Now I’ve started spending time thinking about how good and wise he is, and how many prayers he’s answered of mine in the past. And when I get to my own needs—now I find I can put them in his hands and I feel the burden coming off me rather than on me.” I never forgot her testimony, because she had taken a principle I barely understood myself and had appropriated it in her life.

Praise and adoration are the necessary preconditions for the proper formulation and motivation of all the other kinds of prayer.