Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

by Timothy J. Keller

prayer is both conversation and encounter with God.

Prayer, therefore, leads to a self-knowledge that is impossible to achieve any other way.

unless we put a priority on the

inner life, we turn ourselves into hypocrites.

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.

To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule—it is a failure to treat God as God. It is a sin against his glory.

All Christians are expected to have a regular, faithful, devoted, fervent 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.

Orthodox theologian Anthony Bloom, in his famous book Beginning to Pray, says, “The Gospel tells us that the kingdom of God is within us first of all. . . . If we cannot meet God within, in the very depth of ourselves, our chances of meeting Him outside ourselves are very remote. . . . So it is inward we must turn.”

Reformer John Calvin wrote of the divinitatis sensum, the sense of deity that all human beings have. “There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity,”

Jonathan Edwards added that “God is sometimes pleased to answer the prayers of unbelievers,” not because of any obligation but strictly out of his “pity” and “sovereign mercy,”

God is the initiator—“hearing” always precedes asking. God comes to us first or we would never reach out to him.

The power of our prayers, then, lies not primarily in our effort and striving, or in any technique, but rather in our knowledge of God.

for God, speaking and acting are the same thing. The God of the Bible is a God who “by his very nature, acts through speaking.”

the Bible is the way to actually hear God speaking and also to meet God himself.

“Language is spoken into us; we learn language only as we are spoken to.

studies have shown that children’s ability to understand and communicate is profoundly affected by the number of words and the breadth of vocabulary to which they are exposed as infants and toddlers. We speak only to the degree we are spoken to.

We should listen, study, think, reflect, and ponder the Scriptures until there is an answering response in our hearts and minds.

In every case the nature of the prayer is determined by the character of God, who is at once our friend, father, lover, shepherd, and king.

Eugene Peterson says that your starting point for prayer must be immersion in God’s Word.