A Word on Prayer

A couple of weeks ago I had the joy of speaking on the topic of prayer to the students and faculty of Bethlehem College and Seminary. The goal of my message was that we’d learn to love to pray — because I’ve been convinced by my own experience that the only way to have a consistent, active prayer life is by love.

But how do I get people to love to pray? Well, I can’t (which is no surprise, because I can’t achieve any of my goals in preaching, if the goals are worthwhile). 

What, then, does a preacher do?

All I can do is try to show the loveliness of prayer (because discerning the loveliness of an object is always the prerequisite to our loving it).

So I tried to show prayer’s loveliness by explaining three realities of prayer, and the first was that “prayer is the breath of faith.”

In other words, the first step to genuinely embracing the truths about God we’ve learned is to pray them. 

For example, maybe you’ve heard that by faith in Jesus God is your Father. But it’s one thing to hear that, to learn that; it’s a different thing when you pray “Our Father in heaven…” 

Prayer becomes the most basic exercise of faith. It’s the initial enactment of our trust in God. That’s what I mean by the breath of faith. 

And then, just this week, I read a paragraph in a book that doubled down on the same idea. 

In his book, Working the Angles, Eugene Peterson argues that prayer must be in the context of God’s word. Prayer is the right response to God’s revelation. He writes, 

Prayer is not something we think up to get God’s attention or enlist his favor. Prayer is answering speech. The first word is God’s word. Prayer is a human word and is never the first word, never the primary word, never the initiating and shaping word simply because we are never first, never primary. (47)

He goes on,

This massive, overwhelming previousness of God’s speech to our prayers, however obvious in Scripture, is not immediately obvious to us simply because we are so much more aware of ourselves than we are of God. We are far more self-conscious than God-conscious and so when we pray, what we are ordinarily conscious of is that we are getting in the first word with God. But our consciousness lies. (48–49)

This is why it’s so helpful to pray with an open Bible, to let the words of Scripture, like the Psalms, guide our prayers. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we can’t pray at other times — we can, and should (“Pray without ceasing,” Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5:17). But it does mean that we can’t pray as if God has not spoken. Even when you pray in your car, or before a meal, or on the spot when you get a text from a friend, that prayer is never starting the conversation, but always continuing it, always answering. To live in union with Jesus, the Word made flesh, is to live in an ongoing conversation with God.

Let us pray, and be praying.