Today, we’re taking a look at Prayer by Timothy Keller. He provides a rich overview of prayer and tools to create a life that prays with intentionality, awe, intimacy and persistence.
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I recently finished reading Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God by Timothy Keller. I wanted to take today to share this book and some of my thoughts about it with you.
Keller divides the book into five main sections: Desiring Prayer, Understanding Prayer, Learning Prayer, Deepening Prayer and Doing Prayer. In those sections, Keller provides an excellent overview of prayer. He approaches and develops a theology of prayer from Scripture and church history citing Augustine, Martin Luther and John Calvin extensively along with others. He then provides practical wisdom on praying.
Keller’s writing is rich and in-depth but can be a little dense at times. I found myself rereading parts to better understand what Keller said, but it was well worth it. It just wasn’t a book that I could pick up at the end of a long day to relax and unwind. I needed the focus and mental energy to really understand what I was reading from Keller.
For Keller, prayer is both conversation and encounter. A dialogue (NOT monologue) extending from Scripture, the words of God to us. We must listen to God who initiates the conversation and offer up a response to Him. However, prayer is also encounter. Consider this quote from the beginning of chapter 11:
“Prayer is a conversation that leads to encounter with God. As we have seen, the Westminster Larger Catechism acknowledges that this ‘working and quickening in our hearts’ does not take place ‘in all persons, nor at all times, in the same measure’ Nevertheless, that is our goal. In John Owen’s treatment of meditation, the third stage anticipates a character-forming experience of God’s presence and reality.”1
I found this book extremely helpful in understanding (1) why we can pray and (2) how to develop a praying life.
Throughout the book, Keller continually remarks that prayer is both duty and delight. I think for many of us that it is typically more duty than delight. Prayer can be boring. Stale. A chore. Another box simply to check off.
Sometimes it is. And we must be faithful to pray even when we don’t feel it.
But we should also have a desire to pray! Rather than always dragging our feet into prayer, there should also be times when we’re running into it full of joy and excitement, expectation and longing.
I found Keller’s dissection of why we can pray—including what prayer is and who we pray to—extremely beneficial in increasing my desire to pray and shifting it solely from duty to delight as well.
Keller’s insights on how to approach pray are also very helpful in developing a fruitful, consistent and practical prayer life. However, with that said, what Keller provides are tools. He provides a framework for each of us to build upon. We must avoid the danger of turning it into a ritualistic or legalistic formula which Keller expresses clearly time and again throughout the book.
The how-to’s on prayer that Keller shares serve as guides and markers. Our paths will have similarities and differences when it comes to prayer. However, these guides that Keller provides are meant to help keep us on course and give us direction when it comes to furthering our intimacy with our Father through prayer.
There is the one place where I would differ or expand on from Keller, I suppose. Keller’s discussion on prayer primarily seems to concern verbal prayer. I think prayer consists of our entire lives—words, thoughts and actions.
Let me be clear that I am in no way devaluing verbal prayer. It is so necessary. I know for myself it is easy to pray in my head or to journal out my prayers. Sometimes there are situations where I can’t pray out loud. Sometimes writing helps me to focus my mind and stay present to the moment.
But speaking our prayers out loud does something different. There is a certain vulnerability that praying out loud provides and with that vulnerability comes greater intimacy with the Lord. There is a certain power, or consummation in the language of C.S. Lewis, in verbally speaking out your fears, hopes, dreams, desires, joys, disappointments and sorrows before the Lord. Fears are taken from the darkness to the light. Joys from inner delight and satisfaction to outward praise and worship. Dreams from secret, unfulfilled longings to possible realities.
But with that said, I still think prayer goes beyond the verbal to the non-verbal, to our actions as well. It’s easy enough to understand our words and thoughts as prayer. Actions are prayer though too. Actions speak and sometimes they speak louder than words.
Paul told the church at Rome, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” But from James, we learn that faith without action is dead, faith and action should work together and action makes faith complete and fruitful.
We need both words and actions, faith and deeds. We can say with our mouths and in our minds that we believe, but we must also live it.
The way we live our lives speaks volumes. Don’t get me wrong. Our words are important but so are our actions. With both, we speak about who we believe God to be; what we believe to be good, beautiful, true and lovely; whether or not we truly trust God and so on. Both words and actions can be prayer and so both are important.
In that regard, I think reflection is an essential component of prayer that isn’t touched on in the book. Our actions speak. To consider what we are saying with what we do, we have to take time throughout the day or at the end of the day to reflect on our actions.
All of this to say that Keller’s book Prayer is fabulous and rich but not the definitive or only work on prayer you should read. I think all of us could stand to learn more about prayer, and Keller does a fantastic job of drawing on Scripture and examining the thoughts on and traditions of prayer throughout church history. I think any believer could read this and take away at least something, if not some things. I highly recommend it! You can grab your copy at the link below.
If you want to grow in your prayer life, we recommend Prayer by Timothy Keller. He provides an extensive, rich overview of prayer and offers frameworks and tools to create a life that prays with intentionality, awe, intimacy and persistence.
Footnotes:
1Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 165.
Author:
Hi, I’m Keagan! Some of my friends call me “Keags” though! My wife, Charity, is the C to my K. I am loved by Jesus and am in love with Jesus! I am passionate about others fully knowing and loving Jesus and living life in His unforced rhythms of grace. Read more of my writing here.
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