What Is Prayer?
What precisely is prayer? The best and most easy option to outline prayer is as an individual speaking to God. The English Reformer Thomas Becon (1512–1567), whom students have recognized as having authored the very first English Protestant treatise devoted solely to prayer, revealed a catechism in 1548 during which he outlined prayer as “an earnest discuss with God.”1 If Christians confess that God is private, each succesful and desirous of actual relationship together with his creatures, then to speak to him ought to be as pure as it’s essential.
As Campegius Vitringa helpfully famous, “It’s a attribute of God to ‘hear prayer’ (Ps. 65:2).2 We learn in Genesis 4:26 that shortly after the autumn, “individuals started to name upon the identify of the Lord,” and all through Scripture the devoted are described as each listening to from God and chatting with him in return. The Psalms overflow with cries to God comparable to “Give ear to the phrases of my mouth” (Ps. 54:2) and corresponding praises comparable to “On the day I referred to as, you answered me” (Ps. 138:3). Scripture assures us that “when the righteous cry for assist, the Lord hears” (Ps. 34:17). The connection between inclusion amongst God’s individuals and confidence that God will hear one’s prayers could be very tight: it’s exactly as a result of “the Lord has set aside the godly for himself” that David can instantly conclude, “The Lord hears once I name to him” (Ps. 4:3). Certainly, your complete Christian life itself begins with listening to God’s phrase and responding again with phrases of repentance and religion: “Once they heard this they had been reduce to the center, and mentioned to Peter and the remainder of the apostles, ‘Brothers, what we could do?’ And Peter mentioned to them, ‘Repent and be baptized each certainly one of you within the identify of Jesus Christ’” (Acts 2:37–38).
A Coronary heart Aflame for God explores religious formation practices which can be in keeping with the 5 solas, presenting the riches of the Reformed custom for Twenty first-century evangelicals.
God has addressed us via his phrase, and we reply to him via our prayers. Or as William Ames put it, “In listening to the phrase we obtain the Will of God, however in Prayer we provide our will to God, that it could be acquired by him.”3 Scripture and prayer thus work collectively to create a conversational, or “dialogical,” dynamic that lends construction to our communion with God and development in grace.4
As with our extraordinary conversations, our conversations with God in prayer will range in size and depth as our altering circumstances dictate. The English Puritans thus distinguished between “two kindes of prayer”: there have been occasions of set and targeted, or “solemne,” prayer—what occurs, say, throughout our quiet time—after which there have been additionally quick, spontaneous prayers uttered all through the day, “the key and sudden lifting up of the center to God, upon the current event.”5 The latter type of spontaneous praying was understood to be a essential a part of a Christian’s religious life and infrequently understood as each a way to and a mark of a extra basic spirit of prayerfulness that may start to permeate one’s whole life and outlook. Certainly, it’s spontaneous prayer, because the Puritan John Downame (1571–1652) defined, that helps the believer “pray with out ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17):
It isn’t sufficient that we use day by day these set solemn, and extraordinary prayers, however we should, as our Saviour injoyneth us, Pray at all times, and because the Apostle speaketh, frequently, and with out ceasing. That’s, we have to be prepared to wish, so usually as God shall give us any event, . . . craving God’s blessing after we undertake any businesse, and praysing his identify for his gracious help, . . . craving his safety on the approaching of any hazard, and his helpe and energy for the overcoming of any problem which affronteth us in our approach.6
Furthermore, these two sorts of prayer had been understood as mutually reinforcing. They went collectively, and both one would shortly wither within the absence of its counterpart. Spontaneous prayer, it was mentioned, ought to complement and improve our settled prayer “as salt with meat.”7
God has addressed us via his phrase, and we reply to him via our prayers.
As we learn the assorted definitions of prayer scattered all through the Reformed custom, we discover gildings on the thought of prayer as speaking to God, whilst we don’t discover something basically at odds with it. Thus, William Bridge outlined prayer as “that act and work of the soul, whereby a person doth converse with God.”8 Likewise, in line with John Calvin, to enter into prayer is to “enter dialog with God,” a dialog “whereby we expound to him our wishes, our joys, our sighs, in a phrase, all of the ideas of our hearts.”9 Such communication will not be overly formal and impersonal, however relatively, it’s an “intimate dialog” during which believers discover the dwelling God “gently summoning us to unburden our cares into his bosom” and welcoming us “to pour out our hearts earlier than him.”10 Typically the metaphor was barely tweaked, as when Matthew Henry (1662–1714) described the Bible as “a letter God has despatched to us” and prayer as “a letter we ship to him,” however the emphasis was at all times on prayer as a approach for the believer to speak and dialogue with the dwelling, private, and ever-present triune God.11
Such prayer, by its very nature, encompasses the whole lot of the Christian life, shaping and being formed in flip by the breadth and depth of redeemed expertise. “I perceive prayer in a broad approach,” wrote Campegius Vitringa. “It refers to every part we talk to God.”12 Such communication contains our praises, our petitions, and our thanksgivings. It contains expressions of pleasure, lament, and anger. As we talk to God in prayer, we confess our sins, intercede on behalf of others, and cry out to God for his miraculous intervention amid trial and storm. In response to the query “For what issues are we to wish?” the Westminster Bigger Catechism (1647) means that the scope of our prayer ought to be as huge and deep as life itself: “We’re to wish for all issues tending to the glory of God, the welfare of the church, our personal or others’ good.”13
Typically our communication with God is eloquent and profound, as after we take the lofty expressions of the Psalter as our personal; at different moments we “have no idea what to wish for as we ought” and should lean on these Spirit-wrought “groanings too deep for phrases” (Rom. 8:26). But in all moments, our prayers talk the complete vary of our Christian expertise and signify an ongoing dialog with the God in whom “we reside and transfer and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
Notes:
- Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford College Press, 2013), 99.
- Campegius Vitringa, The Religious Life, trans. Charles Okay. Telfer (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018),
116. - William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1639), 244.
- This dynamic additionally characterizes company worship. For a dialogue of the “dialogical precept” in worship, see D. G. Hart and John R. Muether, With Reverence and Awe: Returning to the Fundamentals of Reformed Worship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2002), 95–97.
- William Perkins, The Entire Treatise of the Instances of Conscience (Cambridge, 1606), 282.
- John Downame, A Information to Godlynesse(London, 1629), 209–10.
- William Gouge, quoted in Ryrie, Reformation Britain, 147.
- William Bridge, The Works of the Rev. William Bridge (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845),
2:102. - Calvin, Institutes, 2:853 (3.20.4); John Calvin, Instruction in Religion, trans. and ed. Paul T. Fuhrmann (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1949), 57.
- Calvin, Institutes, 2:854–55 (3.20.5).
- Matthew Henry, Instructions for Each day Communion with God (London: William Tegg, 1866), 12.
- Vitringa, Religious Life, 115
- “Westminster Bigger Catechism,” in Van Dixhoorn, Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms, 402 (q. 184).
This text is tailored from A Coronary heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Method to Religious Formation by Matthew C. Bingham.
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