Firmly Connected
Chapter Four of Prayer, entitled “Conversation With God,” is my favorite so far. Tim Keller spent a lot of time at the start of the chapter looking at philosophies of language and how God must be able to speak. He then tied these ideas in with the truth that God speaks to us through His Word.
The first conclusion from this discussion so far is that, when we read the Bible in faith, our time in scripture becomes in itself an act of prayer.
The conclusion is clear. God acts through His words, and the Word is “alive and active” (Heb 4:12), and therefore the way to have God dynamically active in our lives is through the Bible. To understand the Scripture is not simply to get information about God. If attended to with trust and faith, the Bible is the way to actually hear God speaking and also to meet God Himself.
The concept that follows is that the Bible is our language-learning laboratory for discovering how to pray:
It is therefore essential to the practice of prayer to recognize what [Eugene] Peterson calls the “overwhelming previousness of God’s speech to our prayers.” This theological principle has practical consequences. It means that our prayers should arise out of immersion in the Scripture.
[…]
If the goal of prayer is a real, personal connection with God, then it is only by immersion in the language of the Bible that we will learn to pray, perhaps just as slowly as a child learns to speak.
This was an eye-opening thought to me! I had never considered reading God’s Word as an integral part of my prayer life.
My favorite quote from the chapter tied it all together:
Your prayer must be firmly connected to being grounded in your reading of the Word. This wedding of the Bible and prayer and cause your life down in the real God.
Now I see both my reading of the Word and my prayer life in a whole new light.