10 Questions on Prayer with Tim Keller
Question 1: Prayerlessness
Among Christians today, how
widespread is prayerlessness — and what does that reveal about our spiritual
health?
We
know from empirical secular studies that everyone in our Western society today
has less solitude. There is less and
less of our days or our months or our weeks in which we are unplugged, when we
are not listening to something or talking to somebody or texting. This is due
to the pervasiveness of social media, the Internet, and various
sorts of electronic devices. In the past, most people
couldn’t avoid solitude. But now there isn’t any.
This
is anecdotal, but everybody I talk to seems so busy, and is communicating so
incessantly, and around the clock, that I do think there is more and more
prayerlessness. There is less and less time where people go into a
solitary place to pray. And I am sure that we are
more prayerless than we have been in the past, and that says our
spiritual health is in freefall.
Question 2: Praying the Psalms
Your
new book is clear: a profitable prayer
life is impossible without solitude, but it’s also impossible without God’s
word. You explain a time in your life when you were driven by desperation to
pray, and so you opened the Psalms and prayed through them. Explain how you did
this and what you learned from this season.
I am glad to talk about that. I came to see that the
Psalms are extremely important for prayer. Perhaps that is because I read a
book some years ago by Eugene Peterson called Answering
God. He makes a strong case that we
only pray well if we are immersed in Scripture. We learn our
prayer vocabulary the way children learn their vocabulary — that is, by getting
immersed in language and then speaking it back. And he said the prayer book of
the Bible is the Psalms, and our prayer life would be
immeasurably enriched if we were immersed in the Psalms.
So that was the first step. I realized I needed to do that, but I didn’t know
how.
Then I spent a couple of years studying the Psalms.
At one point, I realized that there were a fair number of the Psalms that
seemed repetitious or difficult to understand, so I couldn’t use them in
prayer. So I decided to work through all 150 of them. I used Derek
Kidner’s little commentaries on
the Psalms (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries), Alec
Motyer’s commentary on
the Psalms (The New Bible Commentary, 21st century edition), and Michael
Wilcock’s commentaries on
the Psalms (Bible Speaks Today).
I
worked through all 150 Psalms and wrote a small outline and a small description
of what I thought the Psalm was basically about, and key verses that I thought
were useful for prayer. Using nine-point font, I basically broke out all 150
Psalms on about 20 pages, which I now use in the morning when I pray.
By the way, I use the Book of Common Prayer schedule. I read Psalms in the morning
and the evening, and then I pray. Sometimes I actually pray the psalm, but many
times I just read the psalm and then pray. I do this morning and evening and
get through all 150 Psalms every month. So that is what I learned and that is
what I do now.
I love this intentional and disciplined
approach. I presume over time you found Peterson’s point to be true, that
this practice shaped your prayer language?
Yes.
That is the reason why you don’t have to literally take the psalm and turn it
into a prayer, though that can often be powerful. Just reading all the Psalms
every month all the way through, and then praying after reading a psalm, changes
your vocabulary, your language, your attitude.
On
the one hand, the Psalms actually show you that you can be unhappy in God’s
presence. The Psalms, in a sense, give you the permission to pour out your
complaints in a way that we might think inappropriate, if it wasn’t there in
the Scriptures. But on the other hand, the Psalms demand
that you bow in the end to the sovereignty of God in
a way that modern culture wouldn’t lead you to believe.
Alec
Motyer said the Psalms are written by people who knew a lot less
about God than we do, and loved God a lot more than we do.
And by that, he meant that because they didn’t know about the cross, there are
a number of places where you could say they don’t know as much about God’s
saving purposes as I do now. But, he says, even though many of the psalmists
don’t know God as well as we do, they loved God more than we do.
Question 3: Meditation
Throughout your new book on prayer, you warn readers about moving
from Bible study to prayer, skipping over one crucial step in the middle — meditation.
Why are we quick to skip right over meditation?
It’s possible that we are quick to miss this step
because we live in a culture that doesn’t encourage solitude and
reflection. It is also possible that evangelicalism
is a little bit too shaped by the rationality of Rationalism.
So our approach to the Bible sometimes is to get the meaning through the
grammatical, historical exegesis, and once you have got the meaning, that’s all
you need, and you don’t have to work it into your
heart.
I’m
concerned about approaches to reading the Bible that say: read the Bible, but
don’t think about theology, just let God speak to you. I’m concerned about
that, because God speaks to you in the Bible, after you do the good exegesis
and you figure out what the text is saying. Martin Luther believed you need to
take the truth that you have learned through good exegesis, and once you
understand that, you need to learn how to warm your heart
with it — get it into your heart.
And it diminishes our prayer life that our hearts
are cold when we get into prayer. Without meditation, you
tend to go right into petition and supplication, and
you do little adoration or confession. When
your heart is warm, then you start to praise God and then you confess. When
your heart is cold, which it is if you just study the Bible and then jump to
prayer, you are much more likely to spend your time on your prayer list and not
really engage your heart.
So a key to a fruitful prayer is the conviction that the Bible was really and truly
written to me personally.
Yes, it is. Deuteronomy
29:29 says,
“The secret things belong to God, but the things that are revealed are revealed
that you may do them.” The Bible is the part of God’s will and mind that he
wants us to know. But the way you determine what he is saying in the Scriptures
is through sound theological exegesis. But then, once you discern the meaning,
you have to work it into your heart to make sure it does become a personal word to you and
not just a concept you hold with the mind.
Question 4: Prayer Distractions
Last December on Twitter you were asked, “Why do you think young
Christian adults struggle most deeply with God as a
personal reality in their lives?” You replied, “Noise and distraction. It is
easier to Tweet than pray!” Sadly true. And we are fickle people. For all the
many benefits of digital technology, we are tempted to get distracted from
prayer by tweets and our Facebook feeds and texts and emails on our phone. In a
sense, we want to be distracted! You’ve already identified this as a problem
earlier. So what counsel would you give to a Christian who finds himself or
herself lured to distractions when they are trying to pray?
I may have just answered the question. I mean, there
is no way around just simply saying: This is something that I must spend time doing.
In
the book, I tell the story of how my wife used an illustration on me: If the
doctor said you have a fatal condition, and unless you take this medicine every
night from 11:00 to 11:15, and swallow these pills, you will be dead by
morning. If that was the case, she said, you would never miss. You would never
say, I was too tired, or, I didn’t get to it, or, I was watching a movie, and I
didn’t leave time. You never would do that.
And so when people ask: How
am I going to get to prayer? How am I going to deal with [distractions]? I
say, maybe you don’t believe you need prayer. And that is a theological,
spiritual problem, and there is nothing I can do except tell you to
get your heart and your mind straight on that.
Having said that, once you determine you must do it, inside your prayer time, it is
hard sometimes to keep from being distracted. That is where meditation helps. Martin
Luther said that if you warm your heart through meditation on the Scriptures,
so that your heart starts to really warm up, you go into prayer because you want to pray, because you want to praise him for what you see, and you want to confess
your sins.
Meditation on a passage of Scripture keeps me from
being distracted in prayer. You say: Okay, what does it mean to me? How do I praise God for this? How do I confess for
this? How do I petition for this? Meditation
warms the heart and absorbs the mind so I am not as distracted.
So
the answer is twofold. You must decide prayer is something you must do, and
there is nothing I can do to help you with that. But once you are inside,
meditation keeps your mind from wandering.
Question 5: Unhappy Before God
Back to being unhappy in the presence of God: In the book you talk
about lamenting to God — complaining to God — for the way things are going on
earth. We know God is in control of all things. So when and how should we
express lament in prayer, like the Psalmist? In other words, how do good
Calvinists complain?
My belief is that Calvinists do understand that
though God’s decree is the final reason for everything that happens, there is a
concurrence. That is, God’s will and our responsible
choices fit together. God predestines things through
our choices. You don’t want to flatten things so that basically you believe our
efforts and our crying out and our petitions and our actions really don’t
matter. According to Scripture they do. Both Don Carson’s book Divine
Sovereignty and Human Responsibility and
J.I. Packer’s classic Evangelism
and the Sovereignty of God point
out the fact that those are two things that seem to be in tension in our mind,
but they are not in God’s understanding of things.
We
must not flatten one for the other, or say because it is all God’s will anyway,
there is no reason to cry out. God is going to do what he wants to do. So why
pray?
If
you take a kind of flat Calvinism and say God is in control of all things, then
all prayer would be useless. So if prayer is not useless, why would laments be
useless? If asking God for your daily bread isn’t useless, why would crying out
and complaining about what is going on be useless? It wouldn’t be. So you must
keep these things together.
So what does this look like for you? Can you share with us a
season in your life when you did complain to God in prayer? What does your
lament look like?
When
people die, and it sure looks like it doesn’t seem to help the kingdom at all.
That goes back a long way with me. The Christian church doesn’t have great
leaders growing on trees. And when something comes along and takes a leader out
of commission, either through death or something else, I can struggle with that
and say: God, it doesn’t look like you know what you are doing.
Now
that is a horrible thing to say, but the Psalms are filled with that kind of
thing. So there have been times in my life in which I have wrestled and
struggled and said: You know, Lord, thy will be done, and you do know best, but
honestly I am struggling. This doesn’t make any sense to me.
Question 6: Entering God’s
Happiness
The book is drenched in God-centered joy. On page 68, you write, “Prayer is our way of entering
into the happiness of God himself.” Unpack that sentence for us.
I bring that up in the place where I am talking
about Jonathan Edwards’s great work The
End for Which God Created the World. Edwards’s thesis
there, which, of course, John Piper has been hammering at, and promoting in his
own way for decades, is that God is happy because he enjoys his
own glory. That is trinitarian — the Father,
the Son, the Holy Spirit are glorifying each other.
But
the fact is that God is infinitely happy because of who he is, and he is just
happy in his own glory. When you are especially glorifying him, when you are
adoring and glorifying him, that is when you, in a sense, are entering into his
happiness, because you are doing what he does, and you are experiencing the
same joy he has. So that is where I talk about that.
Question 7: Praying to a Father
We have passages like Luke
11:11–13 that seem to say a fruitful
prayer life requires a foundational conviction that God is my Father, he is
totally for me, without hesitation on his part, he is wholly for my good. Just
how key is this conviction for our prayer life?
It has to be foundational or Jesus wouldn’t have
started the Lord’s Prayer with the words “Our Father.” Some Bible scholar may
find an exception to what I am about to say here, but I don’t think Jesus ever addressed
God without calling him Father.
And so it must be foundational. And I would say it is
foundational because in the word Father — that you are my Father — is the
gospel in miniature. If God is my boss or my
employer, then even though he might be a good boss or a good employer;
nevertheless, in the end, he is not unconditionally committed to me. If I act
up, he may give me a break or two, but eventually my boss will terminate me.
And
so if I forget that God is my Father, I
may come to him in prayer in a mercenary way, saying: I am going to do this and
this and this, and now you owe me this and this and this. First,
that destroys the ability to adore God. You are basically in petition.
Secondly, it makes prayer a way of manipulating God.
I have three sons, and growing up they were always
at different places. But if one of them was acting up, if one of them was
actually being a little more disobedient, a little more rebellious or something
like that, as a father my heart went out to him more. It actually got me more
involved with him, because I am not his boss, I am his father. And so when I
know that when I call God Father I know I am coming in Jesus’s name. I
am coming only because of God’s grace. I know because Jesus died for me, now
God is committed to me.
By
the way, to say that God is my Father and I can always know that
he will hear me and I can rest and I can adore him, that doesn’t mean I can sin
away. And the reason is, of course, that if you break
your boss’s rules, that doesn’t hurt your boss as much as if you break your
father’s rules, because that is trampling on your father’s heart.
So I would say calling God Father means, on the one hand, I’m assured of
grace and assured that he is always going to hear me. So that makes my
petitions stronger. But on the other hand, it also means that I have to confess
my sins because this wonderful God who has done all this for me and has brought
me into his family at infinite cost of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, that I
need to obey him because of his good grace.
So to call God Father enhances everything you do in prayer.
If you don’t know that God is your Father, it flattens and reduces and thins
out every prayer.
Question 8: Prayer and
Self-Knowledge
Here is perhaps the thing I was least expecting to learn, and
found most surprising to see in your book. You say prayer gives us an accurate
knowledge of ourselves. Explain this. How does prayer lead to self-knowledge?
C.S. Lewis gives an image. If you are a proud
person, you will never be able to see God, because a proud person looking down
on everyone cannot see something that is above him, bigger than him. And from
that image, I get that it is in God’s presence that I
learn humility. I really don’t know how sinful I
am unless I am in the presence of a holy God. That is what
happened to Isaiah. When Isaiah is in the presence of the “Holy, holy, holy
God” in Isaiah 6, what is the first thing he says? He does not say: “Oh, you
are so holy.” He says, “I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah
6:5). So right away, he senses his sin just like the
brighter a light is, the more you can see the dirt on your hands.
The
more beautiful a person is, the more we unbeautiful people see that we are not
good looking. In other words, when you get close to superlativeness, you see
your flaws. And so there is absolutely no way that you will really
existentially know that you are sinner, and know what is wrong with you, unless
you draw near to a holy God in prayer.
Is this why we don’t pray? We don’t want to see the dirt on us?
Yes.
Prayer is humbling. For example, if I
am really upset, it is hard for me to stay upset when I get in God’s presence,
because I say: Lord, you are wise, and I really don’t need to be this upset.
You know what you are doing. It is hard to stay on a high horse and be
self-righteous and then turn around and pray. It just knocks you off your horse
right away.
Question 9: Prayers That Don’t
Work
In passages like James
4:3, we are told there’s a type of prayer that doesn’t work, an
idol-centered prayer, asking for something with wrong motives. Can you explain
this? What type of prayer doesn’t work?
When
James talks about prayers in which you are asking for something
selfishly or just to spend on selfish desires, I would say this
would be a sub-heading under an even bigger heading.
God
is not going to give you something that is bad for you, just
like I, as a father, wouldn’t give my children something they ask for if they
don’t realize it would not be safe and they would probably hurt themselves.
J.I. Packer in his
book on prayer actually
says that ultimately there is no such thing as unanswered prayer. And even
John Calvin says that God grants our prayer even if he does not always respond
to the exact form of our request. That is a pretty
amazing thing for Calvin to say.
So
what Packer and Calvin are saying is that we might ask for
something that is just not good for us, and God, being a good Father, tries to
give us what we would have asked for if we knew everything he knew, or give us
what we are after even though he won’t give it in the form that we ask for.
Now
that is the general heading of things that are bad for us. But inside,
there are some things that we are asking for with bad motives. We
don’t know about it at the time. It could be selfish or proud or maybe there
are things that assume an overblown assessment of our own gifts. And
those things that are actually badly motivated, God particularly can’t give us
because that would just fuel pride. And so I would say
that is a sub-heading. It is something that is not good for us.
Now
you could ask for something that is not good for you with the best of motives.
You are not being selfish. It is not idol-driven. It is just unwise,
and he is not going to give it to you. But then the idol-driven
kinds of requests would even be worse and he just simply won’t do it.
Question
10: The New Book
Of course, there are a lot of books on prayer, and some especially
good ones. So what do you think will surprise readers about your book? Or what
do you think makes your book on prayer unique?
I
will give you three, and I think people will probably come away with at least
one of these three.
First,
it is a more comprehensive book. The reason I wrote it was because there is a
lot of great books on prayer, but the books on prayer either go into the
theology of prayer or they go into the practice of prayer or they troubleshoot
it. And I didn’t have one book I could give to people that was basically
covering all the bases — a biblical view of prayer, the theology of prayer, and
methods of prayer. So some people might say it’s balanced and comprehensive,
but not too long.
Second,
and this might be surprising, I really go deeply into John
Owen, not only his book on the role
of the Holy Spirit in prayer, but also his book on the grace
and duty of being spiritually minded. John Owen is
mystical. He really believes that you can have a
faith-sight of Jesus Christ — really see the glory of God, not with your
physical eyes, but with the eyes of the heart. He says your
affections have to be involved. There must be deep, deep, deep joy in prayer.
So he is mystical in that sense. But at the same time, he is down on Catholic
mysticism and down on an awful lot of the ways in which evangelicals are trying
to bring in Catholic contemplative prayer practices.
That
is what is unusual about the book. Most books I know that are critical of
contemplative prayer, as I am, do not turn around and try to give you a
robustly Reformed and Protestant
approach to affectionate prayer and
meditation. Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards, and John Owen give you that. But
many people trying to get away from the contemplative prayer practices are
afraid of talking about meditation at all, and they are afraid of talking about
deep experiences and encounters with God. I try to say: No, we have to get
there. And these guys are good guys. But at the same time, we need to be pretty
critical of a lot of the contemplative prayer practices that are being brought
into the Church right now. I think that is what I think a lot of people would
probably find pretty interesting.
Third,
in the end the book is practical. I do find an awful lot of books are afraid of
actually saying: Here is a way to actually spend 15 or 20 minutes in prayer. I
try to get pretty practical at the end. I think some people would expect a Reformed,
evangelical type like me to be a little bit more: Here is the
exegesis, and now you go and apply it for yourself.
The book is surprisingly practical and comprehensive. You have
accomplished something remarkable with this book. Prayer:
Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God releases on November 4. Get it,
read it, and perhaps even read it with a friend or a group of friends.
