The Irreplaceable Value of Prayer in Your Spiritual Formation

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 completely to prayer, revealed a catechism in 1548 by which he outlined prayer as “an earnest speak with God.”¹ If Christians confess that God is private, each succesful and desirous of actual relationship along with his creatures, then to speak to him needs to be as pure as it’s crucial.

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 trustworthy are described as each listening to from God and talking to him in return. The Psalms overflow with cries to God reminiscent of “Give ear to the phrases of my mouth” (Ps. 54:2) and corresponding praises reminiscent of “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: “After they heard this they have 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 one in every of you within the identify of Jesus Christ’” (Acts 2:37–38).

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 obtained 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 progress in grace.⁴

As with our peculiar conversations, our conversations with God in prayer will differ in size and depth as our altering circumstances dictate. The English Puritans thus distinguished between “two kindes of prayer”: there have been instances 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 crucial a part of a Christian’s religious life and infrequently understood as each a way to and a mark of a extra common spirit of prayerfulness that will 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’s not sufficient that we use each day these set solemn, and peculiar prayers, however we should, as our Saviour injoyneth us, Pray all the time, and because the Apostle speaketh, regularly, and with out ceasing. That’s, we should be prepared to hope, so usually as God shall give us any event, . . . craving God’s blessing once 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 power for the overcoming of any issue which affronteth us in our method.⁶

Furthermore, these two sorts of prayer have 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 embellishments on the concept 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 needs, our joys, our sighs, in a phrase, all of the ideas of our hearts.”⁹ Such communication is just not overly formal and impersonal, however somewhat, it’s an “intimate dialog” by 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 all the time on prayer as a method 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 method,” wrote Campegius Vitringa. “It refers to every little thing we talk to God.”¹² Such communication consists of our praises, our petitions, and our thanksgivings. It consists of 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 hope?” the Westminster Bigger Catechism (1647) means that the scope of our prayer needs to be as vast and deep as life itself: “We’re to hope 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 once we take the lofty expressions of the Psalter as our personal; at different moments we “have no idea what to hope 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 characterize an ongoing dialog with the God in whom “we dwell and transfer and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

This text is tailored from A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation by Matthew C. Bingham.

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