Christian Prayer 101

After I posted an article on prayer last week, four young adults responded with comments that showed an unusual degree of honesty.  If you have not read their responses, I strongly urge you to do so.  Those responses, and conversations with other young people with whom I have spoken in recent days, have confirmed my suspicions that (a) members of this generation want to relate to God, and (b) they know that prayer must play a key role in this relationship, but (c) effective prayer is difficult and elusive.  When Christians are asked, “Is prayer essential?” the answer is a resounding, “Yes.”  But when it comes to the practice of prayer – how to actually do it – the evangelical community seems befuddled and bewildered.  It is not an exaggeration to say that Christian prayer is in a state of crisis.

When we hear believers speak of prayer in glowing terms, when we hear hymns and contemporary Christian music gushing with creative and joyous expressions toward God, many of us fall into despair. Compared to these images of what prayer “ought” to be, we feel an overwhelming sense of inadequacy and shame from the realization of our own spiritual impoverishment. Our prayers seem so formulaic and feeble.  On the one hand, we know that the merit and effectiveness of prayer shouldn’t depend on the quality of our own emotional response to God, because faith is not a feeling.  But on the other hand, if all that we feel inside ourselves when we pray is a dull deadness, then how do we know that our petitions have been heard?  How do we know that God is listening, that we are not simply talking to ourselves, sending up smoke signals to an empty sky?  And if he truly is listening, when and how should we expect a reply?

For now, let’s put aside those questions and raise another that seems more fundamental: Is there really such a thing as Christian prayer? What is it, if anything, that can make a prayer specifically Christian, as opposed to the chanting of a Muslim, the meditation of a Buddhist, or the introspection of an agnostic?  Apart from the names by which we address God, which are partly a byproduct of language and culture (note that Allah is simply the Arabic word meaning “God”), apart from the specific phraseology (for example, “in Jesus’ name”), and apart from the mental images that we conjure up as we try to visualize our Creator — is there anything that distinguishes what we do when we are praying from what sincere people of other belief systems are doing?

In one respect, I think that the answer to that last question is often, “No.”  We could say that Christian prayer is the prayer of a Christian, the expression of a living and vital Christian faith.  But that seems to beg the question.  One young man who commented on the last article was very perceptive when he wrote:

It seemed that the act of praying or meditating cemented worldviews and assumptions that were already posited at the most basic level… The praying Christian would see confirmation of his or her prayer in actual life experience, but equally so would the Muslim or the Buddhist. And, of course, the atheist also sees the confirmation of his truth in daily experience.

Prayer is an intensely personal matter, and it is not entirely possible to separate the qualitative essence of the prayer from the beliefs and worldview of the one who is praying.

Yet I do believe that there is such a thing as Christian prayer.  There is an actual “method” (not the best word for it, but I can’t think of a better one right now) that is rooted in the unique message of the gospel that was handed down to us by the apostles and recorded in the New Testament.  I will now try to explain it in terms that, I hope, will resonate with believers raised in a modern evangelical tradition.

Let’s begin with two postulates of our faith, two basic teachings that define for us what it means to be a Christian.

Postulate 1: Christianity is not a religion, but a personal and life-giving relationship with God through his Son, Jesus Christ.

Religion, in the sense that I have used it above, is any effort or attempt by human beings to know and reach God. Although many today are fond of denouncing religion, especially of the “organized” kind, I do not want to use the term in a derogatory fashion, because religion always has been and always will be an essential part of what it means to be human. Religion brings out the best (and, sometimes, the worst) in people.  And by contrasting religion with Christianity, I am not denying that the historical and sociological movements that we collectively refer to as Christianity are a religion.  What I am saying is this: The central message of the gospel as communicated in the New Testament is that Jesus Christ has risen from the dead, that he is the living Son of God, that he is the only way to the Father, and that he lies at the center of every aspect of Christian life and spirituality.

Postulate 2: Salvation comes by grace alone, through faith alone.

This statement comes directly from the teaching of Paul in Ephesians 2:8: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God…”   Our own efforts to reach God, however sincere, are insufficient and ineffective. When we approach God as Christians, we do so by faith in the merit and finished work of Jesus Christ.

If we take these two bedrock principles of the Christian faith and apply them to prayer, we are inevitably led to the following conclusion: The only prayer that is acceptable to God is the Lord’s prayer.

When I say “Lord’s prayer,” I am not merely referring to the short prayer of Jesus recorded in Mathew chapter 6, or the even shorter version found in Luke chapter 11. Nor am I suggesting that the only words and phrases that we may employ when we pray are the spoken words of Jesus found in the New Testament, and that extra-biblical and extemporaneous prayers are invalid.

What I am saying is this: Christian prayer is not the prayer of a person who happens to be a Christian.  Christian prayer is the prayer of Christ.  It is the prayer that Jesus offered for us while he lived as a man on the earth (Heb 5:7).  It is the prayer that he continues to offer for us in the sanctuary in heaven, before the throne of God, as our High Priest and mediator (1Ti 2:5; Heb 8:1-2).  When Christians are praying to God in an acceptable fashion, it is not we who are praying to God; it is Jesus himself, who sends the Holy Spirit upon us and prays to his Father through us (Ro 8:15; Gal 4:6).

For the modern Christian who doesn’t know how to pray, this principle is truly liberating. Our prayers need not – indeed, they cannot – arise from some creative force within us, from some mysterious wellspring of spiritual riches in the depths of our own souls. Christian prayer is, at the most basic level, to hear the prayer of Jesus and say, “Ditto.” It is taking hold of the words of God and offering those same words back to God. Prayer is God’s work, not ours.