Another Seedling wrote:

I don’t believe we are supposed to try to visualize Jesus, God, His throne, etc. I heard before that doing so is wrong because it is the same as trying to limit God. God is an infinite being that simply can’t be grasped by our finite minds. To try and do so degrades God.

Andrew’s point about God’s infinitude is certainly well taken.  It is foolhardy to think we can capture God in our imagination.  But I was surprised when he said we shouldn’t try to visualize Jesus, because Jesus is actually a human being.  The whole purpose of his incarnation was to bring God into the world so that fallen people could relate to God once again.

The Old Testament prohibited Israelites from creating images of Yahweh: “Make yourself no graven image…”  But Jesus is no graven image. His coming brought us a genuinely new revelation of God. It showed us that God is not a singleton, but a community of three persons that we now call the Trinity.  Some have argued that the doctrine of the Trinity is not found in the New Testament.  No, that word is not found in the Scripture. But there is plenty of evidence for the Trinity there.  For example, Jesus commanded the apostles to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 28:19).  If the Son and the Holy Spirit were not God, then mentioning them in the same breath with the Father would be highly unusual to say the least. Or consider the way the 1 Peter begins:

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To God’s elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit are also together in the closing words of 2 Corinthians:

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

Belonging to an independent, non-denominational church has certain advantages, but there are some disadvantages as well. You are not constrained by all detailed doctrinal statements which you may not understand or agree with.  But you are less organically connected to ancient traditions and teachings which Christians have always understood to be important.  One example is the Trinity.  Any fair reading of Christian history should tell you that this is the primary teaching that defines orthodoxy.

The Trinity is not an abstraction or an attribute of God.  It is who God really is.  And it is essential to our understanding of the gospel.  The gospel is much more than a doctrine of justification by faith.  It is a personal relationship with God. The so-called personal relationship with God is actually a whole set of relationships; it is belonging to a community. Robert Webber made this point extremely well in his final book, Ancient-Future Worship, which was published in 2008 shortly after his passing (pp. 31-32):

The biblical God is no monad, no impersonal force, but a Triune community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The emphasis falls on community. God is one… The Triune community is a person and is personal.  The biblical and ancient definition of person is “being in a community.” God is an eternal community of love… God, this eternal being of love, desires to create other beings (persons in community) to share in his own community. God creates humanity in his image persons who dwell in his community and are actually called by God to fellowship with the community of the Godhead from the inside.

To bring fallen people into this community, one of its members, the Son, became a man.  Not an illusion of a man, but a real human being. By his death and resurrection, he binds people to himself and brings them into his own community.

Over the first three hundred years of the Church, believers struggled to put into words the truth about God that they already knew.  From the day of Pentecost onward, they found themselves worshiping the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. They had real and continual fellowship with all three.   The written doctrine of the Trinity merely described what they already had been experiencing.

If a human being told you his name, it would be impolite and dehumanizing to continually refuse to use that name when you engage him in conversation. But that it what we often do with God. Many of us address him in a generic way as “God,” “Lord,” or perhaps “Father.” Prayers directed to Jesus are less common, and addressing the Holy Spirit seems rare.  Some have even said that it is incorrect to pray to the Son or to the Holy Spirit, that we should pray only to the Father in the name of the Son through the power of the Holy Spirit.  Although there is truth to that, if we carry it too far, it depersonalizes the Son and Spirit, treating them only as the vehicles by which we reach the Father who is the real thing.  All three are God, so why shouldn’t we pray to all three?  On the other hand, I suppose that praying separately to each person can also be carried too far, because they are not three separate Gods; they are one God.  I do believe that when we approach God, it is helpful and important to envision him as a community of three persons, because that is how he revealed himself.

Early Christian prayers clearly recognize God as the Trinity.  For example, the Gloria Patri doxology from the fourth century:

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

In the ancient disciplines of prayer, believers often repeated short prayers over and over until they became cemented in their minds and personalities. One of the most famous is the so-called Jesus Prayer:

Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Although this prayer is helpful, N.T. Wright suggested a revision that is Trinitarian and less focused on the individual who is praying:

Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth: Set up your kingdom in our midst.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God: Have mercy on me, a sinner.

Holy Spirit, breath of the living God: Renew me and all the world.

If you are having difficulty engaging God in prayer, try calling him by the names he gave us: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is not a prayer technique. It is acknowledging and encountering God in an authentic way, because the Trinity is simply who God is.

We tend to think of personal prayer as something we create by ourselves; it should just bubble up from within our souls.  So we begin by composing a prayer to God.  But we don’t hear anything back. We don’t feel much of anything.  We begin to think, “Something is wrong.  I guess I’m not praying hard enough. Gotta get more intense! Gotta get more sincere!” As we try to do better, we continue this process of self-evaluation.  The focus turns inward. Our prayer becomes introspection, a conversation with the self and about the self.

Wikipedia says (and they’re always right, you know) that the most common form of prayer is supplication. Supplication means asking God for favors.  When we supplicate, we focus our attention on what is being sought.  I have heard Christian leaders, some very respectable ones, talk about how important it is to imagine the item you are seeking, to visualize it and brood over it.  The purpose of this brooding is to help yourself believe, because Jesus said in Mark 11:24, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”  Perhaps that is helpful in certain cases, but as general advice it leaves much to be desired.  That doesn’t sound like prayer to me.  It could easily cross the line and veer into idolatry.

Some of us don’t know how to pray because we were never taught.  At some point, personal devotion became just that – a personal matter between me and God – and we were supposed to figure it out on our own.  By default, we modeled our prayers after the verbalized prayers of people around us. That’s very understandable, but those people around us might not have known how to pray either.

The disciples of Jesus confessed that they didn’t know how to pray (Lk 11:1).   This is very curious, because Jewish people in the first century had well developed spiritual disciplines.  But when they saw Jesus praying, they must have realized that his was very different from theirs.  In response, Jesus gave them this model (Lk 11:2-4):

Father,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread.

Forgive us our sins,

for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.

And lead us not into temptation.

The Lord’s Prayer is amazingly simple. It takes the focus off of self. (Notice that there is no “I” or “me”.) And it does not begin with supplication; it starts by turning attention toward God and his people.

This prayer more than any other seems to profoundly impact believerss who actually pray it.

The first word of this prayer is stunning. Who has the audacity to call God “Father”?  Jesus does.  It surprises me when Christians approach God in a casual manner, wearing informality on their sleeves like a badge of honor.  Yes, the New Testament teaches us to come to the throne without fear.  And holiness is not the same as formality.  But neither is it the same as informality. It is easy to forget that, despite our Christian faith, we still have no right to approach God except through Jesus.  And when we do, we are coming into the Holy of Holies.  This is exactly what Jesus taught when he said, “Hallowed be your name.”

The next line is a beast: “Your kingdom come.”  Do we really want God’s kingdom to come?   Do we want him to rule over us?  Do we want Christ to return and radically transform everything?  There are plenty of things we don’t like about our lives, and we would change them if we could.  But would those changes be to God’s liking?

From the standpoint of biblical teaching, God’s kingdom has already come, and it is still coming.  The full revelation or unveiling of this kingdom will occur when Jesus returns.  It is not merely a possibility, but a sure thing, and it will happen whether or not we pray.  So why should we pray for it? I think this is a prayer intended to purify us, to bring us out of a self-centered fog into the spiritual clarity that knows God is King.

One line that may seem perplexing is, “Forgive us our sins.” When Jesus used the pronoun us, did he intend to include himself?  We understand that Christ is without sin.  But I do think that he meant to include himself, because he took our sins upon himself. He is God who stands in the place of humans, and the human who stands in the place of God.  The dominant notion of sin taught in Western Christianity is a breaking of laws and commandments by individuals.  But the biblical concept of sin is much broader; it includes national, cultural, and corporate sin and the tragic warping of Adam’s entire race.    When praying the words, “Forgive us our sins,” take some of the focus off of yourself and all your personal mistakes and deficiencies. Consider the implications of Jesus praying these words on behalf of the entire world..  Your understanding of this prayer and your faith will broaden, becoming more universal and God-honoring.

I have studied the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6 and Luke 11 many times.  But it was not until I actually started to pray it that I began to understand how to pray.  We have legitimate needs to bring before God, and those are not to be neglected at all.  But supplication no longer dominates my personal devotions.  Adoration, praise, and contemplation now seem much more basic, a more authentic response to the message of the gospel.

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.

Every Christian I know says that prayer is essential.  They pray every day.  At least they claim that they do. Or they admit that they should. Prayer is, after all, our lifeline to God. But how often are these people actually doing it? And when they do, what are they experiencing?  Are they worrying, daydreaming, or fantasizing? Rattling off long lists of requests?  Arguing with God?  Enjoying an ecstatic, out-of-body experience?  Groveling on an ash heap, filled with a sense of personal failure and shame?

When people pray, are they actually thinking about God?  About themselves?  People they love, people they hate, people they have never met?  Are they orbiting the globe, praying for the nations?  Are they praying in a very generic way, saying “God bless everyone and everything, Amen”?

I’ve been noticing how often Christian leaders and laypeople talk about prayer in an abstract, doctrinal or moralizing fashion, but rarely do they give any details about their own experiences with prayer.  Getting explicit about their private encounters with God is taboo.  At times, this information ought to be kept secret.  Jesus said to his disciples, “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (Matthew 6:6).  But in that context, Jesus was talking about our natural tendency to brag, to use a public display of spiritual practice to aggrandize ourselves.  He did not discourage us from talking about our own experiences for genuine learning and spiritual growth.  When everyone keeps silent about what they are doing with God in the privacy of their own rooms, it leads me to suspect that they are not praying nearly as often, and their prayer is not nearly as vital or effective, as they would like others to believe.

In 1966, Time magazine published its famous cover story, “Is God Dead?”  The gist of that article was that the idea of God is not dead at all, but to modern people he seems very silent.  I would put it a different way: God is alive, but we have lost the ability to communicate with him.  Atheists and skeptics promote the image of a foolish Christian talking to God but never hearing back.  In many respects, that picture is accurate.  I have sensed that people, especially younger ones, are spiritually hungry.  They instinctively know that God exists, and no amount of rationalistic argument will convince them otherwise. They want to connect and interact with him.  They want to truly know him – not intellectually or doctrinally, but relationally.  But how can they have a conjugal union with a being whom they have never seen, heard or felt, someone who has been described to them only in terms of abstract attributes and principles?  

The rationalistic elder would say, “Read your Bible; God speaks through his Word.”  Okay.  But the way many Christians approach the Scriptures today – as a book of rules or timeless principles to be learned and followed or, even worse, as a self-help manual – almost seems to guarantee that the knowledge they gain will be abstract, intellectual and impersonal.  The words of the Bible speak loudly and clearly if we intimately know the One who is speaking.  But that knowledge is supposed to come through the Word.  It’s the paradox of the chicken and the egg, the ultimate spiritual Catch-22.

Getting back to my initial question: How often and how do you actually pray?  And when you do, what are you experiencing?  Are you frustrated with this aspect of your life, and if so, are you willing to admit it?  Have you found any way to connect with God that seems to actually work?  At some point, I will share some of my own experiences.  But I would like to hear from you first.