Book Review & Quotes: Prayer by Tim Keller

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Book Review and Quotes:
Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God
by Tim Keller
A recommended resource for "You Are... a series in Christian Basics"
Review by Jim Harper

Have you ever been haunted by questions like these: Why are there times when I see prayer more like a duty than a delight? Why is it that I am mortified when asked the question “How is your prayer life going” How can my prayer times become less like a monologue where I do all the talking and more like a dialogue with a living, all present, all wise, and all loving Being? And lastly, am I the only one that struggles with these questions?

Well, if you have been haunted by these questions, you will find this book more than helpful. Tim Keller shines some encouraging biblical light on these shadowy questions. So much so, that it may raise a new question within you, as it did me: How can I inspire more people to read this book? Below are a few quotes from Keller’s book that I hope will cause you to want to read this book.

Chapter 1 - the Necessity of Prayer

Learning to Pray
Prayer is how God gives us so many of the unimaginable things he has for us… It is the way we know God, the way we finally retreat God as God. Prayer is simply the key to everything we need to do and be in life. (18)

Chapter 2 - The Greatness of Prayer

The Supremacy of Prayer
It is remarkable that in all of his writings Paul’s prayers fro his friends contain no appeals for changes in their circumstances. (20)

In his own prayers, then, Paul is not giving us a universal model for prayer in the same way Jesus did. Rather, in them he reveals what he asked most frequently for his friends - what he believed was the most important thing that God could give them. What is that? To know him better. Paul explains this with color and detail. It means having the “eyes of their hearts…enlightened’ (Ephesians 1:18) (20)

Paul does not see prayer as merely a way to get things from God but as a way to get more of God himself. Prayer is striving to “take hold of God” (Isaiah 64:7) (21)

Chapter 3 - What is Prayer?

A Conversation, an Encounter
In the Bible, God’s Living Word, we can hear God speaking to us and we respond in prayer, though we should not call this simply a response. Through the Word and Spirit, prayer becomes answering God - a full conversation. All prayer is responding to God. In all cases God is the initiator - “hearing” always precedes asking. God comes to us first or we would never reach out to him. (46)

Listening and Answering
The power of our prayers, then, lies not primarily in our effort and striving, or in any technique, but rather in our knowledge of God. (49)

Chapter 4 - Conversing with God

The Tragedy of Untethered Prayer
The lesson here is not that God never guides our thoughts or prompts us to choose wise courses of action, but that we cannot be sure he is speaking to us unless we read it in the Scripture. (63)

Chapter 7 - Rules for Prayer

Spiritual Insufficiency
We must be ruthlessly honest about our flaws and weaknesses. We do all we can to avoid the “unreality” of putting on our best face. We should come to God knowing our only hope is in his grace and forgiveness and being honest about our doubts, fears, and emptiness. We should come to God with the “disposition of a beggar” (100)

Restful Trust yet Confident Hope
Also, God often waits to give a blessing until you have prayed for it. Why? Good things that we do not ask for will usually be interpreted by our hearts as the fruit of our own wisdom and diligence. Gifts from God that are not acknowledged as such are deadly to the soul, because they thicken the illusion of self-sufficiency that leads to over confidence and sets us up for failure. (102)

Chapter 12 - Awe:Praising His Glory
There are three basic kinds of prayer to God. There is the “upward” prayer - praise and thanksgiving that focuses on God himself. We would call this the “prayer of awe”. Then there is the “inward” prayer- self examination and confession that bring a deeper sense of sin and, in return, a higher experience of grace and assurance of love. Finally there is the “outward” prayer- supplication and intercession that focuses on our needs and the needs of others in the world. (189)

Chapter 14 - Struggle: Asking His Help

The Power of Prayer
If we believed that God was in charge and our actions meant nothing, it would lead to discouraged passivity. If on the other hand we really believed that our actions changed God’s plan - it would lead to paralyzing fear. If both are true, however, we have the greatest incentive for diligent effort, and yet we can always sense God’s everlasting arms under us. (225)

How We Should Ask
It means that rather than simply running down a quick list of things we want, we should reflect on what we want in light of all that we know from the Scripture about the things that delight and grieve God, in light of what we know about how his salvation works and what he wants for the world. Those who practice this discipline find that it helps them revise - sometimes deepening, sometimes lessening - their desires and purposes. (227)

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