Devotional 108: Prayer: The Acceptable Worship of the Sovereign God

The Confession Read

Prayer, with thanksgiving, being one special part of religious worship, is by God required of all men: and, that it may be accepted, it is to be made in the name of the Son, by the help of his Spirit, according to his will, with understanding, reverence, humility, fervency, faith, love, and perseverance; and, if vocal, in a known tongue.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 21, Section 3

Introduction

It happened once, in a certain place, that the disciples came upon their Master at prayer and waited, silent, until he had finished. They had grown up praying. They had heard prayers recited in the synagogue every Sabbath of their lives. They knew the formal words, the appointed hours, the customary postures. And yet, watching this Man speak to God as a Son speaks to his Father, they felt all at once that they had never prayed at all. When he rose, one of them found the courage to say what the rest were thinking: "Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples." Luke 11:1 It is one of the most honest requests in Scripture, because it confesses what every thoughtful believer eventually discovers: that prayer, the simplest thing a creature can do, is also the most difficult, and that no one learns it except by being taught. The Westminster Divines understood this. Having established in the first two sections of this chapter whom we worship and through whom we may draw near, they now descend to the great act itself. Prayer, they tell us, is no incidental decoration laid upon the life of faith; it is "one special part of religious worship," a duty God requires of every person who has ever drawn breath, and it carries within it the whole architecture of the gospel. For notice how the sentence moves: prayer is to be made in the name of the Son, which is the doctrine of Christ's mediation turned into breath; by the help of his Spirit, which is the doctrine of the Holy Spirit's enabling turned into dependence; and according to his will, which is the doctrine of God's sovereignty turned into submission. Every one of the seven graces that follows, understanding, reverence, humility, fervency, faith, love, and perseverance, is a small doorway into the character of the man or woman who has truly learned to pray. And the closing clause, "in a known tongue," is a quiet protest against a religion that would make the worship of God unintelligible to those who offer it. We come, then, to the most personal of all the doctrines of worship. The object of worship is God alone; the Mediator is Christ alone; and now the instrument, the very act by which the creature ascends to the Creator, is prayer. If the first two sections framed the grammar of acceptable worship, this third section teaches us how to speak it. And because prayer is the place where theology becomes biography, where every man's doctrine is tested against the floorboards of his own soul, there is no section in this chapter that will press upon us more intimately than this one.

Scripture Foundation

The apostle Paul, writing from prison to the church he loved at Philippi, gives us as compact an anatomy of prayer as any in Scripture: "Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." Philippians 4:6-7 The Greek vocabulary here is deliberate and layered. The word for prayer is proseuchē, the general term for addressing God, and beside it stands deēsis, supplication, the specific asking for a particular need, the two together covering both the broad communion and the pointed request. But the third word is the one that would have surprised Paul's pagan contemporaries. Eucharistia, thanksgiving, is joined to the asking as its inseparable companion, so that the believer never merely asks; he asks and gives thanks in the same breath. The pagans of antiquity approached their gods with clenched anxiety, hoping to wring favor from reluctant deities. The Christian comes to a Father who has already given him the unspeakable gift of his Son, and therefore every request he makes is wrapped in gratitude for what has already been granted. And Paul names the result before the asking is even done: the peace of God, which exceeds all comprehension, will stand sentinel over the heart and mind. Prayer, rightly offered, is not the anxious chatter of a creature trying to persuade an indifferent heaven; it is the confident speech of a child to a Father who loves him, and the very act of speaking unburdens the soul before the answer ever arrives. Our Lord himself fixed the ground of all acceptable prayer when he taught his disciples why their requests would be heard: "And in that day ye shall ask me nothing. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you. Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full." John 16:23-24 The phrase en tō onomati, "in my name," is not a formula appended to the end of a prayer, as though the words "in Jesus' name, Amen" were a magical seal that guaranteed delivery. To ask in the name of Christ is to ask as one who has been united to Christ, who comes clothed in his righteousness and bearing his authority, who has no standing of his own before the throne and wants none. It is to acknowledge that the only reason a sinner may address the holy God at all is that the Son has opened the way through his own flesh. When a servant petitions a king, he does not come in his own name; he comes in the name of the one who sent him, and his petition is received because of the authority that name carries. So the believer, having nothing in himself to commend his prayers, pleads the name of Jesus, not as a conclusion but as the very ground upon which he kneels. The joy that Christ promises is not a reward for eloquence but the natural overflow of a soul that has learned to ask and receive from a Father who delights to give. But if prayer is offered in the name of the Son, it is enabled by the Spirit, and no text makes this dependence clearer than Paul's word to the Romans: "Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God." Romans 8:26-27 This is one of the most comforting words about prayer in the Bible. We come to prayer with a handicap we scarcely recognize: we do not know what to ask for, not truly, not with the wisdom that sees the whole span of our lives and the purpose of God beneath it. We ask for what would harm us, and we shrink from what would heal us. But the Spirit, dwelling within the believer, supplies what we lack. The word Paul uses for "helpeth" is a compound that in the Greek carries the picture of one who takes hold of a burden at the opposite end, bearing it together with us. And the groanings that cannot be uttered are not the believer's ecstatic babbling but the Spirit's own inarticulate sighing, deeper than words, translating the confused longings of our hearts into petitions the Father can receive. Here is the Trinitarian shape of prayer laid bare: we pray to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit, and the whole Trinity is engaged in the lifting of one soul's request from earth to heaven. If the Spirit teaches us how to ask, the will of God teaches us what to ask, and the apostle John binds the two together in a promise of staggering confidence: "And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us: and if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him." 1 John 5:14-15 The phrase kata to thelēma autou, "according to his will," is the boundary within which all true prayer moves. This is not a limitation that diminishes prayer but a compass that directs it. The man who prays according to his own will is trying to bend heaven to his desires; the man who prays according to God's will has bent his desires to heaven, and therefore cannot fail. To pray according to God's will is to pray in submission to his revealed purposes, to ask for what he has promised to give: holiness rather than ease, his kingdom rather than our comfort, the glory of his name rather than the satisfaction of our appetites. And when our requests are shaped to his will, the hearing and the granting become one thing, so certain that John can speak of the petition as already possessed before the answer has visibly arrived. Finally, because prayer is an act of the whole man and not merely of the tongue, Paul insists that the understanding must be engaged. "For if I pray in an unknown tongue, my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is unfruitful. What is it then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also." 1 Corinthians 14:14-15 The word nous, the mind or understanding, is the faculty by which a man comprehends what he is saying, and Paul refuses to surrender it in the act of worship. Prayer is not an incantation whose power lies in the sounds themselves; it is intelligent converse with a personal God, and a prayer the one praying cannot understand is a prayer in which the man himself is absent. This is the verse beneath the Confession's closing clause about the known tongue, and it reaches far beyond the particular controversy over tongues into the whole question of what worship is. God has given us minds, and he intends the mind to be consecrated in prayer no less than the heart. The believer is to pray with spirit and understanding together, so that the whole soul, affection and intellect, fervor and clarity, is gathered up into the single act of speaking to God.

What the Divines Meant

The Divines opened this section with a claim that reaches back to the very first section of the chapter and, indeed, to the foundations of natural religion. Prayer is "by God required of all men." Not merely of the godly, not merely of the elect, not merely of those who have been regenerated and gifted with the Spirit of grace, but of all men. This is because prayer is not first a privilege of the saints but a duty of creatures. The man who has never been taught the gospel still owes his Maker the homage of address, for he is a dependent being, drawing every breath from the hand of God, and dependence unexpressed is ingratitude enacted. Scripture is full of this universal expectation. The pagan sailors in Jonah's storm, though they knew not the true God, cried every man unto his god, and the shipmaster rebuked the sleeping prophet with words that stand as an indictment of every prayerless man: "What meanest thou, O sleeper? arise, call upon thy God." Jonah 1:6 Even where the object of worship is false, the instinct to pray bears witness that man was made for communion with his Creator, and the refusal to pray at all is not merely a sin but a repudiation of what it means to be a creature. The Divines placed this requirement first because it grounds the entire section: prayer is not an optional exercise for the spiritually inclined but the universal obligation of humanity, and the man who never prays stands before God as a debtor who will not so much as speak to the one he owes. The seven graces attached to acceptable prayer, understanding, reverence, humility, fervency, faith, love, and perseverance, are not a random catalogue but a deliberate summary of the biblical portrait of the praying soul. Each word does theological work. Understanding answers the enthusiast who imagines that prayer is a matter of pure feeling, divorced from the mind. Reverence answers the presumptuous familiarity that forgets to whom it speaks. Humility answers the Pharisee who thanks God that he is not as other men. Fervency answers the cold, formal prayer that moves the lips but not the heart. Faith answers the doubting prayer of the man who asks without believing he will receive. Love answers the mercenary prayer that approaches God as a vending machine for blessings. And perseverance answers the prayer that abandons the field after a single unanswered request. Together they compose a portrait of the whole man engaged, mind, heart, and will, in the single act of address, and the Divines' insistence on all seven is a quiet rebuke to every generation that would reduce prayer to one of its parts and mistake the part for the whole. But the clause that cost the most and meant the most in the seventeenth century was the final one: prayer, if vocal, is to be offered "in a known tongue." Behind these four words lay a hundred years of Reformation blood and ink. In the medieval church the public prayers of the people were offered in Latin, a tongue the common worshipper did not understand, so that the congregation stood before God hearing sounds that conveyed nothing to the mind. The Reformers saw in this a double evil: it denied the people the nourishment of the Word, and it turned prayer into a kind of incantation whose efficacy was thought to reside in the syllables themselves rather than in the understanding heart that offered them. When the Westminster Assembly convened, it replaced the Book of Common Prayer with its own Directory for the Public Worship of God, and among its first concerns was that all prayer "be in a known tongue," that the people might say Amen with understanding. The matter was no academic nicety. When the Act of Uniformity restored the Prayer Book in 1662, some two thousand ministers chose to leave their livings rather than conduct worship they believed contrary to the Word of God, and the question of intelligible worship was among the reasons. The Divines wrote "in a known tongue" because they had learned from Paul that God would be worshipped with the understanding, and that a prayer offered in sounds no one comprehends honors neither God nor man. Underneath all these particulars runs a single Trinitarian conviction that gives the section its shape. Prayer ascends to the Father, who is the fountain of every good gift. It is offered in the name of the Son, who alone has opened the way and purchased the access. And it is enabled by the Spirit, who teaches us to pray and intercedes with unutterable groanings. The whole Godhead is engaged in the single act, and this is why the believer may come with confidence. He does not pray alone. The Son pleads his name at the right hand of the Father, and the Spirit prays within him in the depths where words fail. The Divines did not invent this structure; they found it in Scripture and pressed it into the service of the believer's comfort, so that the one who kneels to pray knows himself to be carried, as it were, by the three Persons of the Godhead into the presence of God. The commentators have read this section as a single sentence doing three things at once. Hodge, expounding it, notes that the Confession first names what prayer is, a special part of religious worship, then establishes upon whom the duty lies, which is all men, and only then lists the conditions that render it acceptable. Shaw's Exposition draws out the same shape, observing that the section answers two questions the natural conscience cannot avoid: whether a man must pray at all, and how the prayer of a sinner may possibly be received. Turretin, pressing the first, classed prayer among the duties of natural religion, an obligation written into the creature's dependence upon his Maker, so that the man who will not pray sins against the gospel and against the constitution of his own being. It is not scattered counsel but a tight answer to the most practical question a creature can ask.

Theological Depth

Before we hear the devotional writers, the doctrinal foundation deserves a word, and no theologian set it more plainly than Calvin, who devoted the longest chapter of his Institutes to prayer and ranked it among the chief exercises of faith. Prayer's first office, he taught, is not to inform God of our wants, as though the Father did not already know, but to exercise us in dependence, that we might dig up by prayer the treasures which the gospel sets before us. Warfield compressed the conviction into a sentence: prayer is the breath of the soul, the channel of all blessings. It is not an intermittent duty but the very respiration of the new life, so that the Christian who does not pray is not merely disobedient but suffocating. Watson, whose treatise on the Lord's Prayer belongs beside the four works we are about to consider, defined prayer as the soul's colloquy with God, a private conference in which the creature unburdens his heart to the One who knows it already, and in the unburdening finds strength he did not have. John Bunyan knew prayer from the inside, and his little treatise on the throne of grace is one of the richest devotional writings on prayer in the English language. Bunyan took as his text the promise that "we may come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need," and he unfolded what it means for prayer to be made in the Spirit. Hebrews 4:16 The Spirit, Bunyan insisted, is the great enabler of prayer, the one who gives the believer a heart to pray, words to pray with, and strength to continue when the heavens seem brass. Before his conversion, Bunyan himself was a stranger to prayer, as deaf to it as a stone; but when grace took hold of him, the Spirit poured upon him the spirit of supplication, and prayer became as natural to his soul as breathing is to his body. Bunyan was especially alive to the difference between the prayer of the Spirit and the prayer of mere habit. The one is a burden and a joy together, a groaning too deep for words; the other is a shell of words with no soul within. And he warned tenderly that the believer who finds prayer hard should not conclude he is without the Spirit, for the very sighing after prayer, the very desire to desire, is itself the Spirit's work within. Bunyan's word to the discouraged is the word the Confession itself intends: you do not pray your way into the Spirit's help; you pray by the Spirit's help, and the help is given before you ever open your mouth. Matthew Henry devoted an entire manual to the practical question of how prayer is to be conformed to the will of God. His Method for Prayer rests on a simple and profound conviction: that the best prayers are those most formed by Scripture itself, because it is in Scripture that the will of God is revealed. Henry did not despise extemporaneous prayer, but he observed that the believer who prays in the language of the Bible prays with a safety and a breadth that his own narrow desires could never supply. When we pray the promises, we ask for what God has already bound himself to give. When we pray the precepts, we ask for what God has already commanded us to become. When we confess in the words of David's penitential psalms, we confess sins we did not even know we had. Henry's method was, in effect, a practical outworking of John's principle that we must ask "according to his will," and it answers the believer who wonders how he can ever be sure he is praying aright. Search the Scriptures, Henry would say, and let the Word of God supply the matter of your prayers, and you will find that you have prayed according to the will of God because you have prayed in the very words God has given you. This is why the Confession joins prayer to the understanding and to the will of God in a single breath: the prayer that pleases God is the prayer that has been taught by God. Thomas Brooks, in his treatise on secret prayer which he called The Privy Key of Heaven, pressed home the grace of humility that the Confession names. Brooks's controlling image is drawn from the Lord's own instruction: "When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret." Matthew 6:6 The closet, for Brooks, is not merely a place but a posture of the soul, a shutting of the door against the applause of men, against the desire to be seen and admired for one's devotion, against every performance of piety that seeks its reward from the watching eye rather than from the seeing Father. Secret prayer is the test of sincerity, because in the closet there is no audience but God, and what a man does there reveals what he is when he is not being watched. Brooks also called secret prayer the Christian's key, for it is the means by which the believer unlocks the treasury of grace, obtaining mercy and strength that the world never sees and never measures. The humility the Confession requires is precisely this: the willingness to be known by God alone, to pray without witnesses, to count the audience of One sufficient, and to find in the secret place the intimacy that public display could never purchase. William Gurnall, in The Christian in Complete Armour, completes the picture by pressing the grace of perseverance, for he treats prayer as the very breath of the spiritual soldier. Taking up Paul's phrase "praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance," Gurnall argued that prayer is not one piece of the Christian's armor but the element in which the whole armor is worn. Ephesians 6:18 A soldier may be clothed in steel from head to foot, but if he does not breathe, he falls; so the believer, however furnished with truth and righteousness and faith, perishes without the continual breathing of prayer. Gurnall was urgent about the "all" in Paul's words, all prayer, all perseverance, because he knew that the great enemies of prayer are not gross sins but faintness and distraction, the gradual cooling of the heart that lets a man pray for a season and then let the season pass. His counsel to the discouraged is bracing rather than tender: do not measure your prayers by your feelings, but persist in them; the very constancy of prayer, kept up through dryness and darkness, is itself a victory over the devil, who would gladly persuade you that a prayer offered without feeling is a prayer thrown away. Perseverance is not the garnish of the praying life; it is its backbone, and the prayer that would prevail must outlast its own discouragement.

Puritan Application

First, pray, because prayer is not a suggestion but a command, and the prayerless life is not merely a weakness but a sin. It is easy to think of prayer as the extra, the ornament, the thing we will attend to when the pressing business of life relents. But the Confession will not permit the thought. Prayer is required of all men, and required of you, at this hour, whatever the state of your soul. The man who says he has no time to pray is saying he has no time to breathe, and he will discover which of the two is the more necessary when the storm comes. And do not let a sense of unworthiness keep you from the throne, for it is precisely the unworthy who are invited. The Lord does not say, "Come unto me, all ye who have attained a satisfactory devotional life"; he says, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden." Matthew 11:28 The greatest obstacle to prayer in most lives is not busyness but the subtle pride that refuses to ask until it feels able to ask well. Cast that pride down. A stammering prayer from a broken heart is more acceptable to God than the fluent prayer of the self-satisfied, and the Father who hears in secret knows the difference. Second, pray always in the name of Christ, and let that name be the ground of your confidence rather than the conclusion of your requests. There is a world of difference between ending a prayer with the formula "in Jesus' name" and actually praying in that name: between the habit of the lips and the faith of the heart. To pray in the name of Christ is to come to God as one who has no righteousness of his own to plead, no merit to present, no claim to offer but the claim of a sinner who has been washed in the blood of the Son. When you pray, remind yourself deliberately of the ground on which you stand: the Father hears you not because you are eloquent, not because you are consistent, not because you have performed well this week, but because you come in the name of his beloved Son, in whom he is well pleased. This is the great comfort of the section. It takes prayer out of the realm of performance and sets it on the rock of Christ's finished work. And when the accuser rises against you, when he whispers that such a prayer as yours could never reach heaven, answer him with the name that silences every accuser: I come in the name of Jesus, and that name is enough. Third, depend upon the Spirit for the very ability to pray, and cease striving after eloquence as though prayer were a skill to be mastered. The believer who thinks he must first learn to pray well before he may pray at all has reversed the order of grace. The Spirit is given precisely because we cannot pray, and he helps our infirmities at the very point where we are weakest. When words fail you, do not suppose that prayer has failed. The groaning that cannot be articulated is still prayer, still heard, still carried by the Spirit into the presence of God. And when you feel no desire to pray, ask the Spirit to give you the desire, for the asking of that small thing is itself prayer and the Spirit's enabling. There is a beautiful condescension in this. God does not stand apart from our weakness, waiting for us to become strong enough to approach him; he sends his Spirit to dwell in us and to pray in us, so that the feeblest believer is never actually praying alone. Learn to lean upon this. Prayer is not your achievement offered to God; it is God's gift given to you, and the giving precedes the asking. Fourth, conform your requests to the will of God by praying in the language of Scripture, so that your asking is shaped by his promises rather than by your appetites. The greatest defect in most prayers is not that they ask too much but that they ask too little and too wrongly, asking for comfort where God would give holiness, for the removal of a burden where God would give strength to bear it. The remedy is to let the Word of God furnish the matter of your prayers. Pray the promises, and you will ask for what God has pledged to give. Pray the precepts, and you will ask for what God has commanded you to become. Pray the psalms, and you will find words for sorrows you could not name and joys you had not understood. A man who prays in the words of Scripture cannot long pray against the will of God, for the Word and the will are one. And as your requests are conformed to his will, you will taste the confidence of which John writes, that whatsoever we ask according to his will, he heareth us, and prayer will cease to be a gamble and become a certainty. Fifth, pray with understanding, and therefore pray in a known tongue, which is to say, engage your whole mind in the act, and never settle for the mere recitation of sounds. The Confession's closing clause is about the language of the congregation and, more deeply, about the attention of the soul. A prayer offered while the mind is elsewhere is not prayer but the shadow of prayer, the shell without the kernel. When you pray, gather your thoughts as you would gather a congregation; do not let them scatter to the ends of the earth while your lips move on alone. Slow down. Consider to whom you speak. Weigh the words you are offering. And if you find your mind wandering, as every believer does, do not despair, but gently return it, and return it again, and count every recovery of attention a small victory over the wandering heart. The God who gave you a mind intends the mind to be consecrated in prayer, and the prayer that engages understanding, no less than affection, is the prayer he has promised to bless. Pray with the spirit, and pray with the understanding also; for the whole man, mind and heart together, is to be lifted in the single act of speaking to God.

Prayer

O God, who hast taught us to call upon Thy name and hast promised to hear the prayer of Thy people, we come before Thee in the name of Thy Son, for we have no other name to plead and no other ground to stand upon. We thank Thee that Thou hast not left us to invent our own way to Thy throne, but hast opened a new and living way through the veil of the flesh of Jesus, and hast given Thy Spirit to dwell within us, to teach us to pray when we know not how, and to intercede for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. We confess, O Lord, the coldness of our hearts and the wandering of our minds, the prayers we have offered with our lips while our thoughts were far from Thee, the seasons we have neglected the throne of grace altogether, and the pride that has kept us from asking because we thought ourselves unworthy to ask well. Forgive us, we beseech Thee, and create in us a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within us. Teach us to pray, O Lord, as the disciples asked Thee long ago. Teach us to ask in the name of Thy Son, that our confidence may rest not on our own worthiness but on his finished work. Teach us to depend upon Thy Spirit, that we may never strive after eloquence as though prayer were a skill of ours. Teach us to conform our requests to Thy will, that we may desire what Thou dost promise and seek what Thou dost command. Teach us to pray with understanding, reverence, and humility, with fervency, faith, and love, and with that holy perseverance that will not let us go until Thou dost bless us. And make our prayers to ascend before Thee as incense, and the lifting up of our hands as the evening sacrifice. We ask these things, O Father, in the name of Jesus Christ Thy Son, by the help of the Holy Spirit, according to Thy will. Amen.