The Irreplaceable Value of Prayer in Your Spiritual Formation
What Is Prayer?
What exactly is prayer? The simplest and most straightforward way to define prayer is as a person talking to God. The English Reformer Thomas Becon (1512–1567), whom scholars have identified as having authored the very first English Protestant treatise devoted exclusively to prayer, published a catechism in 1548 in which he defined prayer as “an earnest talk with God.”1 If Christians confess that God is personal, both capable and desirous of real relationship with his creatures, then to talk to him should be as natural as it is necessary.
As Campegius Vitringa helpfully noted, “It is a characteristic of God to ‘hear prayer’ (Ps. 65:2).2 We read in Genesis 4:26 that shortly after the fall, “people began to call upon the name of the Lord,” and throughout Scripture the faithful are described as both hearing from God and speaking to him in return. The Psalms overflow with cries to God such as “Give ear to the words of my mouth” (Ps. 54:2) and corresponding praises such as “On the day I called, you answered me” (Ps. 138:3). Scripture assures us that “when the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears” (Ps. 34:17). The connection between inclusion among God’s people and confidence that God will hear one’s prayers is very tight: it is precisely because “the Lord has set apart the godly for himself” that David can immediately conclude, “The Lord hears when I call to him” (Ps. 4:3). Indeed, the entire Christian life itself begins with hearing God’s word and responding back with words of repentance and faith: “When they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’ And Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ’” (Acts 2:37–38).
A Heart Aflame for God
Matthew C. Bingham
A Heart Aflame for God explores spiritual formation practices that are consistent with the 5 solas, presenting the riches of the Reformed tradition for 21st-century evangelicals.
God has addressed us through his word, and we respond to him through our prayers. Or as William Ames put it, “In hearing the word we receive the Will of God, but in Prayer we offer our will to God, that it may be received by him.”3 Scripture and prayer thus work together to create a conversational, or “dialogical,” dynamic that lends structure to our communion with God and growth in grace.4
As with our ordinary conversations, our conversations with God in prayer will vary in length and intensity as our changing circumstances dictate. The English Puritans thus distinguished between “two kindes of prayer”: there were times of set and focused, or “solemne,” prayer—what happens, say, during our quiet time—and then there were also short, spontaneous prayers uttered throughout the day, “the secret and sudden lifting up of the heart to God, upon the present occasion.”5 The latter sort of spontaneous praying was understood to be a necessary part of a Christian’s spiritual life and often understood as both a means to and a mark of a more general spirit of prayerfulness that would begin to permeate one’s entire life and outlook. Indeed, it is spontaneous prayer, as the Puritan John Downame (1571–1652) explained, that helps the believer “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17):
It is not enough that we use daily these set solemn, and ordinary prayers, but we must, as our Saviour injoyneth us, Pray always, and as the Apostle speaketh, continually, and without ceasing. That is, we must be ready to pray, so often as God shall give us any occasion, . . . craving God’s blessing when we undertake any businesse, and praysing his name for his gracious assistance, . . . craving his protection at the approaching of any danger, and his helpe and strength for the overcoming of any difficulty which affronteth us in our way.6
Moreover, these two kinds of prayer were understood as mutually reinforcing. They went together, and either one would quickly wither in the absence of its counterpart. Spontaneous prayer, it was said, should supplement and enhance our settled prayer “as salt with meat.”7
God has addressed us through his word, and we respond to him through our prayers.
As we read the various definitions of prayer scattered throughout the Reformed tradition, we find elaborations on the idea of prayer as talking to God, even as we don’t find anything fundamentally at odds with it. Thus, William Bridge defined prayer as “that act and work of the soul, whereby a man doth converse with God.”8 Likewise, according to John Calvin, to enter into prayer is to “enter conversation with God,” a conversation “whereby we expound to him our desires, our joys, our sighs, in a word, all the thoughts of our hearts.”9 Such communication is not overly formal and impersonal, but rather, it is an “intimate conversation” in which believers find the living God “gently summoning us to unburden our cares into his bosom” and inviting us “to pour out our hearts before him.”10 Sometimes the metaphor was slightly tweaked, as when Matthew Henry (1662–1714) described the Bible as “a letter God has sent to us” and prayer as “a letter we send to him,” but the emphasis was always on prayer as a way for the believer to communicate and dialogue with the living, personal, and ever-present triune God.11
Such prayer, by its very nature, encompasses the entirety of the Christian life, shaping and being shaped in turn by the breadth and depth of redeemed experience. “I understand prayer in a broad way,” wrote Campegius Vitringa. “It refers to everything we communicate to God.”12 Such communication includes our praises, our petitions, and our thanksgivings. It includes expressions of joy, lament, and anger. As we communicate 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 question “For what things are we to pray?” the Westminster Larger Catechism (1647) suggests that the scope of our prayer should be as wide and deep as life itself: “We are to pray for all things tending to the glory of God, the welfare of the church, our own or others’ good.”13
Sometimes our communication with God is eloquent and profound, as when we take the lofty expressions of the Psalter as our own; at other moments we “do not know what to pray for as we ought” and must lean on those Spirit-wrought “groanings too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26). Yet in all moments, our prayers communicate the full range of our Christian experience and represent an ongoing conversation with the God in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
Notes:
- Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 99.
- Campegius Vitringa, The Spiritual Life, trans. Charles K. Telfer (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), 116.
- William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1639), 244.
- This dynamic also characterizes corporate worship. For a discussion of the “dialogical principle” in worship, see D. G. Hart and John R. Muether, With Reverence and Awe: Returning to the Basics of Reformed Worship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2002), 95–97.
- William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (Cambridge, 1606), 282.
- John Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse(London, 1629), 209–10.
- William Gouge, quoted in Ryrie, Reformation Britain, 147.
- William Bridge, The Works of the Rev. William Bridge (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845), 2:102.
- Calvin, Institutes, 2:853 (3.20.4); John Calvin, Instruction in Faith, trans. and ed. Paul T. Fuhrmann (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1949), 57.
- Calvin, Institutes, 2:854–55 (3.20.5).
- Matthew Henry, Directions for Daily Communion with God (London: William Tegg, 1866), 12.
- Vitringa, Spiritual Life, 115
- “Westminster Larger Catechism,” in Van Dixhoorn, Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms, 402 (q. 184).
This article is adapted from A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation by Matthew C. Bingham.
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