True prayer is not to be found in the words of the mouth, but in the thoughts of the heart.
Gregory the Great1
To generalize is to be an idiot. William Blake1
Four of us sat at breakfast not long ago. Two of my companions were pastors; the third was a new Christian trying to quit smoking. As he lit up his fourth post-breakfast cigarette, he commented: “Quitting smoking is as hard as trying to develop a prayer life. I’ve been trying to do that lately, too. Do you guys have any suggestions on how to establish a regular prayer life?”
Asking two pastors for spiritual counsel is like asking an insurance agent about pension plans. Paul took the lead:
“I’ve struggled for twenty years with a need for regularity and consistency in my prayer life. I longed for an intense, quality time with the Lord. The image that kept running through my mind was that of Adam meeting the Lord in the cool of the day.
“In an attempt to achieve that, I tried particularly hard to get up early in the morning for prayer. It didn’t work for me. About five years ago I finally said, ‘Lord, I can’t handle this problem. If you want me to pray regularly, show me how to do it.’
“About that time I started waking up at two or three in the morning. Without any reason I would suddenly be wide awake. At first I didn’t realize what was happening. I thought I might be ill. After three consecutive nights of this, I decided if I couldn’t go back to sleep, I’d try praying. It was some of the most meaningful prayer I had ever experienced. I felt God was there in the room with me. Now I wake up in the middle of almost every night and pray for thirty to ninety minutes. Then I fall back to sleep. That’s how the Lord answered my prayer about personal time with him.”
Gordon listened respectfully. Although he was as impressed with Paul’s discovery as we were, he had a different experience:
“I, too, struggled with personal prayer early in my ministry. My wife and I wanted desperately to serve God as best we could, and we did everything we could think of to make our first churches all they could be. We worked hard. But after several years I realized I was getting by on natural ability and sooner or later my lack of a quiet time with God would catch up with me—I’d find myself totally dry.
“But the Lord worked differently in my life than he did in Paul’s. I decided I’d try to get up at 5 a.m. and pray and do Bible study for one hour. I started setting my alarm clock ten minutes earlier and earlier each day until I was getting up at five. I soon found I thrived on the spiritual food I was getting in that hour of quiet. Once I got started, I felt like I had an appointment with God every morning, and I couldn’t wait to meet him. I have never quit the practice. It’s an invariable in my schedule now.”
Two radically different approaches to prayer. One gives it up to the unknown guidance of the Holy Spirit, the other to a disciplined, regimented approach utilizing the Spirit’s power. Yet both are committed men of God, if the many fruits of their respective ministries are any indication. Which style is right? Which is the model to follow?
Perhaps neither. Or maybe both. If talking to Christian leaders revealed one thing, it was there are many different ways to pray with effective spiritual power. One of the difficulties in talking about prayer practices is that there is no single correct way.
Leaders said they became comfortable with prayer only when they finally realized they were unique and had to do it in a way that fit them. One said: “I’ve come to a degree of peace about my prayer life and what God expects. I’m sure my prayer could be more effective, but I don’t feel guilty about it. When I see people who do, I get a little bit worried. It’s as if we’re not measuring up to the standard, but the standard we’re getting is not from God’s Word, but from the extraordinary examples of prayer. Let’s face it. The people who write books don’t have ordinary experiences, and yet they’re the ones who create the level of expectations.
“I remember trying to spend long periods of time in prayer at a former church. That church was started by a man renowned for the hours he spent on his knees. Having that kind of model around can really put a load of guilt on you. I remember worrying about the poverty of my own prayer life. I’d get into my office resolved to pray for hours. But it just wasn’t me, and I couldn’t do it.”
Prayer styles seem to fall into two main camps. On the one hand are the disciplined saints determined to build their faith through prayer no matter what the cost. On the other hand are the faithful who trust God will call them to their knees whenever he deems it necessary. Interestingly, these two ends of what really is a long spectrum of practice (no one is fully one or the other) correspond to two main philosophical theories of how virtues are developed.
Aristotle felt virtues were innate human possibilities that are only awaiting the development of the appropriate skills to be put into practice. Translation: When you develop the skills to pray, you will pray and your faith will grow.
Plato felt that people would naturally act virtuously if they fully understood what the virtue in question was. Lack of skill is not the problem, lack of understanding is. Translation: If you fully understand why it is important to pray, then you will naturally pray.
Of course, neither Aristotle nor Plato were talking about Christian faith and prayer.2 But their categories and arguments are remarkably similar to the question raised about whether faith or the practice of prayer comes first. In order to more fully examine the question, let’s look at an example of each prayer style. To explore the implications, we will look at a Christian leader who demonstrates each style. Naturally, we are using them only as illustrations and are not commenting on the motives that have driven them to use this style.
The Disciplined Way
After teaching theology in a Christian college for several years, John Piper became pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a center-city church of three hundred fifty. The church has grown to a Sunday morning attendance of seven hundred thirty. Piper attributes the growth to an intensely God-centered worship service.
An intense person, Piper speaks with a wiry toughness that typifies his approach to ministry. He reads Jonathan Edwards with a passion, and, following Edwards’s claim to be a “Godbesotted man,” he has told his church his desire for them is to be a “God-besotted church.”
In his devotional time, John is a systematic pray-er. He gets up a half hour before his four children and his wife, Noel, and he uses that time to prepare himself before God for the stresses of early morning family life and for the family devotions after breakfast.
“I found I had to ‘get my own heart happy before God’ before I could effectively lead my family in devotions,” he says. “That phrase is from George Mueller who said he discovered early in his life that if he got up early and tried to read and pray, his mind would always wander. So instead he would just say, ‘Lord, open my eyes to seeonderful things out of your law,’ and then he began reading Scripture until he got his heart happy in the Lord. He wouldn’t see anyone until that happened.
“After leading the kids in a devotional after breakfast and getting them off to school, I read the newspaper and return to my study. I don’t go to the church until noon. In my study I have a prayer bench, and I kneel there and roll my concerns onto the Lord. That again is from George Mueller who had a mental image of one by one rolling all of his concerns onto the Lord each morning. Then later in the day when the world might be coming down around his head, he had the calmness of knowing that all his cares were in God’s hands. I mentally think through the day to come and roll each and every task onto God.
“I have already prayed for my family before and during breakfast; my next priority is my staff and key volunteers at church. Then I pray for the congregation. I systematically go through the church directory. Next I work on a prayer list of missions concerns, local concerns, and other individuals. Then I read the Bible. Recently, I have used McCheyne’s method of reading the Old Testament once each year and the New Testament twice. It’s basically about four chapters a day, and I proceed slowly because I mingle prayer with my reading. After that I’m ready for study, sermon preparation, and later the work at church.
“Noel and I end the day with evening prayer together and often read to each other aloud from a book for fifteen minutes. It’s amazing how much reading you can do that way. We’ve found we read fifteen to twenty books a year if we are consistent.”
Piper’s prayer life represents that of many pastors who structure their time carefully, using the discipline to ensure they get in the time needed. Most cautioned against confusing their method with the real heart of prayer. Piper cited Matthew 6 (praying in secret) as a warning against setting up anyone’s prayer practice as normative.
Those who use this kind of approach, though, can point to Hebrews 5 as ample justification for their disciplined time. The writer recommends the solid food of the gospel only for the mature “who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.” Salvation is not enough to develop this ability; one needs to seek maturity by honing the skills of discernment.
There are several different directions this approach to prayer practice can take us. On the one hand, it can feed into a strong mystical tradition. Mysticism stresses that spiritual maturity is attained in graduated stages. In this tradition, the discipline of spiritual habits is only the beginning stage that leads on to higher things. For example, St. John of the Ladder, a seventh-century mystic, identified four stages of spiritual development, comparing them to rungs of a ladder stretching upward to perfection. The first rung is to tame the passions, the second to pray with the lips, the third is to practice inner prayer, and the fourth is to rise seeing visions. The habit of prayer deals with the first two rungs, leading to the third, and perhaps, if you’re a mystic, the fourth.3
Or the disciplined approach can lead to a simplified way to promote evangelism. Blaise Pascal’s well-known “wager” is an example. The French philosopher said that in all matters of faith, including prayer, you cannot “prove” God is at work—but it is well worth the wager. You cannot prove prayer will be meaningful, but Pascal’s advice to believers is: The practice of the religious life will put your belief on a firmer psychological basis
Deed leads to thought: “For we must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automaton as mind. As a result, demonstration is not the only instrument for convincing us. How few things can be demonstrated. Proofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed.… When we believe only by the strength of our conviction and the automaton is inclined to believe the opposite, that is not enough. We must therefore make both parts of us believe: the mind by reasons, which need to be seen only once in a lifetime, and the automaton by habit, and not allowing it any inclination to the contrary.”4
The best argument for the disciplined approach to prayer is simply that, for whatever reason, it does lead to increased, deepened faith. Martin Luther frequently mentioned it. In his Treatise on Good Works, he talks about the value of habit to developing firmer faith. In his discussion of the second commandment, he notes a common complaint he heard from Christians: I don’t have much faith that my prayers will be heard—so I don’t pray.
Luther’s response? “That’s the very reason you should pray. God commands us to pray so that we can find out what we can and cannot do. Even if we begin with a very weak spark of faith, we must pray daily so the weak spark is fanned through regular exercise into a full flame of faith.”5
Luther goes on to say that weak faith is not a sign of weak Christians. Even the apostles, including Peter, prayed for increased faith. Indeed, prayer should be seen not as a good work, but as a means to increasing our faith. That can only be done through regular, habitual prayer.
And on the modern front we can only say that it works. Testimonies such as John Piper’s are common. So is the behavioral evidence of what prayer can do. L. D. Nelson and Russell Dynes reported in a research article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion that people who attended church frequently and performed other acts of devotion (such as prayer) had higher rates of helping behavior than those who didn’t.6 Apparently devotionalism has a positive influence on the way people live out their faith. As Aristotle said in his Ethics, “We become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones.” Might we extrapolate and say we become men and women of prayer by praying, not by thinking about prayer and hoping it comes?
The Haphazardly Intent Way
Bud Palmberg is pastor of Mercer Island Covenant Church in Mercer Island, Washington, one of the wealthiest areas surrounding Seattle. A large man, he commands attention by his physical presence as much as through his insights. He speaks colorfully, Van Dyke beard bobbing with each freshly crafted metaphor. The span of his ministry is what impresses. He’s a small town Nebraska boy who still wears cowboy boots as he ministers to well-to-dos in Mercer Island, including business executives, Seattle Seahawks football players, and attorneys. But one night each week he cruises the streets of skid-row Seattle presenting the gospel to prostitutes and motorcycle gangs in a program called Operation Nightwatch he started with other Seattle pastors.
Palmberg describes his prayer as the “style of a driven pastor.” He prays on the run.
“Prayer is my primary back-up system. The longer I’m in ministry, the more I realize that prayer is like respiration. It’s my deep breaths between appointments, my sighs when I feel down, my gasps when I’m in trouble. I try to make prayer the backdrop to everything else I do.
“Why don’t I lock myself in my closet every morning? Because I can’t sit still that long. And I’ve found that you can pray while you’re walking. Or, if you live on an island like we do, while you’re sitting in your car waiting for traffic to clear on the bridge to the mainland. My walk with God is comfortable enough for me that I don’t feel the need for a formalized place or time or structure for my prayer. In the morning I hit the road running and I try to have an open channel to God all the time. I don’t want to have to dial God—I can just say, ‘Help me, God,’ or ‘Thank you, Lord,’ or ‘That’s fantastic,’ whenever something strikes me.
“As I pray in those short snatches throughout the day I always try and have a notebook near because as I pray I’m reminded of needs people have: ‘I haven’t seen him lately,’ or ‘She was considering surgery last week. I wonder how she’s doing?’ or ‘How’s that family coping?’ I also try to read in short snatches, and I’ve found the Psalms to be my greatest resource for prayer-oriented reading. The Psalms are the blueprints of prayer.
“My prayer style fits my conception of ministry. Frankly, I’m over my head most of the time. I’m treading water administratively. I have a congregation that can dance circles around me in organizational skills. There are saints in this church that dwarf me spiritually. The only thing I have going for me is I’m willing to take it all on and be responsible for it. That’s a real incentive for prayer.”
Palmberg believes the ministry is ideally suited for “informed” prayer. “Because of the nature of my job, I know more about people than anyone else. What a golden opportunity to pray specifically for needs. The first free minute I have after I leave someone, I pray a short prayer for them and their problems. That’s something I don’t know at five o’clock in the morning but I do right after I leave someone. I believe God honors specific prayers. That advantage of knowing a great deal has become a responsibility, an impetus to passionate praying for me.
“I know pastors I highly respect who practice very structured prayer. But whenever I try it I’ve felt terribly self-righteous. I already have enough trouble with that, so I gave up trying to structure my prayer life.”
You don’t have to talk very long to Palmberg to realize that his lack of structure doesn’t translate to a lack of prayer. Others in the church testify to the power of his public prayers and many can cite instances of private prayer sessions with their pastor that have led to serendipitous answers and spiritual growth. By all indicators, Palmberg’s prayer life doesn’t lack power, just structure.
Many pastors follow Palmberg’s style. They are generally too activist in personality to sit still for any length of time when there’s ministry to be done. Yet their personalities and strong faith drive them to prayer and the resulting power they need for ministry. The Bible is clear that this relationship between prayer and power is invariable. In Matthew 17 Jesus heals a mentally deranged boy whose sickness often made him fall in the fire or water. The boy’s father brought him to Jesus after first bringing him to the disciples. The disciples failed in their attempts to heal him.
After seeing the illness cured at Jesus’ command, the disciples asked him why they had failed. After all, they had been able to cure in other situations. Jesus lays the blame at the disciples’ feet. Because of their lack of faith, he says, they didn’t have the power to heal this particularly stubborn case. Faith is like the potential power represented in the water trapped behind a dam. In order to be made useful as electricity, it must be funneled into a conduit that will turn the generator’s blades. Prayer is like that conduit, turning the potential of faith given as grace into wonder-working power that can change the world.
Christian leaders like Bud Palmberg feel free to call on God through prayer whenever a task of ministry or personal living requires it. The faith is there—it only needs activating through prayer. More than that though, they have developed a prayer style that relies on the incidents and difficulties of life to call them to prayer. If life and our relationship to God is fully understood, prayer is a natural way of behaving.
Calvin credits faith with all answers to prayer and with driving us to our knees in prayer. After citing Romans 10:14—”How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in?”—he goes on to say that “faith gets whatever is granted to prayer.”7 For Calvin, faith, saving faith at least, is the necessary foundation for all prayer.
For the haphazardly intent, prayer is the overflowing of a heart longing for intimacy with a personal God. Paul Rees, traveling lecturer for World Vision International, talks about prayer as relationship, not discipline: “There is biblical justification for referring to prayer at times as real discipline. Paul speaks about Epaphras as one who labored in prayer. But prayer is a relationship so intimate and so dynamic that it should be easy to listen for God’s voice and to respond by articulating some confession or petition. This idea of prayer as a relationship has grown on me through the years, so that now for me prayer is the healthy expression of this intimacy with God.”
One of the values of stressing haphazardly intent prayer is the lessening of negative incentives. We don’t pray because we have to, but because we love God so much we feel we must. Henri Nouwen talked about the problem Christian leaders sometimes have in making time for prayer. Nouwen identified with that problem, but suggested something he had found helpful: “I can’t fight the demons of distraction directly. I can’t say No to television, or No to my overcrowded schedule unless there is something ten times more attractive pulling me away. The only thing I know of that is ten times more attractive than the lure of creaturely comforts is to be loved with God’s love, either directly or through one of his followers. If I can experience God’s love in my brokenness, I become free from the compulsions of doing anything—but then I want to do everything for him.”
Prayer is not drudgery that must be performed in order to satisfy some divine taskmaster snapping a whip over our cracking knees and furrowed brow. Instead, acceptance of God’s love leads to prayer.
Prayer and Faith Feed on Each Other
Both Piper and Palmberg are men of prayer. Recognizing the varieties of prayer does not mean we decide one style is better than another. We could line up witnesses to disciplined prayer, pair them with witnesses to the haphazardly intent approach, and come out just about even.
And it would be foolish to try to reconcile them in one theory of “true and valid prayer,” as if that were possible. Both styles are true and valid, although based perhaps on different premises. How the Holy Spirit works in lives is an intensely individual thing. Even distinguishing only two categories of prayer practice is overly simplistic.
Indeed, one of the attractions of studying prayer is the many different forms it can take in the lives of Christian leaders. Trying to define orthodox prayer practice too narrowly and uniformly can gloss over the remarkable ways God’s grace works in different lives.
It is also possible that one person can use several different styles. Cassian reports that in Egypt in the fourth century, the elders of the Christian church prescribed the prayer norm to be followed by the monks: “Twelve Psalms for an evening Office and the same number for a night Office. The presumption was that during the day each monk arranged in his own way for prayer and words of Scripture to accompany his manual work.”8 In effect this combines formal hours of prayer with personalized structure, whatever that may be.
In reality, we all need the fruits of both approaches. Some may need more of one than the other. But the truths of both must be recognized by all Christians. Andrew Murray in his classic book on prayer, With Christ in the School of Prayer, said that “faith needs a life of prayer for its full growth.”9 Perhaps that, after all, is the best statement of the relationship between the two. There is value in viewing the relationship between prayer and faith in both priority sequences: faith leads to prayer, and prayer increases faith. Both are indispensable. Some incipient faith must be present to stimulate the believer to want to pray, to take advantage of the power God offers through his Holy Spirit in order to allow us to pray. However, prayer increases faith, and anything we can do to foster the habit of prayer will be valuable.
The habit of prayer will lead to a oneness of spirit with God. Our motivations to prayer may not be pure as we begin. They may be naive, misguided, even cynical. But regular prayer and sincere effort to understand prayer will change that. As Sören Kierkegaard noted, “The immediate person thinks and imagines that when he prays, the important thing, the thing he must concentrate upon, is that God should hear what he is praying for. And yet, in the true, eternal sense, it is just the reverse. The true relation in prayer is not when God hears what is prayed for, but when the person praying continues to pray until he is the one who hears, who hears what God wills. The immediate person therefore uses many words, and therefore makes demands in his prayer. The true man of prayer only attends.”10
Developing a prayer style that fits your needs requires two things. First you must clearly see the purpose of prayer—why a Christian must pray. Primary motivation is essential. Second, you must solve the process to go through in order to make regular prayer a reality.
Gregory the Great, “Commentary on the Book of Job.” Quoted in an excellent overall introduction to the topology of prayer study, James Hasting’s classic survey work, The Christian Doctrine of Prayer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915).
See excellent discussions of Aristotle and Plato positions on the development of virtues in Amelie Rorty, “Plato and Aristotle on Belief, Habit, and Akrasia,” American Philosophical Quarterley 7, 1 (January 1970): 50-61; Cynthia Freeland, “Moral Virtues and Human Powers,” Review of Metaphysics 36 (September 1982): 3-22.
See John Climacus in J.P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Graeca, lxxxviii, 585-1248.
Blaise Pascal, Pensees (New York: Penguin Books, 1966) 149ff. See a good analysis of “The Wager” in an article by Robert Holyer, “Pascal on Belief and the Religious Life,” Scottish Journal of Theology 35 (1982): 431-445.
Martin Luther, Works of Martin Luther 1 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1980), 228.
L. D. Nelson, and Russell Dynes, “The Impact of Devotionalism and Attendance on Ordinary and Emergency Helping Behavior,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 15, 1 (1976): 47-59.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 2 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 864.
Cassian, “Institutes,” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 11 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1978), 161-641.
Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing Company, 1983), 63.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 97.
William Blake quoted from C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1963), 55.
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
