Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

for God, speaking and acting are the same thing.

Prayer is continuing a conversation that God has started through his Word and his grace, which eventually becomes a full encounter with him.

Prayer, then, is a response to the knowledge of God, but it works itself out at two levels.

the psalmist was spiraling down into deadly despair, he went in prayer to “the sanctuary of God; then I understood” (Ps 73:17).

Prayer means knowing yourself as well as God

the beginning the feeling of poverty and absence usually dominates, but the best guides for this phase urge us not to turn back but rather to endure and pray in a disciplined way, until, as Packer and Nystrom say, we get through duty to delight.

“Now he is a man of just and holy life who forms an unprejudiced estimate of things, and keeps his affections also under strict control, so that he neither loves what he ought not to love, nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that equally which ought to be loved either less or more, nor loves less or more which ought to be loved equally. No sinner is to be loved as a sinner; and every man is to be loved as a man for God’s sake; but God is to be loved for His own sake. And if God is to be loved more than any man, each man ought to love God more than himself” (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, vol.

In light of all these blessings, I now ask that you would not allow my affections to be tangled in inordinate desires for the things of this world, but let me always set my heart on things above, where Christ, who is my life, is seated at your right hand.

In any case—pray no matter what.

Sometimes a light surprises the Christian as he sings;

it is the Lord who rises, with healing in his wings:

When comforts are declining, He grants the soul again

A season of clear shining, to cheer it after rain.

In holy contemplation we sweetly then pursue

The theme of God’s salvation, and find it ever new.

Set free from present sorrow, we cheerfully can say,

Let the unknown tomorrow bring with it what it may.