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To pray looking for understanding

What does it look like to have turned our backs on God and then came back to Him? I am sure we would be humble and not proud.

But the time will come when the people of Israel will once again turn to the Lord their God and to a descendant of David their king. Then they will fear the Lord and will receive his good gifts. – Hosea 3:5 GNT

I am sure that I would have found myself in this situation by depending more on myself than on Him. So my first step in coming back to God is to not do that any more and my second step is to depend on Him.

Depending on Him means I have to deal with my fear that He will not come through for me or that He is even capable of being in control. I might be honest and even admit that He does not know what is best for me. So what or maybe how do I come to a place where I can depend on God?

It would seem that the most action/command recommended in the New Testament is the call to prayer. Prayer in its very essence is what shows that I depend on God. Prayer is the communication in the building/renewing of my relationship with God.

Learning about God does not quite cut it when it comes to having a relationship. Nothing gives me more insight into God than begin quiet and praying. It is in this place where I encounter God.

So here is what my simple prayer sounds like.

Your instructions are always just;
    give me understanding, and I shall live. – Psalms 119:144 GNT

It is a great prayer to getting me back to God. It gets me going into a place of discovery with Him. So whether I am starting my life or my life is ending, my passion is the same. I am in a place, opening myself up to God to move in me. I can do this because of grace – understanding comes as a gift from God.

I do believe the Word of God has a place here, a prominent place, but it does not depend on me, rather on God enlightening me to what He wants me to see.

Many will recognize in Owen’s discussion of the beatific vision many of the basic ideas on spiritual experience later developed by Jonathan Edwards. Edwards believed that the difference between a Christian regenerated by the Holy Spirit and a merely religious and moral person is that the Christian experiences “a change made in the views of his mind, and the relish of his heart whereby he apprehends a beauty, glory, and supreme good in God’s nature as it is in itself” (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith, [New Haven: Yale, 1959], 241). Elsewhere he describes the change like this: “’Tis the soul’s relish of the supreme excellency of the divine nature, inclining the heart to God as the chief good” (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 21, Writings on the Trinity, Grace, and Faith, ed. Sang Hyun Lee, [New Haven: Yale, 2002], 173). The two things Edwards discerns in genuine spiritual experience are: (1) a whole-person change (both views of the mind and the “relish” of the heart) (2) in which God becomes no longer a means to an end to other goods, but now becomes the supreme good. Edwards puts this in other ways—previously God was useful to us but now he is beautiful to us, satisfying for who he is in himself. God’s glory and happiness now become your glory and happiness. Behind both Owen and Edwards, of course, stands Augustine, with his teaching that sin is disordered love, and only if the heart’s greatest joy is changed, and God is loved supremely, will other virtues begin to develop and the character be renewed. – Timothy Keller

Power and priority of a prayer life with answers

Remember the story of the couple who hosted Elisha from time to time as he passed through their village and through their home? It is found here in 2 Kings 4:8-37.

I believe that the woman in this story, in her relationship with Elisha, has began to learn, maybe through him, the power and priority of prayer and it has become part of her practice.

Maybe it is not personal prayer – maybe she recognizes that she needs a mediator and an intercessor.

One day Elisha went to Shunem, where a rich woman lived. She invited him to a meal, and from then on every time he went to Shunem he would have his meals at her house. She said to her husband, “I am sure that this man who comes here so often is a holy man. Let’s build a small room on the roof, put a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp in it, and he can stay there whenever he visits us.” – 2 Kings 4:8-10 GNT

The Psalmist in Psalm 116 knew that God listened to prayers as well.

I love the Lord, because he hears me;
    he listens to my prayers. – Psalm 116:1 GNT

Calvin’s Institutes are something like what we would today call a systematic theology. It is striking and somewhat puzzling, then, that even writers of systematic theology in Calvin’s Reformed tradition do not usually have a chapter on prayer. One exception was Charles Hodge, the nineteenth-century Princeton theologian, whose systematic theology contains a substantial section on prayer, and particularly on the implications of the Christian doctrine of God for Christian prayer. See Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965),
692–700. – Timothy Keller