Why We Pray

by William Philip, Alistair Begg (Foreword by)

Overview

Prayer is foundational to the Christian life, but many people don't really understand it. What is it for? How does it work? Why do we do it? This short and accessible book explains what prayer is, why it exists, and how it can encourage us in our life of faith. Written by a pastor with years of teaching and counseling experience, Why We Pray doesn't simply tell readers why they should pray, but instead focuses on four blessing-filled reasons that will help Christians want to pray. Rather than feeling discouraged and disheartened by their inconsistency in prayer, readers will feel reinvigorated to approach God with confidence and joy, delighted by the privilege of talking directly to their loving heavenly Father.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433542893
Publisher:	Crossway
Publication date:	02/17/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	793 KB

About the Author

William Philip has been senior minister of The Tron Church in Glasgow, Scotland, since 2004. He was formerly director of ministry at the Proclamation Trust in London and is now chairman of Cornhill Scotland, an organization committed to training pastors for expository preaching. Prior to ordination, he was a doctor specializing in cardiology. He is the author of Why We Pray.

William Philip has been senior minister of The Tron Church in Glasgow, Scotland, since 2004. He was formerly director of ministry at the Proclamation Trust in London and is now chairman of Cornhill Scotland, an organization committed to training pastors for expository preaching. Prior to ordination, he was a doctor specializing in cardiology. He is the author of Why We Pray.

  Alistair Begg serves as the senior pastor of Parkside Church near Cleveland, Ohio. He has been in pastoral ministry since 1975 and served eight years in Scotland at both Charlotte Chapel in Edinburgh and Hamilton Baptist Church. He has written several books and is heard daily on the radio program Truth For Life. He and his wife, Susan, have three grown children. 

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

We Pray Because God Is a Speaking God

The most important question to ask first about prayer is — Why? Why do we pray? Not, Why should we pray? We begin not with an exhortation but with an explanation: why prayer exists at all, as it were. Why is there such a thing as prayer? Prayer is speaking to God, but — just think about it for a moment — why should there be any such thing as speaking to God? Why would God want us to speak to him? Why would God need us to speak to him if he controls all things, as he does? Why would we need to speak to God just because he's there? We have a queen in the United Kingdom, but I don't speak to the queen, and I don't suppose you do either — not very often, anyway. Why should we speak to God just because he is a powerful being and our sovereign ruler and Lord?

At its most basic and fundamental level, we pray because God is a speaking God. Prayer derives from who and what God is, and the great feature of the God of the Bible, the God of the Christian faith, is that he is a speaking God. That is evident from the very first chapter of the Bible.

God Spoke the Whole Creation into Being

Creation begins with the voice of God, with God speaking: "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light" (Gen. 1:3). And so it goes on. "And God said" is the refrain of the whole chapter. Then we come to these crucial words:

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
(Gen. 1:26–27)

Here is the first thing to think about: all the way through the opening chapter of the Bible, creation happens as God speaks the whole of the created order into being. He didn't just imagine it into existence, as no doubt he could have done. He didn't wave a magic wand and bring it out of his hat. According to Scripture he spoke it into being. "Let there be light," and light was. "Let there be creatures," and creatures were, including man. He spoke into existence everything we see.

Now, why so? Well, because (and we'll think more about this presently) the creator God is, as the Bible tells us, the covenant God, which means he is not a distant deity; he is not aloof, disinterested, and far off but a God who is involved intimately and totally with everything he makes, from the sparrows that fall to the ground that Jesus tells us about (Matt. 10:29), to the very hairs of our heads, to the hills, to the valleys, to the rivers, to everything. God is a God of committed, covenant relationship.

When you think about it, this is what speech does; speech creates relationship. In fact, speech requires relationship. You can't speak to someone without creating a relationship. It might be a very short and cursory relationship, like the one you have with the bus driver when you get on and say, "Does this bus go to Buchanan Street?" and he says, "Yes — hop on!" You've created a relationship. It's rather shallow, but it's a relationship. At the other end of the spectrum are relationships that are lifelong and deep. I suppose the most obvious of those is marriage. But whatever the nature of the relationship, you can't create or sustain an ongoing relationship without speech (or at least some form of surrogate for the spoken word).

Genesis 1 tells us of a God who created the world in perfect relationship with himself and of a creation that, as it were, speaks back its praise to God its creator. God saw everything he had made, we are told, and it was very good. That was creation's speech back to God. The whole of the created order was telling God, by everything in its very nature, "This is very good!"

Many parts of the Bible echo this truth. Psalm 19 reminds us of it when it tells us, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork" (v. 1). Psalm 96 calls on the whole of creation to speak forth praise to God: "Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it!" (v. 11). Psalm 98, likewise, speaks of the seas, the rivers, and the hills — of all creation — speaking back to the God who spoke them into being. So you could say that the whole of the created order, in a sense, prays; it speaks back its praise to God the creator, to the one to whom it owes everything, even its existence. Because God spoke everything into being, he spoke all creation, therefore, into a relationship with himself.

Of course, these verses also tell us about God's speaking humans into being. He did that as the crowning glory of creation in a unique way. In Genesis 1:26 we find an astonishing thing; we hear God speaking to himself: "Let us make man," he says, "in our image." Don't you think that is an extraordinary statement? The passage is recorded by Moses, the great leader and teacher of Israel, the Moses whose constant message was that Israel must be devoted always and only to the one God. All through their wilderness journeyings, and at Sinai, and in his final exhortations on the plains of Moab as Moses prepared Israel for their life in the land, he repeatedly emphasized that their God, the true God, is one. The Lord is not like the many gods and idols of the pagans who lived in the lands round about. He is the one God and the only God. Moses also teaches the famous Shema, the great prayer of the Israelite people: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deut. 6:4). This is the very essence of the biblical faith: God is one, not many. Yet here in the first chapter of the Bible, we have the one God speaking to himself, using the plural terms "us" and "our": "Let us make man in our image."

Of course, we who have the fullness of the revelation of God through his ultimate word to us in Jesus Christ can understand this (at least, as far as it is possible for finite beings to understand the infinite God). We know that the one God is also three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We know God as the Holy Trinity, indivisible, inseparable; one God, but nevertheless, as the Scripture testifies, a God who speaks within himself and who is in perfect relationship with himself. So we should not be too surprised to see that perfect relationship in evidence here, way back at the dawn of creation, any more than we should be surprised that much later in history, John's Gospel records Jesus, the incarnate Son of God on earth, speaking in the Spirit to his heavenly Father. (Indeed, as part of that very prayer, in John 17:5, Jesus speaks explicitly of the glory he shared with the Father before the world existed.) The one God has always been, from all eternity, before all creation, the triune God, the relational, covenant God, the speaking God.

Here is the vital point for us in all this. According to the Bible, it is uniquely in the image of this God, this God of relationship, this speaking God, that we are made. "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." And that is why, fundamentally, we human beings speak. That is why we human beings are relational, covenantal beings; it is because we image the relational, covenant, speaking God.

Just consider for a moment the way speech, communication, is intrinsic to our human nature. We can hardly imagine what it would be like to be denied any communication. That would be for us to become subhuman. In fact, we use that very language, such as when we talk about people who have lost all communicative capacity as being in a persistent vegetative state. They are totally unable to communicate with others. When we refer to people as being in a "vegetative state," we are saying that they are not really like human beings anymore. They are, tragically, more like vegetables.

We also know that to deny real relational interaction will ultimately dehumanize people. That's why sensory deprivation can be used so horribly in torture; when people are denied all communication, it unhinges them. You might remember years ago when the Eastern Bloc of Europe was for the first time exposed to the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Awful pictures appeared on our television screens of some of the orphanages in Romania where children had been abandoned and treated so horrifically. No one ever spoke to those babies and young children. There had been no speech, no communication, no warmth of human relationship, no belonging — none of these essential aspects that comprise normal humanity. As a result, not only their emotions but also their intellect and even their physical growth were stunted.

We human beings are made as human beings for relationship. By our nature, we are covenantal beings, because fundamental to our creation is the purpose that we should image the covenant, relational God. The most intimate reflection of this image in the created order is marriage. Marriage is a living illustration, in the flesh, of our relational nature, because in marriage two become one flesh. That is why to marriage, and to marriage alone, according to the Scriptures, belongs that deepest and most intimate relational communication, the physical, fleshly "speech" of sexual intercourse.

Above all, of course, we are spoken into being for a relationship not just with one another but with God himself. Man was created for that perfect, harmonious relationship with the God of creation and to be in perfect relationship with the whole of that creation over which God had placed human beings. Genesis 1:28 tells us, "God blessed them. And God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over ... the earth.'"

There's not a hint there, as some have tried to claim, of exploitation of the earth; this verse is not the root of all the problems in ecology in our world today. Far from it. Pictured here is rather a perfectly ordered relationship between human beings and their world. It's a picture of man imaging God's gracious relationship over his creation, in his place, because it flows out of a perfect relationship between human beings and their God.

The whole of Genesis 1 and 2 paints a picture of that perfect relationship. God commands man as his vice-regent to rule over the earth. He sets him to work in the garden of Eden. Genesis 2:15 tells us that the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden to work it and keep it. By the way, the Hebrew word translated "put him" is literally "gave him rest." God gave him rest in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. Perfect rest for man is doing the work of God. We should remember that. In fact, all the way through the Old Testament God lays before his people the promise of the future of rest in his land, and that is what God lays before us too; a glorious Sabbath rest still awaits the people of God (Heb. 4:9). Sometimes we think that when we go to heaven (or, more properly, when God's eternal kingdom fully comes), we're going to sit about doing nothing, but that's not true. The perfect rest of God is doing the work of God, and that is the eternal calling that awaits his people.

We see that glorious situation here, right in the beginning, in Genesis 1 and 2. God puts man in the garden, at perfect rest, in perfect harmony, to work under his direction. He speaks his gracious words of command to human beings, and the man and the woman respond obediently to God's direction. That's the visible form, if you like, of their trust in God, the visible form of expressing that right relationship with God, which they were created for. The New Testament calls it the obedience of faith (Rom. 1:5). But the audible form of that right relationship with God, of that trust, is their speech with God, their verbal communion with him. Apparently, God had the habit of taking an evening stroll in the garden of Eden to have a chat with Adam and Eve all about the goings-on of the day, because when we come to Genesis 3:9, God comes looking for them and asks, "Where are you?" He wanted to talk. The Lord God called to the man, "Where are you?"

That was the problem. God had spoken the whole creation into being and created man as a speaking being in his likeness so that above all he might enjoy relationship with man, calling out to him and receiving a joyful answer that would nurture ongoing fellowship and friendship. But something happened.

Man Stopped Answering God

Man stopped answering God. Adam hid. The Lord God called, "Where are you?" and Adam said, "I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself" (Gen. 3:9). He hid because the human beings had cheated on that exclusive relationship with God, which they were created for. As we all know, when the communion of an exclusive relationship is broken, communication breaks down.

The newspaper columnists love to talk nowadays about the "special relationship" that Britain used to have with the United States. Remember Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan? We were led to believe they were always on the phone together. If poor old Ronald Reagan stepped out of line, Maggie was on the phone putting him right, just like that. But they had, it seemed, a great relationship. It seemed to be similar with Tony Blair and George Bush, although they are very different characters. But it appears things are different now. Barack Obama and Gordon Brown didn't hit it off, and David Cameron has not fared a lot better, because all kinds of things have happened to put a strain on whatever had made the relationship special. The freeing of the Lockerbie bomber by the Scottish government dented transatlantic harmony, and the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico hardly helped. You certainly don't get the impression that the special red phone on the desk at 10 Downing Street is ringing nearly so often these days with a request from the incumbent of the White House for a congenial evening yarn. No special relationship, no communication.

Or think about a marriage. When a marriage is in trouble, what is the first sign? Husband and wife are not talking anymore. Perhaps first that deeper intimacy of sexual intercourse tails off and is gradually lost, but ultimately it is all kinds of communication. "We don't talk anymore!" as Cliff Richard put it. And when you don't talk, you live increasingly separate lives, because speech is the audible form of a real and living relationship. If there's no speaking happening, there's no relationship.

If you shout to somebody in the street, "Hello John!" and he doesn't answer but just continues walking, well, you know it's not John. He doesn't know you; that's why he doesn't answer. Recently I was walking down the street in the center of Glasgow, when I saw one of our students from the Cornhill Training Course, a girl with a long pigtail, on her bicycle at the traffic lights in front of me. I was just about to yank on her pigtail (since I've always thought that to be the purpose of pigtails), when the person on the bike turned around, and I saw it was somebody quite different; in fact it was a rather wild-looking man. It would have been very embarrassing to yank on the pigtail and discover an angry man thinking, "Who on earth are you?" Pigtail pulling just isn't a form of communication that can take place outside a good relationship with someone you know very well.

Meaningful speech, communication, and healthy relationship go together. Conversely, when communication is cut off completely, there can't be an ongoing relationship. Alas, that is where Genesis 3 leaves humanity:

Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever" — therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. (vv. 22–24)

So, tragically, early in his story, man is shut out of the garden of God. He is shut out from hearing God's voice. He is barred from talking to God. There are no more strolls in the cool of the day. There is just total silence. Man has refused to respond to God's gracious words; he has taken his own way, and, therefore, with great sadness, God has to say, "Okay, you won't listen. I'll stop the conversation. I'll back off." So man, created as human for communion with God, became, well, subhuman, not talking anymore to God, who made him. That's pretty much the way the world has been ever since. Man won't listen to God; he puts his fingers in his ears and says, "I don't need to listen to this! I reject God, if there is a God. I don't need God. I'll live as my own God. I'm not listening." It's a bit like a cross teenager who storms into the bedroom, slams the door, and turns up the music so that he can't hear his parents' voices if they're calling him, and he hopes because the music is so awful his parents will stay away.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Why We Pray"
by .
Copyright © 2015 William J. U. Philip.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Alistair Begg,
Introduction,
1 We Pray Because God Is a Speaking God,
2 We Pray Because We Are Sons of God,
3 We Pray Because God Is a Sovereign God,
4 We Pray Because We Have the Spirit of God,
Notes,
General Index,
Scripture Index,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Prayer is a particular kind of relationship to God, not a technique. By examining the fundamentals of that relationship—who he is and who we are—with straightforward Bible exposition, William Philip helps you understand and enter into it.”
—Timothy Keller, Founding Pastor, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City; Chairman and Cofounder, Redeemer City to City

“There are not many books on prayer, and there are fewer good books on prayer. Here is a handbook on the subject that combines clarity and brevity and provides us with a thoroughly biblical and understandable framework for prayer. I commend it enthusiastically.”
—Alistair Begg, Senior Pastor, Parkside Church, Chagrin Falls, Ohio

“Philip grounds prayer in the nature of the triune God, thus avoiding the modern evangelical tendency to make ‘the experience of prayer’ central. When divine Sonship and not feelings define you, then you have real prayer with a real God. This book will bless you.”
—Paul E. Miller, author, A Praying Life and J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life

“This book made me want to pray! It shows us what God is like—a Father who speaks, and whose adopted children are able to speak to him, by his Spirit. It is thoroughly biblical, honest, and entertaining. Philip takes our eyes off ourselves and our performance and onto God—Father, Son and Spirit.”
—Caz Dodds, Scotland Assistant Team Leader, UCCF

“Wonderfully refreshing, biblically realistic, and personally motivational—this book cuts through the stereotypes and guilt about prayer and presents us with our amazing privileges, at the heart of what it means to be a child of God. It will do your own heart good!”
—David Jackman, Former President, The Proclamation Trust

“To speak freshly about prayer is neither easy nor common. Philip has done it here. In answering so well the big question he has set himself, he has enriched my thinking and practice.”
—Dick Lucas, Rector Emeritus, St. Helen's Church, Bishopsgate, United Kingdom; Founder of Proclamation Trust

“In this wonderful book I find that my prayer life needs a reality check. The heart of prayer is not only talking to God, but knowing I pray because God is a speaking God.”
—Karen Loritts, speaker; coauthor, Your Marriage Today . . . and Tomorrow

“In this fine book on prayer you will find no super-spiritual hype nor dry detachment, but robust and sensitive exposition. Philip has put us all in his debt by this little book, which can be read with enjoyment in one sitting, but will reward repeated study and will give both challenge and encouragement.”
—Bob Fyall, Senior Tutor, The Cornhill Training Course, Scotland

“I found my heart and will deeply moved by the key premise of this book: that we learn about prayer by learning about God. He speaks—are we listening to him? He sends his Son—are we responding to him? He is sovereign—do we trust him and think his thoughts after him? He sends his Spirit—do we realize we’re empowered to pray? Internalize these great Bible truths, and your prayer life will come alive.”
—Rico Tice, Senior Minister (Evangelism), All Souls Church, London

“It’s refreshing not to have another Christian how-to book. Philip takes us right in by the front door and down the stairs to examine the very foundation of prayer. As he presses us to face the why, we also find help with the what and the how. I found these studies an essential exercise in thinking, a welcome source of relief, and a gentle lure to repentance.”
—Dale Ralph Davis, former pastor; Former Professor of Old Testament, Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson