Practice: Daily Prayer
Paul said we should “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17), meaning that we should, if possible, do everything all day with conscious reference to God (1 Cor 10:31). There should be background music of thankfulness and joy behind every incident in our day, audible only to us (Col 3:16–17). This kind of spontaneous and constant prayer during the day should be a habit of the heart. We will never develop it, however, unless we take up the discipline of regular, daily prayer.
Daily prayer has been a biblical practice from time immemorial. “Three times a day [Daniel] got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to God” (Dan 6:10). The Christian medieval practice of horae canonicae, the daily, fixed hours of prayer—also called the Daily Office—was said to be grounded in Jesus’ challenge to his sleeping disciples, “What, could ye not watch with me one hour?” (Matt 26:40). In the monasteries multiple services of daily prayer were held. Alan Jacobs, however, argues that the seven daily fixed times of monastic prayer—Matins (midnight), Lauds (3 A.M.), Prime (6 A.M.), Terce (9 A.M.), Sext (noon), None (3 P.M.), Vespers (6 P.M.), and Compline (9 P.M.)—were eventually proven to be physically insupportable. Many of the monastic orders either decreased the number of services or distributed responsibility for the various prayer times to different brothers or sisters.350
When the Protestant Reformation came to Great Britain, the Reformer Thomas Cranmer was faced with the question of how to help ordinary people with a full day of work do daily prayer. He was also concerned about how medieval prayer practices, so tied to an extremely detailed liturgical calendar of holy days, provided people only snatches of short, daily Bible passages appropriate for the holy day. He believed it prevented people from becoming acquainted with the entire Bible. In his preface to the first Book of Common Prayer of 1549, Cranmer argued that the earliest church fathers made sure that “all the whole Bible (or the greatest parte thereof) should be read ouer once in the yeare” in the regular services and prayers of the church.351
His solution was to first eliminate the numerous prayer times throughout the day except Morning Prayer (Matins) and Evensong. Then he provided, at the very beginning of his prayer book, a “Kalendar” in which four chapters of the Bible were to be read daily—two for Morning Prayer and two for Evensong. As Cranmer notes in his introduction to the Bible reading calendar, this meant that the entire Old Testament was read through once and the New Testament twice in a year, with the exceptions of chapters filled with genealogies, parts of Leviticus, and parts of the book of Revelation.352 In addition, Cranmer prescribed immersion in the Psalms. This too was an adaptation of clerical practice for laypeople. While the monastics with their seven daily services could get through the Psalms every week, Cranmer outlined a schedule by which all 150 Psalms could be read morning and evening and completed in a month.353
The result was a new and brilliant reworking of an ancient form. It was a Protestant Daily Office with a greater focus on the systematic reading of the Scripture. It called for twice-daily prayer that could be conducted either in community or privately. It provided both written prayers of adoration, confession, and thanksgiving and space for free-form prayers of petition, as well as a plan for the consecutive reading of books of the Bible, which has been called lectio continua.
This Protestantizing of daily prayer was also attempted by non-Anglican churches, though Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and others put less emphasis than did Cranmer on written prayers. John Calvin, however, prepared five brief, simple model prayers to be used for each of the five times of the day he advised Christians to pray,354 calling for prayers to be offered “when we arise in the morning, before we begin daily work, when we sit down to a meal, when by God’s blessing we have eaten, and when we are getting ready to retire.”355 Most Protestant churches, though, settled into a pattern of morning private prayer and evening family prayer. Presbyterian minister Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s famous annual Bible reading calendar, developed in Scotland in the early nineteenth century, included two chapters in the morning to accompany private prayer and two in the evening with the family.356 In addition, the Reformed free churches practiced congregational Psalm singing rather than morning and evening Psalter readings, in order to work the Psalms deep into the hearts and minds of people.357
In more modern times the practice of a single, daily “Quiet Time” was considered mandatory for two or three generations of Christian college students. In the 1930s and ’40s, British and Australian evangelical leaders produced a short booklet entitled Quiet Time: A Practical Guide for Daily Devotions. It was first published by InterVarsity Press in the United States in 1945.358 The thirty-page booklet subsequently became a million-copy seller and shaped and influenced at least fifty years of evangelical books and guides thereafter.359
Quiet Time spends a good deal of its short length insisting that daily devotion is a discipline that requires a very deliberate act of the will. It advises finding a quiet place and composing our spirits with the thought that God himself seeks to meet with us. It instructs us to use a journal to write down the results of our Bible study, after which we are to conclude with a relatively similar amount of time in prayer. The only period of time specified is twenty minutes, which is referred to as a minimum.
At the heart of the most practical part of Quiet Time is a summary of some of the prayer practices of George Mueller (1805–98), a well-known German Baptist minister and founder of orphanages, who lived most of his life in England. Mueller was noted for his prayer life, which he described in some of his autobiographical writings. He was particularly concerned to meditate on Scripture as a means of warming his heart and leading it into prayer. In this Mueller was following Martin Luther’s lead. His method of meditation was also a classic. He had a set of questions that he asked of a text, which echoed Luther’s own. Quiet Time listed them prominently:
Is there any example for me to follow?
Is there any command for me to obey?
Is there any error for me to avoid?
Is there any sin for me to forsake?
Is there any promise for me to claim?
Is there any new thought about God Himself?360
After Bible study and meditation, prayer is outlined as first approaching God in confession of our sins, then responding with thanks and praise for our salvation via the cross. After praise comes intercession for others and finally petition for our own needs.361
The late-twentieth-century evangelical Quiet Time tended to play down the more experiential aspects of prayer. Interpretive Bible study was stressed, including outlining a passage and paraphrasing it, and looking for literary structures of composition. One daily devotional called us to ask of a passage: “Are there any recurring thoughts exemplified by repeated use of the same word, phrases, contrasting words or thought? . . . What is the direction of the passage—specific to general or general to specific—in the subject matter?”362 This takes a good deal of practice, and it is difficult to imagine it happening in a very few minutes every morning. The effect was to promote a method of daily inductive Bible study aimed more at interpreting the text than at meditation and experience of God. After this kind of Bible study came prayer, but this more cognitive study did not lead very naturally to adoration. Prayer, then, was dominated by petitions for needs and confession of sins.
Many have found the traditional evangelical Quiet Time—with its emphasis on interpretive Bible study and petitionary prayer—to be too rationalistic an exercise. In response, and with desire for greater experience of God, many Protestants have turned to more Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, including lectio divina, contemplative prayer, and fixed hours of liturgical prayer.
One of the most successful contemporary reworkings of ancient fixed-hours prayer has been the volumes by Phyllis Tickle, The Divine Hours. Tickle usefully puts short Psalm and Scripture readings, hymn verses, ascriptions, and prayers all on the same page for easier reference than traditional Divine Office guides offer. However, her work resists several of Cranmer’s Protestant innovations to daily prayer. She calls for three or four daily times of prayer rather than two, and she moves away from the systematic, consecutive Bible reading associated with Cranmer, Calvin, and other churches of the Reformation.363
Tickle’s encouragement of written prayers is not, however, counter to Reformation practice. While some non-Anglican ministers, such as John Bunyan, were vehemently opposed to all written prayer forms,364 some of Bunyan’s contemporaries, such as John Owen, believed that prescribed prayer forms could be useful if they were written by godly “persons from their own experience and the light of Scripture.”365 Such prayers can be heart affecting and give stimulation and guidance to our own prayers.366
It remains for us, then, to find ways of daily prayer and devotion. In general, I think we need to move beyond traditional twentieth-century evangelical devotional practice as well as the current restoration of medieval prayer forms. No reader of this book will be surprised by now to hear me say that I think we could learn more from the prayer practices of Protestant theologians of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. If we look back to those writers as we have been doing throughout this book, I see several important changes to make.
I believe prayer should be more often than the classic once-daily Quiet Time. Luther, as we have seen, believed prayer should be twice a day, while Calvin advised prayer to be brief and even more often. To frame the day, there seems to be unanimity from the Christian past in all its branches that we should turn our thoughts to God at set times more than once during a twenty-four-hour period. I agree with most Protestant churches that twice a day is good, though we cannot be too insistent on one schedule. I personally find morning and evening prayer the best for me, but I also try to sometimes practice a brief, midday “stand-up” time of focused prayer to reconnect to my morning prayer insights.
I believe daily prayer should be more biblical, that is, more grounded in systematic Bible reading and study and in disciplined meditation on passages. My reasons for this conviction have been laid out at length in this book. Cranmer’s Bible reading plan for the year is no longer in most current Common Prayer books used around the world, but it can be found in reprints of the 1549 and 1552 books. M’Cheyne’s Bible reading calendar, readily available in many forms on the Internet and elsewhere, takes you through the Bible at various paces, depending on the time you have to give. In any case, systematic, consecutive reading of the Bible should precede or accompany prayer.
Daily prayer in private should be more interwoven with the corporate prayer of the church. Calvin wanted Christians to learn private prayer from the public prayers and the Psalm singing in gathered worship.367 Luther wrote that he prayed twice a day, either by hurrying to his room “or, if it be the day and hour for it, to the church where a congregation is assembled.”368 This shows how important it was for the great teachers of the church that our prayer life not be completely privatized. It is right and necessary that we learn to pray not merely from reading the Psalms and the rest of the Bible but by hearing and reading the prayers of the church. Many churches today, especially those with what is called contemporary worship, give congregants almost no help with prayer at all in this way. The only prayers congregants hear are “spontaneous” expressions of worship leaders, or the final prayer of the preacher at the end of the sermon. Time-tested and carefully considered prayers are not provided as they were in times past. This means that many Christians today will have to search out such prayers, and that is where Cranmer’s matchless “collects” as well as other resources, such as Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours or Arthur Bennett’s The Valley of Vision, can be helpful.369
Finally, daily prayer should include meditation, not just Bible study, and in general we should be much more expectant of experience in the full range. We should expect more struggle and complaint and “darkness of soul” but also more awe, intimacy, and experience of God’s spiritual reality. John Owen is quite clear that if the affections of the heart are not engaged in prayer, real character change and growth in Christ-likeness is impossible. We cannot settle for less.
The most practical question of all, then, is “How do you actually spend time in prayer?” A helpful book, My Path of Prayer, contains a series of very short essays by a number of Christian leaders, many recounting their main pattern for daily prayer.370 One of the contributors, Selwyn Hughes, provided this description of his own prayer life. He prayed as soon as he could after rising in the morning. He read a passage of Scripture and meditated on it, including a Psalm if there was time. He then took a moment to “still his mind” and remind himself both of God’s presence and of the privilege and power of prayer. Then, he began to pray, always beginning with adoration, praise, and thanksgiving to God. After this, he writes, he moved to “pray for my personal spiritual condition,” and by this he meant self-examination, confession, and repentance. Then he did what we have called petitionary prayer for himself, for those he knew, for the church, and for the world. Finally, he says, he would end by again stilling his mind and heart to be sure he had heard from God what he especially wanted him to learn from this time of meditation and prayer.371
This account is striking for not being very original. It is surprisingly similar to the descriptions of daily prayer we have seen by many teachers, including Martin Luther. Therefore, I think we can outline a pattern for daily prayer with some confidence that it will serve many people, always remembering that neither the details nor the order I am providing is written in stone, the Bible, or any particular religious tradition. I suggest this framework—evocation, meditation, Word prayer, free prayer, and contemplation.
Evocation. To evoke means “to bring to mind,” though it also can include invocation, calling on God. There is almost universal agreement that prayer should be started by “thinking over who it is that you will be addressing, what he has done to give you access to himself . . . how you stand related to him . . . [and] the truly breathtaking fact that through his Word and Spirit the Lord Jesus is building a friendship with you.”372 One of the ways to do this is to recap in your mind the Trinitarian theology of prayer. God is your Father now, and he is committed to your good. Jesus gives you access to the throne of the universe because he is your mediator, advocate, and priest. The Holy Spirit is God himself within you prompting and helping you to pray, so you can know that if you are praying, God is listening.
Briefly ponder verses that speak to you about these truths, many of which have been discussed earlier in the book. Or you could read one of the traditional Psalms used in worship for entering God’s presence, such as Psalm 95. Another method is to take one of the tested prayers of the church, such as one of Thomas Cranmer’s collects, to use as a kind of invocation to begin your time of prayer.373 Take no more than a couple of minutes for what we are calling evocation.
Meditation. To respond to God in prayer, we must listen to his Word. This means taking time to meditate on some portion of the Bible as a bridge into prayer. This is not something that usually enriches our prayer life overnight. It is much easier to move into meditation after Bible reading the more you have read and come to understand the Bible over the years. Serious study of the Bible is something that must be done in order to grow as a Christian, but it is a mistake to spend most of your daily time with God in an in-depth interpretive Bible study. It leaves you little time and perhaps no inclination to meditate and pray.
For those starting out in the Christian life, therefore, it would be best to set aside some regular time—apart from daily prayer—for serious study of the Bible. That way the Bible gradually becomes less and less of a strange, confusing jumble of ideas, and it becomes easier to read and meditate on it every day. One way to do this kind of serious study is to read through the entire Bible once, slowly, perhaps reading a chapter a day and covering it in three years or so, and using a short, good one-volume commentary such as the New Bible Commentary, 21st Century Edition, to do so, taking notes in a journal as you go.374 While doing this study, you can earmark some chapters for further reflection. Then, in daily prayer, you can turn to those chapters for the reflective reading and meditation we have been discussing. The actual order in your daily devotion would then be like this: first evocation, then Bible reading and meditation, and then on to prayer.
Word prayer. From Martin Luther we get an important step in daily prayer that is often overlooked. After meditating on the Scripture, Luther takes time to “pray the text” before moving on to more free-form prayer. Meditation, as we have said, is not prayer per se. It is a form of reflection and self-communing. When the psalmist says, “Return to God, O my soul,” he is doing this kind of heart inclining that is meditation. However, if you use Luther’s approach to meditation—discovering something in the text as a basis for praising, repenting, and aspiring—then the meditation itself can be immediately turned into a prayer. The Psalms too have a form such that they can quite easily be turned into prayers and prayed back to God. “Praying the Psalms” is an important and time-honored way to do Word prayer. (See below for a few more thoughts on this.)
Luther’s favorite way to pray a text of Scripture has been treated earlier. He advises that the person praying take the Lord’s Prayer and paraphrase each petition in his or her own words, filling it out with the concerns on his or her heart that day. I believe this is perhaps the single best way to bridge from the Word into prayer because, of course, the Lord’s Prayer is Jesus’ own comprehensive model. I advise doing this at least once a week as part of this step in your daily prayer pattern.
Free prayer. Free prayer means simply to pour out your heart in prayer. Nevertheless, nearly all sound guides remind us to give thought to balance our prayers among the three forms—adoration and thanksgiving, confession and repentance, petition and intercession. This balance does not need to be wooden, though it can be a good discipline to move through them habitually in some order that works well for you. Here is also where prayer lists filled with causes and concerns can be of help, so long as we remember J. I. Packer’s warning that petitionary prayer is only life changing and powerful if we do not rapidly run down a “grocery list” but instead lift each cause to God with theological reasoning and self-examination.
Especially for beginners, it can be very helpful to use the older volume by Matthew Henry, A Method for Prayer, with Scripture Expressions, Proper to Be Used Under Each Head.375 As we noted earlier, Henry digs out of the Scripture hundreds of actual prayers and then organizes and classifies them under subheadings of the larger headings of praise, confession, petition, thanksgiving, intercession, and conclusion. If you feel your own times of free-form prayer have stalled, Henry’s book affords an almost endless amount of grist for the mill.
Contemplation. We have spent a great deal of time talking about what we do and do not mean by contemplation. Edwards described contemplation as times when we not only know God is holy, but when we sense—“see” and “taste”—that he is so in our hearts. Luther described it as a time in which he finds himself getting “lost” in some aspect of God’s truth or character. In the original German he says literally that sometimes when he is going through his prayer regimen, he discovers that “his thoughts go for a walk.” Thoughts about God become “big” and affecting. Then he stops and takes time to follow the lead of the Spirit. He writes:
It often happens that I lose myself . . . in one petition of the Lord’s Prayer, and then I let all the other six petitions go. When such rich good thoughts come, one should . . . listen to them in silence and by no means suppress them. For here the Holy Spirit himself is preaching and one word of his sermon is better than thousands of our own prayers. . . . [So] if the Holy Spirit should come and begin to preach to your heart, giving you rich and enlightened thoughts . . . be quiet and listen to him.376
As we saw when considering John Owen’s teaching on meditation, we should not assume that after all is done, we will necessarily find our heart and affections engaged and the Holy Spirit opening our thoughts in new ways as Luther describes. That is not the norm for most people most times. We may begin and end our time of prayer with a sense of spiritual dryness or even of God’s absence. In that case, this final moment of “contemplation” would simply mean to take the best thought we received about God, then praise and thank him for it and for who he is, and finally ask God sincerely to come near and show us his face in his good time.
What follows are two plans for daily prayer, one more full and challenging and one simpler for those starting out. Don’t be intimidated by these plans. Follow the steps in the outline—approaching (evocation), meditation, Word prayer, free prayer, contemplation—without feeling the need to do all the specific proposals or answer all the questions within each part. Prayer will grow and draw you in.
From earliest times, the Christian church adopted the Psalms of the Old Testament to be its prayer book. A famous letter from the great fourth-century African theologian Athanasius to Marcellinus makes this clear. He wrote: “Whatever your particular need or trouble, from this same book [the Psalms] you can select a form of words to fit it, so that you . . . learn the way to remedy your ill.” Athanasius goes on to argue that the Psalms show us how to praise God, repent for sins, and be thankful, in each case giving us “fitting words” to do so. Finally, he concludes: “Under all the circumstances of life, we shall find that these divine songs suit ourselves and meet our own souls’ need at every turn.”377 There is no situation or emotion a human being can experience that is not reflected somewhere in the Psalms. Immersing ourselves in the Psalms and turning them into prayers teaches our hearts the “grammar” of prayer and gives us the most formative instruction in how to pray in accord with God’s character and will.
What does it mean to pray the Psalms or turn them into prayer? There are innumerable ways to do it, but here are some methods that have profited many.378 One has been called verbatim praying. Many of the Psalms are already written as prayers direct from the author to God, so we can simply “pray the words as they lay.” Psalm 90 works well for this method: “Lord, you have been our dwelling place. . . . Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.”379
The second, perhaps most common way to pray, is to paraphrase and personalize the Psalm. Luther’s example of how to paraphrase and elaborate on the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer fits here as well. When paraphrasing Psalm 59 where it begins, “Deliver me from my enemies, O God,” it may be that we do not have any human opponents dedicated to killing us or destroying our lives. The New Testament, however, talks about our enemies “the world, the flesh, and the devil” (1 John 2:16; Rev 12:9). You can paraphrase this to talk about temptations you are facing or other spiritual traps that it would be easy to fall into.380
A third basic kind of Psalm praying is sometimes called responsive praying.381 Many Psalms are long or consist more of teaching than praying and are not in the form of prayer. So in this method we take themes and statements and let them stimulate adoration, confession, and supplication. This essentially uses Luther’s kind of biblical meditation on the Psalm. We must not be rigid about any of these methods. Many Psalms lend themselves more to one or the other, but as time goes on, the person praying them does not even think about what method he or she is using. You can move back and forth between methods or come up with hybrids too.
For an example, let’s select the following five verses from Psalm 116 (vv. 1–2, 7, 17–18):
I love the Lord, for he heard my voice;
he heard my cry for mercy.
Because he turned his ear to me,
I will call on him as long as I live. [vv. 1–2]
Return to your rest, my soul,
for the Lord has been good to you. [v. 7]
I will sacrifice a thank offering to you
and call on the name of the Lord.
I will fulfill my vows to the Lord
in the presence of all his people. [vv. 17–18]
We might pray the verses like this:
Verses 1–2: I love you, Lord, for when I asked for mercy, you gave it to me. Lord, you have done it again and again. And for that, Lord, I will never stop depending on you—never. There’s nowhere else I can go, nowhere else I should go. (Paraphrase prayer)
Verse 7: O Lord, my heart does not rest in your goodness, it is never consoled as deeply as it should be by your grace. It is too restless. Help me to know you—let your goodness be so real to my heart that it is completely at rest. (Responsive prayer)
Verses 17–18: I will sacrifice a thank offering to you, and call on the name of the Lord. I will live a life consistent with my baptism, with my membership in your church. I won’t do this on my own, but in the community of your people. (Verbatim prayer, slightly paraphrased)
Much of the sweetness and beauty of the Psalms lies in how they point us to the Messiah to come—Jesus Christ. Their power for our prayer life can be unlocked if we learn to pray the Psalms with Jesus in mind. How can we do that?
To begin with, we should remember that Jesus would have actually sung and prayed the Psalms through his entire life. As you consider a particular Psalm, imagine how he would have thought about it, knowing who he was and what he came to do. When we come to a “lament,” we usually think of it in reference to suffering or feelings we are having. Remember, however, what Jesus suffered. When you come to a Psalm of refuge, remember that we “hide” in Jesus and he forgives and cleanses us from our sins, which is our truest danger.382
Finally, there are a number of very obviously Messianic Psalms that give us particularly rich views of Christ. They include the following: the enthroned Messiah (Ps 2, 110), the rejected Messiah (Ps 118), the betrayed Messiah (Ps 69, 109), the dying and rising Messiah (Ps 22, 16), the heavenly bridegroom of his people (Ps 45), and the triumphant Messiah (Ps 68, 72).383 These are opportunities to simply consider the greatness and beauty of Jesus, to adore and rest in him.
I often ask Christians to evaluate their situation with regard to prayer by using a metaphor. Imagine that your soul is a boat, a boat with both oars and a sail. In this case here are four questions:
Are you “sailing”? Sailing means you are living the Christian life with the wind at your back. God is real to your heart. You often feel his love. You see prayers being answered. When studying the Bible, you regularly see remarkable things and you sense him speaking to you. You sense people around you being influenced by the Spirit through you.
Are you “rowing”? Rowing means you are finding prayer and Bible reading to be more a duty than a delight. God often (though not always) seems distant, and the sense of his presence is fairly rare. You don’t see many of your prayers being answered. You may be struggling with doubts about God and yourself. Yet despite all this, you refuse self-pity or the self-righteous pride that assumes you know better than God how your life should go. You continue to read the Bible and pray regularly, you attend worship and reach out and serve people despite the inner spiritual dryness.
Are you “drifting”? Drifting means that you are experiencing all the conditions of rowing—spiritual dryness and difficulties in life. But in response, instead of rowing, you are letting yourself drift. You don’t feel like approaching and obeying God, so you don’t pray or read. You give in to the self-centeredness that naturally comes when you feel sorry for yourself, and you drift into self-indulgent behaviors to comfort yourself, whether it be escape eating and sleeping, sexual practices, or whatever else.
Are you “sinking”? Eventually your boat, your soul, will drift away from the shipping lanes, as it were—and truly lose any forward motion in the Christian life. The numbness of heart can become hardness because you give in to thoughts of self-pity and resentment. If some major difficulty or trouble were to come into your life, it would be possible to abandon your faith and identity as a Christian altogether.
In this metaphor we see that there are some things we are responsible for, such as using the means of grace—the Bible, prayer, and church participation—in a disciplined way. There are many other things we do not have much control over—such as how well the circumstances in our lives are going as well as our emotions. If you pray, worship, and obey despite negative circumstances and feelings, you won’t be drifting, and when the winds come up again, you will move ahead swiftly. On the other hand, if you do not apply the means of grace, you will at best be drifting, and if storms come into your life, you might be in danger of sinking.
In any case—pray no matter what. Praying is rowing, and sometimes it is like rowing in the dark—you won’t feel that you are making any progress at all. Yet you are, and when the winds rise again, and they surely will, you will sail again before them.
Those who enjoy sailing might find these nautical images helpful. However, a metaphor used more often in the Bible to describe fellowship with God is that of a feast. Isaiah looked forward to the day when God will end death, heal the world, and take his people deep into his love. He envisions this as a great feast.
The Lord Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
. . . he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken. (Is 25:6–8)
The word sheet refers to the shroud placed over dead bodies at funerals. At the end of time, we will not only receive God’s forgiveness (“he will remove his people’s disgrace”) but also the end of “the sheet”—all suffering, death, and tears. Eating together is one of the most common metaphors for friendship and fellowship in the Bible, and so this vision is a powerful prediction of unimaginably close and intimate fellowship with the living God. It evokes the sensory joys of exquisite food in the presence of loving friends. The “wine” of full communion with God and our loved ones will be endless and infinite delight.
It is quite possible that Jesus had these prophecies of the Great Feast Day in mind when he was invited to a wedding in Cana. Jesus knew that the great banquet at the end of time was going to be a wedding feast (Rev 19:6–9) in which Jesus took his bride, his people, to himself (Rev 21:2–5). At Cana, when he discovered that poor planning meant the wine had run out in the middle of the days-long feast, he took water jars for purification and turned the water into wine so the joy of the occasion was not diminished but enhanced (John 2:1–11). Because Jesus himself likens his blood to wine at the Lord’s Supper, we can see that Jesus’ death on the cross will be the basis for that final festal joy that we will have with him forever.
Yet this spiritual wine, this fellowship with the Lord, is not wholly in the future. As we have seen, we are invited even now to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8). We can “see” and “taste” his love, at least in part, now (2 Cor 3:18). The great eighteenth-century hymn writer William Cowper suffered from bouts of depression, but he was able to write:
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.
It may be fitful and episodic, but fellowship with God is available now. George Herbert, remember, called prayer “the Churches banquet.” Remember too Dwight Moody, who was praying one day and could say only “that God revealed himself to me, and I had such an experience of his love that I had to ask him to stay his hand.”384
Why are we settling for water when we could have wine?