Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.
Hebrews 10:19–22
Throughout this book we’ve see that the Reformers’ understanding of grace, following Paul as refracted though Augustine, accented the prior unilateral action of God in salvation. Grace emphasizes that salvation is something God does. In recent chapters, we’ve looked at how this emphasis on the activity of God in salvation is worked out in the church as both an act of grace and through the means of grace—the word preached and the sacraments. The Westminster Shorter Catechism adds one further means of grace, which, at first glance, may come as something of a surprise:
Q. 88. What are the outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption?
A. The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption, are his ordinances, especially the word, sacraments, and prayer; all which are made effectual to the elect for salvation.
We’ve already seen why the word and the sacraments are on this list. God’s promise endues them with saving power; God is the agent when his word is preached, when baptism is administered, when the bread and the wine are distributed. But prayer? Prayer is not the act of God mediated through means. We think of prayer as the response of a human being when confronted with God’s grace. Indeed, the discussion of prayer in the Heidelberg Catechism comes under the third section—the “gratitude” section, which speaks of our response to God. So why did the Westminster Divines choose to list it as a means of grace, not a response to grace?
Reading the works of the Reformers (who predated the Westminster Divines by several decades) does not give us an immediate answer. In this chapter I want to offer a rationale as to why we might consider prayer as both a response to God’s grace and a means of God’s grace. A Christian who has a good grasp of God’s sovereignty and of the power of salvation in Christ should understand that prayer is never simply a response to the good news but is itself a key part of that good news. Prayer is a means by which God builds up his saints and extends his kingdom.
Reformation Prayer
The primary focus of Reformation polemics on prayer was the notion of the intercession of the saints. It addressed the idea that certain saints in heaven could plead on behalf of the living and gain favor with God for them. Ironically, a classic example of this medieval notion in practice comes from Martin Luther himself. When caught in a violent thunderstorm in 1505, Luther cried out: “Saint Anne, save me, and I will become a monk!” That was a fateful prayer because it led Luther to the Augustinian cloister in Erfurt, and the rest, as they say, is history. Luther’s prayer that day triggered events that would eventually lead him to refute the practice of praying to saints, yet at the time his response to the moment of crisis was entirely conventional. Saint Anne was the patron saint of miners (and, as it happens, of those caught in storms), the business in which Luther’s father was engaged, and in praying this way Luther represented the general practice of the time (looking to individual saints for help) and the specific piety of his own home.
I would add that we need to be careful before we dismiss all questions of the intercession of saints as unbiblical. The Bible is filled with examples of individuals interceding on behalf of others. There is Abraham in Genesis 18 praying for Sodom and Gomorrah, and Moses frequently interceding for the people of Israel as they sin during their desert wanderings. While we can read these Old Testament examples typologically, pointing toward the great intercession of the Lord Jesus Christ on behalf of his people, intercession on behalf of others continues both in example and precept in the New Testament. Paul remembers the churches constantly in his prayers. James indicates that the elders of the church are meant to pray for the healing of the sick. The idea of one Christian interceding with God on behalf of another is not an unbiblical idea. Most of you reading this book will no doubt have asked other Christians to pray with you and for you at various times.
Medieval Catholicism, however, made the saints themselves the object of intercession. There is a difference between someone praying to God on your behalf and praying to someone else, asking them to intercede for you. Nobody prayed to Abraham in order that he might intercede with God for them. Yet the prayer elicited by the thunderbolt that nearly killed Martin Luther in 1505 rests on a history of theological tradition and popular piety. In Luther’s mind, his physical safety depended on the intercessory intervention of Saint Anne, the patron saint of miners. Saint Anne, of course, was already dead and in heaven. Luther was locating the power of intercession in the person of a departed saint. Luther later came to reject this position because he felt that the theology that surrounded it derogated from the uniqueness of Christ.1
This gives us a clue as to why we might regard prayer as a means of grace. For the Reformers, prayer has a christological focus that places Christ’s own intercession at the center. The Reformation might well be described as a christological corrective to medieval Catholicism. It presented Christ’s mediatorial role, particularly his priesthood, in a manner that transformed the understanding of justification and the sacraments. The priesthood of Christ became the criterion by which medieval notions of priesthood were critiqued and corrected. This also transformed the Reformers’ understanding of prayer because Christ became the sole and immediate focus of intercession.
The Intercession of Christ
As we saw earlier, grace must always be connected to the work of Christ, not simply in its origin in the merciful will of God but also in its execution. This is because grace is not a divine sentiment. It is the concrete, divine response to the human problem of sin and death that is manifested in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We cannot talk about grace without talking about Christ; grace is Christ, not an abstraction.
One of the implications of this is that the gracious work of Christ is ongoing. Not only did he take human flesh, live in obedience to his Father’s will, and die and rise again, but Christ ascended to heaven. There his work continues as he lives to intercede for his people. His intercession is part of the economy of grace and provides the immediate foundation for our own prayers. We can be confident that God hears our prayers because our prayers are presented to the Father by the Son through the Spirit. The Trinitarian economy of grace embraces our prayers and intercessions too.
This is of vital practical importance. Often (and rightly) Christians focus on the death and resurrection of Christ. These are the foundation for the work that he does now, his constant and loving intercession for his people before the Father. Ray Davies of The Kinks sums up the lonely isolation of the modern city dweller in these eloquent lines from his song “Nobody’s Fool”: “Nobody pleads for me, nobody bleeds for me, I’m nobody’s fool and I’m nobody’s friend.” But Christians do have someone. We can know that by grace we are never alone like this. Christ bled for us and pleads for us constantly. The intercession of Christ is a grace-filled doctrine.
God’s gracious plan has made Christ both sacrifice and priest. The sacrifice that he offers before God is his own suffering and death, which was completed once and for all on Calvary. He is the Lamb of God. He is the great fulfillment of that to which the Old Testament sacrifices looked forward. Yet his humanity is not significant simply because it provides the sacrifice. It is also the agent on which his priestly intercession is based. Hebrews 7:23–28 affirms Christ’s perfection and permanence as priest and states that he ever lives to make intercession for his people. His prayers to the Father save to the uttermost those who come to him.
This truth has deep significance for our lives. Hebrews is the classic text in this regard, although the Gospels, especially John 17, give wonderful examples of Christ’s intercession. Christ the Son of God, consubstantial with the Father, is a man of constant, fervent prayer. This is a point that we must take to heart. Hebrews 2:14–18 establishes the necessity of Christ’s incarnation by grounding it in his sympathetic identification with human beings. Many christological arguments establish the need for Christ to take human flesh because it was human beings who had sinned in their flesh. This is the underlying logic of the fourth-century work On the Incarnation by Athanasius and the eleventh-century work Why God Became Man by Anselm. And while this is a key element of any biblical Christology, the writer of Hebrews enriches that picture by adding to it the element of existential sympathy. Christ’s incarnation is also necessary because it makes him a sympathetic high priest. Because he has taken on human flesh, he knows, from a human perspective, what it is like to be human.
This means that Christians can be confident that they are represented before the Father by someone who knows and understands. He shares their human existence, this life of contradiction and pain, in a deeply intimate manner. To have Christ as our sympathetic high priest is an act of grace, and it means that God relates to his people in a special and unique way through his ongoing incarnate life. When we call out to Christ in prayer, he knows not simply what we feel as humans but how we feel it. And he sympathizes with us.
Prayer is a means of grace because the economy of grace involves the intercession of Christ. That intercession, even now, is what makes God’s grace a potent reality to individual Christians. The consubstantiality of Father and Son—that the Son is divine as the Father is divine, and both are one God—means that the Son’s intercession will always be heard by the Father and always answered in the affirmative. Were it not so, we could not say that the two are one God. That Christ’s intercession is part of his priesthood means that his death and intercession are two aspects of Christ’s one role as mediator; principles that apply to the one may be applied to the other.
This means that reflections on the relationship of God the Father to Christ’s death can also apply to the relationship of the Father to Christ’s intercession. It is, of course, incorrect to conceive of Christ’s death as the offering of a Son who is well disposed toward mercy to an angry Father in an effort to persuade him or blackmail him into being gracious to his people. Such a view is absurd. Christ does not die and then present his death to his Father as a bribe designed to change the Father’s mind. Christ does not have to plead his case before a hostile God, hoping for the best while fearing the worst. In actual fact, Christ is commissioned by the Father and anointed by the Holy Spirit in order that he might die for our sins. The economy of grace has its origins in the eternal will of God and involves each person of the Trinity in a unified plan. The Godhead is united in the desire to act with grace and mercy toward a sinful people. There is no blackmail or tension between Father and Son regarding the death of Christ or the gracious intention of that death. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all desire exactly the same end.
Since this is true of the death of Christ, it is also true of his intercession. Christ as mediator is sent by the Father and empowered by the Holy Spirit for his role, and all aspects of that role enjoy the mutual agreement of the persons of the Trinity. When Christ sits at the Father’s right hand and prays for his people on the basis of his sacrificial work on their behalf, he is not cajoling a reluctant Father into doing something that he does not wish to do. He is simply asking him to fulfill that which he has already purposed to do through Christ’s work.2
Christians can enjoy perfect confidence in prayer, knowing that the God who has saved them in Christ is the God who prays for them even now and is also the God who answers those prayers in accordance with his perfect will. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit all agree on the purposes of Christ’s work—life, death, resurrection, ascension, and intercession—and all guarantee his success. That Christ prays for his people, and asks only what his Father is already committed to granting him, should fill all Christians with tremendous joy.
The Christian’s prayer finds its objective, gracious foundation in the prayer of Christ. In John 17, Christ prays for his disciples and his church. That passage not only reveals God’s will for the church; it represents a series of genuine requests that he makes to the Father. Christ’s prayers are part of the way in which God executes his will. We might say that the Father delights to hear the prayers of his Son and to grant that for which he asks. First, as God, the Son only asks for that which the Father, as God, wishes to grant anyway, and second, the Father surely delights to hear the requests of his Son and to grant them. If earthly fathers rejoice when a child asks for something good and take pleasure in giving it to them, how much more must this be true of God?
The Intercession of the Holy Spirit
The second gracious foundation of prayer is the work of the Holy Spirit. One of the perennial concerns of Christians is the reality that our prayers are often weak, halfhearted, and sometimes confused. There are also situations where we find that we do not even know for what we should be praying. In this context the work of the Holy Spirit becomes significant in understanding prayer.
Previously, we noted that the Bible and later theologians use the concept of grace in two ways: as the disposition of God in mercy toward those who have rebelled against him, and in reference to the work of God in those people to bring about his gracious purposes. This latter aspect of grace focuses very much on the work of the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who indwells believers and the church, making us individually and corporately the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Given the language of temple associated with the Holy Spirit, and the role of the Spirit in the life and work of Christ, it is not surprising that the Bible ascribes significance to the Spirit in the prayers of believers. The key passage in this regard is Romans 8:26–27, which says: “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.” In his commentary on these verses, Calvin points out that we are blind in our addresses to God because, even when convicted of our sins, our minds are often chaotic and disturbed. Yet we can still be confident in God, for though he may seem not to have answered our prayers, we know that the Spirit intercedes for us according to God’s will in a profound way that transcends all human understanding. He summarizes his thoughts on the passage in this way:
And the Spirit is said to intercede, not because he really humbles himself to pray or to groan, but because he stirs up in our hearts those desires which we ought to entertain; and he also affects our hearts in such a way that these desires by their fervency penetrate into heaven itself. And Paul has thus spoken, that he might more significantly ascribe the whole to the grace of the Spirit. We are indeed bidden to knock; but no one can of himself premeditate even one syllable, except God by the secret impulse of his Spirit knocks at our door, and thus opens for himself our hearts.3
Calvin says that even our prayers are themselves acts of God’s grace, brought about through the Spirit, perfected by him, and thus made powerful. The theological underpinnings of prayer make our prayers, though in some sense prayed by us, into means of grace both for us as individuals and for the church as a whole.
Human Prayer as a Means of Grace
One of the perennial questions that often puzzles Christians who have a strong belief in the Pauline, anti-Pelagian notion of grace is this: If salvation depends on sovereign grace and thus divine intervention, why should we pray?4 This is an urgent issue for many, one of a number of questions generated by an apparent conflict between a high view of sovereign grace and a desire to maintain a clear understanding of human responsibility and, indeed, biblical piety.
From all that has been said thus far, it is clear that human prayer cannot be understood as in any way cajoling or blackmailing God into doing things that he does not desire to do and that he has not planned to do. That is not a legitimate answer to the question. Perhaps, however, prayer might function not so much by changing God but by changing the one praying? Could prayer be intended to bring our wills into line with the will of God? In this understanding of prayer, we pray to God, and God uses that prayer to conform us to his will.
There is undoubtedly some truth to this latter idea. In the Lord’s Prayer, we are taught to say “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” This implies that a part of prayer is our submission to the greater will of God. Communing with God in prayer must inevitably transform us as his people, as we seek not simply to present our petitions to him but to seek and submit to his will for our lives.
There are even hints of this aspect of prayer in the life of Christ himself. It is a mysterious and profound text, but, as he prays in Gethsemane, there is clear allusion to the fact that he is there submitting his will to that of the Father (Matt 26:39, 42). We cannot possibly fathom all that is implied in that statement, yet it is clear that prayer had a real significance for Christ when it came to obeying his Father’s will. So it stands to reason that prayer must also play its part in bringing our wills into line with that of God. Surely the very nature of prayer, whereby the one praying is automatically placed in the position of a suppliant to another, speaks of this.
And yet prayer cannot be reduced to this. In Luke 18:1–8, Jesus tells the parable of the persistent widow who continually appealed to a judge until at last he gave her the justice for which she was asking. His application of this is that the elect should cry out to God in prayer day and night and believe that he will hear them. It is not that these prayers merely change the elect by bringing their wills into line with those of God; still less is it that these prayers change God. Rather, God uses the prayers of the elect as one of the means of accomplishing his purposes for them.
Though Christ is God incarnate, his life is marked by constant prayer. The Gospels tell us that he would draw aside to pray (e.g., Matt 14:23; Mark 1:35; 6:46; Luke 5:16; 9:18). He also prays at critical points in his ministry, such as at his baptism (Luke 3:21), in the Upper Room (John 17), and in Gethsemane (Matt 26:36; Mark 14:32). Christ’s life of prayer reflects his dependence on his Father during his earthly sojourn and also that his work was accomplished in a deep and important way by prayer. When he prays in Gethsemane, for example, it is not merely a theatrical performance meant to teach us by example about how to pray in difficult circumstances. It is part of God equipping Christ to be that mediator of which the writer to the Hebrews speaks. Something real and important happens in the garden, such that had it not occurred, Christ’s ministry would have been deficient in significant ways. Further, as Jesus prays for his disciples during his earthly ministry (e.g., Luke 22:32; John 17), so even now he intercedes for his people at the right hand of the Father. The prayers of Christ for his people have always been a vital part of the way in which God’s gracious purposes have been fulfilled in the church and in the lives of individual saints.
Christ also commands and expects that his disciples pray (e.g., Mark 11:25; Luke 18:1). Prayer was a significant part of Christ’s own life, and it was also something he expected his disciples to engage in as a means both of strengthening their own Christian lives and of helping to bring about the fulfillment of God’s greater purposes (Luke 10:2). We see this aspect of prayer both in the descriptions of church life in the book of Acts and in the imperatives of Paul’s letters (e.g., Acts 6:6; 13:3; 21:5; Eph 6:18; Col 4:3). Practically, this means that we must not allow our understanding of God’s sovereign grace to eclipse the clear importance and biblical imperative of prayer. Christians pray. It is what we do. So how should biblical examples of prayer be understood, particularly in light of the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s claim that it is a means of grace?
Put simply, we can say that prayer is a means of grace because it is one of God’s chosen means or instruments for achieving his gracious purposes. Christ is the great example of this, praying for his Father’s will to be done and praying for his disciples, both during his earthly ministry and now as he sits in heaven. These prayers of Christ are not a piece of theater. They are part of God’s chosen means of bringing about his will on earth.
Thomas Aquinas is the one who expresses this idea most succinctly in his treatment of predestination when he asks the key question: “Can predestination be furthered by the prayers of the saints?”5 In typical fashion, he first argues for a negative answer. Predestination is eternal and therefore cannot be affected by anything that happens in time. Further, God knows all things. He does not need advice from anyone else on how best to carry out his purposes or on what those purposes might be. Finally, if predestination could be helped by the prayers of the saints, then it could also be hindered by the prayers of the saints. Over against these arguments, Aquinas asserts Genesis 25:21 where Isaac prays for his barren wife, Rebekah, and the Lord hears him and she conceives.
Aquinas then offers his own resolution of the issue. First, he highlights two errors that are to be avoided. Some, he says, use the certainty of predestination to argue that prayers are superfluous because the results of predestination are guaranteed anyway. The predestined will reach heaven, the reprobate will be cast into hell, regardless of any prayers said on their behalf. While this view appears to give credit to a high view of God’s sovereignty, it does not do justice to the importance and urgency of prayer as it is described in Scripture. Others, Aquinas notes, fall into the opposite error of believing that predestination and providence can be altered by prayer and sacrifices. He sees this as a pagan idea, one that the Egyptians were prone to advocate. While this view seeks to do justice to the importance of prayer in Scripture, it does not allow for a proper understanding of God’s sovereignty.
Having laid out two failed options, Aquinas sets forth his own resolution of the difficulty:
Wherefore we must say otherwise that in predestination two things are to be considered—namely, the divine preordination; and its effect. As regards the former, in no possible way can predestination be furthered by the prayers of the saints. For it is not due to their prayers that anyone is predestined by God. As regards the latter, predestination is said to be helped by the prayers of the saints, and by other good works; because providence, of which predestination is a part, does not do away with secondary causes but so provides effects, that the order of secondary causes falls also under providence. So, as natural effects are provided by God in such a way that natural causes are directed to bring about those natural effects, without which those effects would not happen; so the salvation of a person is predestined by God in such a way, that whatever helps that person towards salvation falls under the order of predestination; whether it be one’s own prayers, or those of another; or other good works, and suchlike, without which one would not attain to salvation. Whence, the predestined must strive after good works and prayer; because through these means predestination is most certainly fulfilled. For this reason it is said: Labor the more that by good works you may make sure your calling and election (2 Pet 1:10).6
Aquinas makes an important distinction. There is predestination as God’s eternal will and decree, and this cannot be altered by the prayers of the saints. Yet this is not all there is to the biblical teaching on predestination. There is also the outworking of predestination in time, something that requires means, and God has appointed prayer as one of these means. We can draw an analogy and say that my decision to visit my mother is the cause for my journey, but I still have to travel from my home to hers in order to accomplish that end. If I do not buy the ticket and board the plane, the journey cannot take place.
The analogy is, like all such analogies, inadequate. My journey is not guaranteed simply because I decide to undertake it. Its success is still completely contingent on me making the necessary travel arrangements and putting them into action. When it comes to God’s plan, however, everything that God decides will come to pass will certainly come to pass. Yet God works his purposes out in the created realm and through history. If he wants me to hear the gospel at a certain moment in time, he has to will that all of the contingencies necessary for that to take place do actually happen. These purposes require means, and Aquinas sees prayer as one of the means God uses to accomplish these.
We might press this back to the Trinitarian and christological point that we noted above: our prayers are profoundly connected to the life of God himself and to the relationship between the three persons. God the Father delights to answer the prayers of his Son. In Christ’s intercession, there is no cajoling or blackmailing of the Father. The Son is God and thus only asks for that which God the Father wills to give him. Yet the intercession of Christ is the means to accomplishing his priestly office.
So it is with Christians. We do not pray to persuade God to do something that it is not his will to do. Nor do we pray merely to conform our own wills to that of God, though that is undoubtedly one of the purposes of prayer. We pray because the Lord has appointed our prayers as means of accomplishing his gracious purposes. It is why Paul asks for the prayers of other Christians for his ministry, just as he is constantly in prayer for theirs. Prayer is both a tremendous privilege and a humbling act. Our prayers are used by God to accomplish his purposes, and that is a spectacular thought. Not only do our prayers through Christ give us a taste of intimate communion with the triune God, but they are a chosen means by which the triune God brings about his will. God’s purposes are guaranteed by God himself and are not dependent in any ultimate sense on the strength or fervency of our intercession.
We might add one further aspect to this. God is our gracious heavenly Father. Therefore, he delights to hear and answer our prayers. To draw a human analogy, an earthly father might find it appropriate that his child asks him for something that he wishes to give him anyway, as a means of giving concrete form to the relationship that exists. Thus, God our heavenly Father loves to hear us ask for those things that it pleases him to give us, for in so doing our relationship with him is truly actualized and deepened.
This is one important reason why prayer is means of grace. I pray for myself that I will grow in grace, that God will sanctify me, that God will keep me safe until the final day. And those prayers are a vital part of God’s appointed means for accomplishing precisely those things for which I am praying. And what I pray for myself, I pray for others, and for the church both locally and worldwide. And again, those prayers are a vital part of God’s means of accomplishing precisely those things.
A minister friend of mine likes to put the matter of prayer and God’s grace this way: “I used to think, If God is sovereign, why should I pray? But now I understand the point differently: If God is sovereign, how can I not pray?” Knowing that our prayers are appointed as one of God’s means for achieving his gracious purposes, are rooted in the relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and are thus part of the economy of grace should give us sublime confidence that our prayers will be heard by the Father and answered in accordance with God’s all-surpassing wisdom.
Public Prayer
There is one final aspect of prayer as a means of grace that is of great practical significance for the church but is increasingly neglected today—public prayer. Discussion of and training for public prayer is not as common today as it once was, and I suspect this is not so much the result of a defective understanding of God’s grace but more likely due to the collapse of the distinction between the public and the private. We live in a world where the nebulous concept of “authenticity” has become a supreme virtue. Authenticity is viewed in part as the abolition of the idea that there should be a difference between how we behave in private and how we behave in public. If private prayer is so often the spontaneous cry of the heart to God, should public prayer therefore not be exactly the same? To this concern that preparing for public prayers in some formal way might make them somehow less than authentic, we might add the general cultural fear of anything that smacks of elitism or stuffiness. The faux intimacy and studiedly casual nature of so much of our public interaction speaks of this. The language of friendship has now been debased to include people on the Internet whom we have never met or interacted with in any meaningful way. Students address professors they hardly know by their first names. Even some children call their parents by their first names. I say all of this not to make a curmudgeonly point (although this casual false intimacy does bring out the curmudgeon in me) but to suggest that there are powerful cultural trends that militate against traditional notions of reverence and respect. All of this works against the idea that we should make public prayer something special and unique.
I believe that there is an important place for formal, well-thought-out, corporate prayer in Christian worship. We need people who lead others through appropriately structured and phrased prayer into the presence of God. But why? Again, if the church is an act of God’s grace, then the actions of the church are actions of grace. The preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments make grace a transforming reality in the lives of believers, as does the corporate prayer of the church. Such prayer also offers a paradigm for Christians, showing them how to pray in private. Yes, there are clearly going to be differences in the ways public and private prayer are conducted. There will be a personal intimacy about the latter that the former will—indeed, should—lack. But learning to pray requires listening to others, and the only context in which we can really do that is in some kind of public forum, namely, the worship service of the gathered people of God.
The importance of being led in prayer as the people of God is clearly taught in the Bible. When the ark is brought into the temple, we are told in 1 Kings 8 that Solomon stands in the presence of the whole assembly and prays in a fashion that exalts God, instructs the people, and brings a sense of reverence and awe to the proceedings. In Nehemiah 9, the Levites lead the people in an awe-inspiring confession of sin that is as much a beautiful declaration of who God is and what he has done with his people as it is a prayer. Indeed, it is a confession both of faith and of sin. In each case, the burden of the prayer is to exalt God for who he is and how he has acted toward his people. As the possibility of prayer is the result of God’s grace, so the content of prayer is determined by God’s grace as well.
These prayers are instructive as examples because they show that there is a place for competent, theologically informed, and reverent leading in prayer in a public context. We think of preaching as a means of grace in part because it is one of God’s chosen means of bringing people to maturity in Christ by teaching them about him and as the Spirit uses the word to transform them. Public prayer is similar. It gives people a vocabulary for addressing God, it provides examples of how to address God, and, most importantly, it guides their hearts and minds in appropriate ways at the moment in which it takes place. The people of God are the people of God. We have a corporate identity. And the expression of that identity through the unity of a public prayer is a profound enactment of what it means to be the church.
This connects to what we noted earlier about the purpose of prayer. If prayer is something God has chosen to use as a tool for accomplishing his purposes and extending his kingdom, then it stands to (biblical) reason that the prayer of the corporate church is of critical importance. It is noteworthy that the prayer in Nehemiah 9 is a corporate confession. It is not simply that individual Israelites have sinned and need to confess such. The people as a whole have done so and need to make their confession. And it is appropriate that competent people lead the congregation in such a prayer. Thus, it is the Levites, the priests, who do so.
Further examples are provided by the Psalms, the great prayer book of ancient Israel and indeed of the church. It is noteworthy that these were written for corporate use, and many of them speak in the plural rather than the singular in expressing prayers to God. The Psalms are means of grace in a number of ways. First, they teach the people of God about God. The Psalms are full of doctrine expressed in and through poetic form. They bring doctrine home to us in a powerfully personal and affective way. Second, they provide the people of God with inspired models of how to approach him in prayer. If we did not have certain psalms (for example, Pss 88 and 137), we might never have known that we could legitimately approach God on such terms. Psalm 88 in particular, with its unremitting darkness and gloom, is a key text for someone suffering from depression and wondering how on earth they might speak to God when darkness seems their only companion. That God placed this psalm in his Bible is indicative of his grace toward his people and is a gracious means by which the desperate and despairing might yet come to God in prayer. This is genuine, biblical authenticity, not one of the many modern counterfeits.
The Psalms offer a realistic view of what a grace-filled life lived in a fallen and depraved world is like. One of the keys to the Christian life is an appropriate horizon of expectation. When a church leader said that the massacre in Paris in November 2015 had caused him to wonder whether there was a God, I wondered: Has this person never noticed that this world is full of such outrages, and indeed many far worse, that this one incident would lead him to doubt God’s existence? Had this individual read, sung, and prayed the Psalms, he would have been much better equipped for the Christian life here on earth. It is an act of God’s grace that God has equipped us with a Bible that speaks to the whole scope of human life.
This brings me to the question of grace and liturgy. We have noted several times in this book how liturgy was shaped by the Reformers’ understanding of salvation. Liturgy is the most obvious formalization of public prayer because it uses strict, prescribed, set forms. Some evangelicals struggle with this, believing that it tends toward formalism and mindless repetition. To repeat words—other people’s words—week after week, so the argument goes, is to do nothing more than parrot an empty verbal form.
Liturgy certainly can lead to such formalism, but Bible reading and the singing of hymns and choruses are vulnerable to the same criticism. The mere addition of a musical setting, as in the case of a hymn, does not guarantee that the words are sung with any real commitment or vitality. Indeed, it is not set forms that cause formalism but an attitude of the heart. Written forms or spontaneously composed prayers can both be examples of dead formalism or vital piety.
Instead of focusing on the form of public prayers, whether written or extemporary, we should give our attention to their purpose as a means of grace, as one of the instruments by which God brings about his gracious purposes in the life of the church. If we do this, then we will be more concerned for content than for whether the prayer is written in advance or comes to mind as the person leads the service. As with the preaching of the word, public prayer needs to make the connection between God and the congregation. The primary focus needs to be God himself. The Lord Jesus gives us the great paradigm of the Lord’s Prayer, which starts out by ascribing to God who he is, exalting his name, calling out for the coming of his kingdom and the fulfillment of his will. It then moves to the needs and desires of human beings. In a church where grace is properly understood, the broad liturgical structure of the service will follow a scriptural pattern, will focus primarily on God, and will frame all human requests—from forgiveness of sin to material needs—in light of the identity and action of God himself. This will be reflected in the prayers that are prayed.
So, for example, in a typical Presbyterian church the service starts with a prayer for God’s blessing, moves to a confession of sin (followed by a declaration of forgiveness), then to a general prayer for the church, with a prayer on either side of the sermon for the aid of the Holy Spirit, and ends with a benediction. The prayer structure is a means of grace because it reflects biblical priorities and carries the congregation through the various aspects of what it means to be the object of God’s unmerited favor in Christ.
For this reason, even though it goes against the strongly democratic instincts of today’s church and the notion of spontaneity as a hallmark of that nebulous authenticity that is regarded as such a virtue, I would argue that it is important for those leading in worship to be taught to pray properly in public. The Bible itself gives clear instructions on content and form. The fact that we have the book of Psalms, other examples of corporate prayer, and instructions about avoiding overlong prayers for the sake of showmanship is significant. Prayer is not to be determined by personal whims in private, still less so in public. And the danger with succumbing to contemporary notions of authenticity is that public prayer becomes precisely what Christ himself warned against: a matter of public performance.
Conclusion
At first glance it might seem strange to describe prayer as a means of grace, but it is indeed an appropriate characterization. Prayer, like the church, is not something that is first of all “done” by us. It is done by God and given to us as a means of realizing God’s purposes in our lives.
A theology that takes grace seriously will place prayer at the center of the church’s life and in the life of an individual Christian. Grace is not just God’s unmerited favor; it is also the way God works in our lives to bring about his purposes for us, and at the heart of that is prayer. Christ prays for his people, sympathizing with them even as he asks the Father to be merciful toward them, to keep them from temptation, and to bring them to maturity. And we pray to God the Father through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit, and these prayers themselves are God’s chosen means for achieving his ends.
It should not surprise us that the Reformers took a high view of prayer, public and private, and that those who stand in their footsteps continue to do so. Yes, we believe preaching is nonnegotiable, and we see the sacraments as the great signs and seals of God’s grace. But prayer also has its vital place in Christian life and discipleship, a joyous, God-ordained means by which his grace works in and through our lives. While some see a high view of matters such as election and predestination as temptations to indolence and inactivity as Christians, the reality is the exact opposite. If we believe in God’s sovereign grace, that he has and does act in Christ to save, and he has appointed the means by which his saving purposes will be executed, then we should be more, not less, fervent in our exercise of prayer.
1. We might concede at this point that a construction can be placed on this intercession of the saints that is not far from the Protestant practice of having other Christians pray for us. The real danger in the Roman position is not that it involves others praying on our behalf but that it is rooted in a notion of sainthood as something that only a subset of especially spiritual Christians possess. This would seem to make their prayers more effective because of some intrinsic quality that they possess and that derogates from the honor of Christ, which is why Luther came to oppose this notion in later years.
2. The scriptural basis for this is found, for example, in how Christ articulates his relationship with his Father in his speech to the disciples in the Upper Room (John 14–17). Especially significant is the High Priestly Prayer of John 17, which reveals the connection between that which the Father has given to the Son and that for which Christ prays, e.g., vv. 1–2, 9–10, 17–19, 25–26.
3. John Calvin, Commentary on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans, trans. John Owen (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1849), 313.
4. Of course, those who reject such a view of grace face their own question on this score: If it is unfair for God to intervene in a sovereign way, why pray for him so to do?
5. ST 1a.23.8 (Burns, Oates, and Washbourne).
6. Ibid.