Full-Hearted Prayer

5 Methods for Fighting Half-Hearted Prayer by Joel Beeke (excerpt from Living for God’s Glory: An Introduction to Calvinism)

The Puritans were prone to give five methods for fighting our natural tendency to lapse into half-hearted prayer:

1. Give priority to prayer. Prayer is the first and most important thing you are called to do. “You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed,” John Bunyan writes. “Pray often, for prayer is a shield to the soul, a sacrifice to God, and a scourge to Satan.”

2. Give yourself—not just your time—to prayer. Remember that prayer is not an appendix to your life and your work, it is your life—your real, spiritual life—and your work. Prayer is the thermometer of your soul.

3. Give room to prayer. The Puritans did this in three ways. First, they had real prayer closets—rooms or small spaces where they habitually met with God. When one of Thomas Shepard’s parishioners showed him a floor plan of the new house he hoped to build, Shepard noticed that there was no prayer room and lamented that homes without prayer rooms would be the downfall of the church and society. Second, block out stated times for prayer in your daily life. The Puritans did this every morning and evening. Third, between those stated times of prayer, commit yourself to pray in response to the least impulse to do so. That will help you develop the “habit” of praying, so that you will pray your way through the day without ceasing. Remember that conversing with God through Christ is our most effective way of bringing glory to God and of having a ready antidote to ward off all kinds of spiritual diseases.

4. Give the Word to prayer. The way to pray, said the Puritans, is to bring God His own Word. That can be done in two ways. First, pray with Scripture. God is tender of His own handwriting. Take His promises and turn them inside out, and send them back up to God, by prayer, pleading with Him to do as He has said. Second, pray through Scripture. Pray over each thought in a specific Scripture verse.

5. Give theocentricity to prayer. Pour out your heart to your heavenly Father. Plead on the basis of Christ’s intercessions. Plead to God with the groanings of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:26). Recognize that true prayer is a gift of the Father, who gives it through the Son and works it within you by the Spirit, who, in turn, enables it to ascend back to the Son, who sanctifies it and presents it acceptable to the Father. Prayer is thus a theocentric chain, if you will—moving from the Father through the Son by the Spirit back to the Son and the Father.

Cloud and Fire

Lord of the cloud and fire,

I am a stranger, with a stranger’s indifference;
My hands hold a pilgrim’s staff,
My march is Zionward,
My eyes are toward the coming of the Lord,
My heart is in Your hands without reserve.
You have created it,
redeemed it,
renewed it,
captured it,
conquered it.
I love You with soul, mind, body, strength,
might, spirit, affection, will,
desire, intellect, understanding.
Invigorate my love that it may rise worthily to You,
tightly entwine itself around You,
be allured by You.
Then shall my walk be endless praise.

- a Puritan Prayer

HT: Trevin Wax

Needed Examples

8 Reasons We Need the Puritans by Jeff Robinson at TGC:

...In the minds of many, Puritanism equals scrupulous rules-keeping, dour Christianity, or, as the inimitable American journalist H. L. Mencken famously quipped, “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

Over the past few decades, thanks in large part to the publishing efforts of Banner of Truth and the advocacy of Martyn-Lloyd Jones, the English and American Puritans have made a strong comeback among Reformed evangelicals. During my years in seminary, I fell in love with the Puritans. Now, I delight in teaching about the Puritans, and during my time as pastor, men like John Bunyan, Thomas Watson, and John Owen were among my shepherds through their deeply devotional theological writing. Though dead, they certainly still speak. And we need to hear them.

Granted, they could be maddenly eccentric and sometimes ran to extremes. The Puritans never met a rule the didn’t seem to relish. They had a decidedly underdeveloped view of recreation and leisure. Their writing tended toward wordiness, often stating and then restating the same point several times. And their moralizing of life experiences and spiritual introspection often knew no bounds. For example, Cotton Mather once saw his sinful heart as the cause of a toothache, as he told his diary: “Have I not sinned against my teeth? How? By sinful, graceless, excessive eating, and by sinful speeched? (Quoted in Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints)” They were, after all, sinners saved by grace.

Still, for all their humanness, they represent a high point of (to borrow a favorite phrase from John Piper) Christ-centered, Scripture-saturated, God-entranced living.

Eight Reasons

In our snap-judgment, 140-character age, we need the Puritans perhaps more than ever. Here are eight reasons why.

1. Because they were mature in ways we are not.

J. I. Packer hits the mark:

Maturity is a compound of wisdom, goodwill, resilience, and creativity. The Puritans exemplified maturity; we don’t. We are spiritual dwarfs. A much-travelled leader, a native American (be it said), has declared that he finds North American Protestantism, man-centered, manipulative, success-oriented, self-indulgent and sentimental, as it blatantly is, to be 3,000 miles wide and half and inch deep. The Puritans, by contrast, as a body were giants. They were great souls serving a great God.

Would anyone deny the truthfulness of his assessment in much of modern evangelicalism today?

2. Because they understood the deep sinfulness of the human heart.

John Owen (1616-1683) called the human heart a hornet’s nest of evil. He wrote The Mortification of Sin, the most famous treatment of sin among the Puritans. Because they understood the depravity of the human heart, the Puritans realized that only a unilateral work of sovereign grace can rescue fallen man. Thus, their keen understanding of the deadness of the human heart led them to plant their feet firmly upon a theology of grace as the sole catalyst that will draw dead hearts out of the grave.

3. Because they knew their best life was later.

The Puritans suffered long, but they suffered well. Death was a constant companion for the Puritans of the 17th and 18th centuries. In England, they faced deadly persecution at the hands of the Church of England, the church they sought to purify. In the New World, they faced an especially harsh physical climate. Packer writes:

Ease and luxury, such as our affluence brings us today, do not make for maturity; hardship and struggle, however, do, and the Puritans’ battles against the spiritual and climatic wilderness in which God set them produced a virility of character, undaunted and unsinkable, rising above discouragement and fears, for which the true precedents and models are men like Moses, and Nehemiah, and Peter after Pentecost, and the apostle Paul.

4. Because they viewed the family as a little church.

Puritan fathers were deeply committed to catechizing their children and serving as shepherds in their homes. One of the great needs of our day is for God to raise up an army of lion-hearted and lamb-like husbands/fathers who will love their families by teaching them the Word of God, by modeling biblical headship and churchmanship. I have written more extensively on the Puritans and family discipleship here.

5. Because they saw all of life as being lived coram deo—before the face of God.

For the Puritans in both old England and new, there was no sacred/secular divide. If they worked as blacksmiths, the calling was to blacksmith to the glory of God. If they farmed, they sowed and reaped in dependence upon God. The Puritans knew vividly that God is omnipresent, that there is not one square inch in all creation where he is not present or where he is not interested in radiating forth his glory. Hard work was for the Puritans a central part of Christian living, and what we call the Protestant work ethic is a gift passed down from them.

6. Because they were highly decorated soldiers on the spiritual battlefield.

They viewed spiritual conflict as central to the Christian’s calling. As Packer memorably puts it, “They never expected to advance a step without some sort of opposition.” This is evident in John Bunyan’s classic allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, where every step along the path to the Celestial City contends with fighting without, fears within. John Geree (1601-1649) wrote in The Character of an Old English Puritane or Nonconformist: “His whole life he accounted a warfare, wherein Christ was his captain, his arms were prayers and tears. The Cross was his Banner and his [motto] was: he who suffers conquers.” William Gurnall (1617-1679) penned The Christian in Complete Armor, which endures as one of the most compelling books on spiritual warfare.

7. Because they were skilled physicians of souls.

Long before Jay Adams and David Powlison pioneered the movement, the Puritans excelled in biblical counseling. They saw God’s Word as sufficient for the Christian’s every need, including counsel. Tim Keller writes,

Clearly, the Puritans rested their counseling approach on Scripture. In many ways the Puritans are an excellent laboratory for studying biblical counseling, because they are not influenced by any secular models of psychology. Many of those today claiming to be strictly biblical in their counseling approach still evidence the heavy influence of Maslow or Rogers or Skinner or Ellis. But the Puritans had the field of “the cure of souls” virtually to themselves; they had no secular competition in the area of counseling. Thus we need to consider very seriously their counseling models.

8. Because they understood contentment in Christ as the key to genuine happiness.

Christ was enough for them. He had to be; with no modern medicine and at times precious little food available, life expectancy was around 30, particularly in the American colonies. If a family had four children, on average two would die in child birth. Roughly half of the mothers died during child birth. There was no aspirin, no penicillin, no surgery. Economic hardship was the norm. Yet the Puritans wrote often of contentment. Among the best works ever written on this topic were The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by Jeremiah Burroughs and The Art of Divine Contentment by Thomas Watson. They lived with eternity stamped on their eyeballs.

The Freer the Better

“Retain a single shred or fragment of legality with the gospel, and you raise a topic of distrust between man and God. You take away from the power of the gospel to melt and to conciliate. For this purpose the freer it is the better it is.” 

— Thomas Chalmers   "The Expulsive Power of a New Affection"

Ambition to Be Windows

A poem by 17th Century English Puritan preacher and poet George Herbert.

Hat Tip: The Gospel Coalition

Worship Your Way Out

How do you get rid of a bad habit or sinful patter in your life? Certainly not by willing it away, or just fighting it directly, From much personal experience, I can assure you that does not work! Sin must be "expulsed" by a higher affection.

"The Puritan preacher Thomas Chalmers, in his sermon the Expulsive Power of a New Affection, said that desires for God and desire for sin cannot coexist in the human heart. They are two opposing 'affections' - one will push out the other. So, he said, "the only way to disposses [the heart] of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one. (See Gal. 5:16-17) You can't just 'stop it,' because the it is always more than behavior. It is always rooted in your affections, in what you love - what you worship. Chalmers points the way forward: we worshiped our way into this mess and, by God's grace, we'll worship our way out."

                     -Mike Wilkerson, Redemption, Page 38

We get in by false worship; we get out by true worship. I like it!

The Valley is the Place...

This may have to be my new life motto:

"Let me learn by paradox that the way down is the way up,
that to be low is to be high,
that the broken heart is the healed heart,
that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
that the repenting soul is the victorious soul,
that to have nothing is to possess all, 
that to give is to receive,
that the valley is the place of vision."

From The Valley of the Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers

Quoted by Trevin Wax, Holy Subversion, page 127

Give Me The Deeps

The Deeps

Lord Jesus,
Give me a deeper repentance,
a horror of sin,
a dread of its approach;
Help me chastely to flee it,
and jealousy to resolve that my heart shall be thine alone.

Give me a deeper trust, that I may lose myself to find myself in thee,
the ground of my rest, the spring of my being.

Give me a deeper knowledge of thyself as Saviour, Master, Lord, and King.

Give me deeper power in private prayer,
more sweetness in thy Word,
more steadfast grip on its truth.

Give me deeper holiness in speech, thought, action,
and let me not seek moral virtue apart from thee.

Plough deep in me, great Lord, heavenly Husbandman,
that my being may be a tilled field,
the roots of grace spreading far and wide,
until thou alone art seen in me,
thy beauty golden like summer harvest,
thy fruitfulness as autumn plenty.

I have no Master but thee,
no law but thy will,
no delight but thyself,
no wealth but that thou givest,
no good but that thou blessest,
no peace but that thou bestowest.

I am nothing but that thou makest me,
I have nothing but that I receive from thee,
I can be nothing but that grace adorns me.

Quarry me deep, dear Lord, and then fill me to overflowing with living water.

From The Valley of the Vision

Hat Tip: Provocations & Pantings:

Hearts and Heads

"Is it not a pity that our hearts are not as orthodox as our heads?

But I see we have but half learned our lesson, when we know it, and can say it. When the understanding hath learned it, there is more ado to teach our wills and affections, our eyes, our tongues, and hands."

                         --Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Banner of Truth,1979), 134

Hat Tip: Strawberry-Rhubarb Theology
 

The Smallest Drop

“The smallest drop of grace is a greater sign of Christ’s love than all the glory and pleasures of the earth.”

David Clarkson, Works, cited in Richard Rushing (ed.), Voices from the Past: Puritan Devotional Readings, p. 77

Hat Tip:  Pure Church by Thabiti Anyabwile

Keep Me From Being an Evangelical Hypocrite

Of all hypocrites, grant that I may not be
an evangelical hypocrite,
who sins more safely because grace abounds,
who tells his lusts that Christ's blood
cleanseth them,
who reasons that God cannot cast him into hell,
for he is saved,
who loves evangelical preaching, churches,
Christians, but lives unholily.

A Puritan prayer from the book Valley of Vision.

Hat Tip:  Joshua Harris