“Prayer is the Christian thinking theologically.”[1]
Prayer is a constant conversation with the invisible God who has made Himself visible in Christ and available through the Spirit. In prayer, we are brought to understand the mind of Christ, for the Spirit “moves our hearts into harmony with God’s concerns.”[2] Jesus said, “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (Jn. 15:15, ESV). Then he says, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” (Jn. 16:13, ESV). Paul says, “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal. 4:6, ESV). We are able to address God as our heavenly Father in prayer because we have the Spirit in our hearts to convict our sins so that we turn away from sins and implant a new heart in us so that we can have a desire to pursue the holy Father. In other words, we can pray because of the objective work of Christ applied by the subjective work of the Spirit in our lives. Prayer is trinitarian in nature.
Christians love the triune God with our minds. God is a rational God, therefore, we pursue Him with our rationality. As John Stott said, “The only worship pleasing to God is heart-worship, and heart- worship is rational worship. It is the worship of a rational God, who has made us rational beings and given us a rational revelation so that we may worship him rationally.”[3] For sure, this kind of rationality is not mere intellectual activity. It’s involved with mind, heart, soul, and strength. In other words, doctrine, devotion, and doxology are intertwined. The Christian thinking is not dead orthodoxy. Rather, it’s lived doctrine.
Theology affects every area in life. All of us are theologians. We are either good theologians or bad theologians, for we all do things according to our beliefs. “The Christian mind does not think exclusively about ‘Christian’ topics but thinks about every topic ‘Christianly.’”[4] We think about things theologically. The word theology can be broken down into two parts. In Greek, theos means “god”, and logos means “word” or “discourse.” Thus, theology could be understood as “discourse about God.”[5] For Christian theology, whether such discourse about God is theologically sound or not, it depends on how much this discourse is regulated and sharpened by the revelation of the sixty-six canonical books in the Bible, which, as a whole, points to Christ Jesus. To think and act theologically is a discipline. It is a spiritual discipline.
God wants us to talk to Him genuinely and theologically. God is not so happy with our childish languages through the years. How long have we used the exact same language to pray to Him in different occasions, such as meal time, small group prayer, private prayer, etc…? If we really know someone, will we talk to that person with the same content, same tone, and same vocabulary through the years? We certainly talk differently as the relationship deepens gradually. Our language is subtly changed to relational language in any meaningful relationships. We change. We deepen. We grow.
In this morning, I read Psalm 119:18—“Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.” (ESV) In humbleness, the psalmist prays that God will grant him wisdom and understanding to know His law, for the revelation of God is always given, not earned. No one can truly understand if God doesn’t reveal it to us. For me, this is a theological prayer.
[1] James M. Gordon, Evangelical Spirituality (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1991), p. 238.
[2] Richard L. Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal (Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 1979), p. 157.
[3] Quoted by James M. Gordon, Evangelical Spirituality, p. 297.
[4] Ibid., p. 297.
[5] Alister E. McGrath, Christian Spirituality: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 26.
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