Tim Keller on the Struggle with Prayer and the Pathway to Enjoying God

Prayer

In 2014, Keller was asked what had been his hardest book to write. His answer: “The book I just finished, because it was on prayer.”¹

Prayer was not just a challenging topic to write about; it was also a discipline of great personal struggle for Keller, as it is for countless believers. Over the course of his adult life, though, the great struggle yielded unimaginable reward.

In fact, not long before his death, Keller was asked if, looking back on nearly fifty years of ministry, there’s anything that he would have done differently.

“Absolutely,” he replied. “I should have prayed more.”²

Timely Illustration

It’s not as if Keller was ever indifferent to prayer. Like any good minister, he taught on it often. But something was still missing, still lacking in the vibrancy of his own friendship with Christ. He opened his 2014 book on the topic with these words: “In the second half of my adult life, I discovered prayer. I had to.”

While teaching a Bible study course on the Psalms in the fall of 1999, Keller became keenly aware that his prayer life was nowhere near what God’s word indicated it should be. Within a couple years, he faced the harsh realities of ministry to New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11. Compounding this dark time were his own personal weights, as Kathy suffered the effects of Crohn’s disease and soon after he received a diagnosis of thyroid cancer. Indeed, Keller’s experience with prayer was taking a dramatic turn. Perhaps most formative for him during this season was Kathy’s urging to simply and faithfully join her every night to pray. She used an illustration that Keller later recounted, which placed prayer in its proper light:

“Imagine you were diagnosed with such a lethal condition that the doctor told you that you would die within hours unless you took a particular medicine—a pill every night before going to sleep. Imagine that you were told that you could never miss it or you would die. Would you forget? Would you not get around to it some nights? No—it would be so crucial that you wouldn’t forget, you would never miss. Well, if we don’t pray together to God, we’re not going to make it because of all we are facing. I’m certainly not. We have to pray; we can’t let it just slip our minds.” . . . For both of us the penny dropped; we realized the seriousness of the issue, and we admitted that anything that was truly a nonnegotiable necessity was something we could do. . . . [Since then] Kathy and I can’t remember missing a single evening of praying together, at least by phone, even when we’ve been apart in different hemispheres.³

Tim and Kathy Keller maintained this unbroken streak night after night for more than twenty years—all the way through until the end of his life.⁴

Theology Drives Intimacy

It wasn’t just nightly prayer with Kathy, though, that revolutionized Keller’s prayer life. He also began reading and studying, searching for help. Yearning for richer communion with God, he devoured the works of respected Christian thinkers from the past. His quest ultimately yielded a newfound appreciation for, and deeper engagement with, his own theological heritage.⁵

From Augustine in the fifth century all the way to Martin Luther and John Calvin in the sixteenth, John Owen in the seventeenth, John Newton and Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth, Charles Spurgeon in the nineteenth, and Martyn Lloyd-Jones in the twentieth—and many others in between—Keller realized anew that he didn’t have to choose between robust theology and vibrant experience. His own tradition featured both.

As he put it, “I was not being called to leave behind my theology and launch out to look for ‘something more,’ for experience. Rather, I was meant to ask the Holy Spirit to help me experience my theology.”⁶

The bottom line is we need theology and experience—experience that is theological and theology that is experiential.

Think Out, Work In, Pray Up

Perhaps we could say that if experience without theology eventually leads to heresy, theology without experience often results in hypocrisy. Both are serious threats. Prayer, though, is the key that can “turn theology into experience.”⁷ When Keller was asked to explain this dynamic, he sketched out three simple steps:

• First, think out your theology. Know what you believe and why.
• Second, work in your theology. It requires honesty to wrestle down a restless heart. “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” the psalmist cried (Ps. 42:5). It also requires uncomfortable questions: How would I be different if I took this theological truth seriously? How would it change my attitudes and actions if I really believed this from the bottom of my heart?
• Third, pray up your theology. Learn the art of turning theology into prayer, letting it trigger adoration, confession, and supplication.⁸

“Do those things,” he advises, “and your theology will intersect with your experience.”⁹ Those who are inclined, whether from doctrinal formation or natural temperament, to elevate feelings over theology are planting their feet in midair. But theologically minded believers should likewise beware. “The irony,” Keller warns, “is that many conservative Christians, most concerned about conserving true and sound doctrine, neglect the importance of prayer and make no effort to experience God—which can lead to the eventual loss of sound doctrine.”¹⁰ Christianity that lacks a real encounter with God will eventually be no Christianity at all.

So there are two ways, not one, to welcome false doctrine into your life or your church. The first is to never value doctrine at all. That’s obvious. But the second is far more subtle, and therefore more insidious: Let your heart become sterile over the course of years. Grow numb to the grandeur and splendor of Christ Jesus. Stop listening to his voice in Scripture or letting him hear yours in prayer. Slowly abandon your first love (Rev. 2:4).

The bottom line is we need theology and experience—experience that is theological and theology that is experiential. What God has joined together, let no one separate.

Responding to Revelation

One of the most vital takeaways from Keller’s teaching is this: Prayer, essentially, is answering God. He started the conversation—we did not. This means he sets the agenda and dictates the terms. Our voices are responding to his, not the other way around.

It is therefore impossible to have a rich prayer life apart from careful attention and glad submission to God’s word. Otherwise, we will end up talking to a figment of our imagination—in essence, praying to an idol. But if we hope to anchor our life in “the real God,” we must pray in accordance with who he’s revealed himself to be.¹¹ Keller puts it frankly: “Without prayer that answers the God of the Bible, we will only be talking to ourselves.”¹²

Addressing students at the Oxford Town Hall in England, Keller reflected on the model of prayer that Jesus provides in Gethsemane.We encounter a Savior who is brutally honest about his desire (“Let this cup pass from me”) and yet absolutely submissive to God’s plan (“nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will”; Matt. 26:39). Jesus neither represses his feelings nor is ruled by them. What an example for us! “The basic purpose of prayer,” Keller observes, “is not to bend God’s will to mine but to mold my will into his.”¹³

This is why sound biblical interpretation and meditation are indispensable foundations for prayer. Keller commends two questions each time we open our Bibles: First, What did the original author intend to convey to his readers? Second, What role does the passage play in the whole Bible—that is, How does it contribute to the gospel message and move along the main narrative arc of Scripture, which culminates in Jesus Christ? Keller warns us against meditation devoid of such questions, which may unintentionally amount to “listening to your own heart or to the spirit of your own culture”¹⁴ rather than to God’s authoritative voice.

Again, this is why theology must inform and fuel experience. Just as you can’t grow relationally with a person unless you learn who he or she is, so you can’t deepen intimacy with God apart from studying and treasuring his word. Prayer, then, is equal parts response and gift—a response to revelation from God’s word and a gift for those secure in his grace.¹⁵

And this approach to prayer, nourished by biblical meditation, is the pathway to enjoying God.

This article is adapted from Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel by Matt Smethurst.

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