Consider this statement: Prayer starts in God and not in us. Perhaps this statement raises some questions for us. In what sense can we say this, that our prayers, which seem to be originating in our hearts and minds, have their beginning in God? And if true, how does this change the way we think of prayer?
Plainly stated, everything has its beginning in God. Our faith has its origin in God since Jesus is the author of faith (Hebrews 12:2). Our love too starts in God, for John says we love because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). Since God is the source of all that is good, every spiritual move or act has itself come from God in some way, beginning in his own divine goodness, and is then reflected in us in moving back to God. God is alpha do omeg, beginning and end, of all. What, therefore, does it mean to say that prayer starts in God?
If we think of prayer as our move toward God, a longing for relationship and intimacy, the expression our inner life toward the One who loves us eternally, we begin to recognize that God has drawn near to us in a prayer-like longing for intimacy, relationship, and self-disclosure. While we would not call God’s coming to us “prayer”, our prayers reflect his drawing near. In prayer we are imitating his coming to us by going to him. We move toward the one who has come to us, and who is drawing us to himself.
In one sense, we can say that our prayers are those of God, noting Paul’s reference to the Spirit of God praying in us (Romans 8:26). God clearly initiates this relationship and then consummates it in his own movement within our spirits as we are enlivened by the Holy Spirit. Though at first not apparent, we begin to recognize that the whole dynamic of prayer starts in God and not in us. Our prayerfulness, which can hardly be called “ours” in any absolute sense, is the completion, in God, of what he began.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer. Psalm 19:14
When the words coming from within us are shaped by the prevenient Word of God spoken to us from the beginning, Christ himself, then certainly our prayers will be acceptable in God’s sight. We can say that nothing pleases God more than to see himself within us and his own divine nature returning back to himself again, by our willing participation in reverent prayer and worship.
The goal and end of our spiritual sojourn, as begun in mercy and fueled by grace, is to participate in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Surely, our maturing prayers aim more and more to be nothing more or less than God’s own holy presence in us drawing us back to the One in whom our prayers began. We learn to pray as the fulfillment of what we have always been yearning to do, even before we knew what we were longing for. The undefinable need, the sense of wanting something more, and the restlessness that haunts us, is why we can only rest in God, and then only when the prayer which began in him is returned to its Source.
Leave a Reply