Three Key Elements of a Prayer Life

Last week, I wrote about the two essential ingredients of building a prayer life: hunger and intentionality.

Today, I want to reflect on the three key elements of a prayer life. What does a prayer life look like?

Let’s re-read David’s famous words from Psalm 27:

For David, the prayer life he asks God for and builds his life around consists of three key elements:

1. “to live in the house of the Lord”

2. “to behold the beauty of the Lord”

3. “to inquire in his temple”

For the sake of simplicity, I would say David desires a prayer life based on three key rhythms: seeing, staying, and searching.

1. Seeing

David desires to build a prayer life based on beholding the beauty of the Lord. A prayer life of seeing.

For many in the church today, beholding Jesus in prayer is a lost art. Yet, for most of Christian history, seeing Jesus was the beginning and end of discipleship, and the key to true transformation.

For instance, in the Gospel of John, the disciples are invited to their journey of following Jesus first by a provocation of John the Baptist to “Behold, the Lamb of God!” (1:38, ESV). John also envisions a day where we will see Jesus fully, and we will be like him simply because “we will see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Then, in the book of Revelation, John views the end of the story – the telos to which this is all going – as the day when we will “see his face” (Revelation 22:4).

When Teresa of Avila endeavored to teach her nuns how to pray, she told them: “I'm not asking you now that you think about Him or that you draw out many concepts or make long and subtle reflections with your intellect. I'm not asking you to do anything more than look at Him”.

Similarly, Madame Guyon views “beholding the Lord,” or the practice of visualizing Jesus in our mind's eye as we meditate on the pages of Scripture, as the key to beginning a life of prayer. We cannot move on to more advanced prayer, she says, until we have learned this basic practice.

Seeing Jesus in our sanctified imaginations is a holy invitation to which we are all invited.

What about you? When was the last time you pictured Jesus when you prayed or sang to him?

2. Staying

David aims to build a prayer life where he lives in the house of God. He longs to stay.

Similarly, after the disciples behold Jesus in the book of John, Jesus invites them to stay at his house.

John says they “remained with him.” Astute readers of the Gospel of John will notice that this is one of John’s favorite words. He loves to describe the life of following Jesus as one of “remaining” or “abiding.” Perhaps more famously in John 15:4, Jesus says: “Abide in me, as I abide in you.”

A life of prayer requires both seeing Jesus and staying with him.

Paul literally commands us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17) — what is this if not a life that has learned to stay with the presence of God all throughout one’s day?

We must learn how to stay with God. There are many ways to do this — from a daily office, where we commit to certain set prayer times throughout the day — to regular disciplines of fasting — to the simple commitment to keep going in prayer even when we’ve fallen off our discipline.

Teresa of Avila says that the biggest mistake for people early in their journey of growing in prayer is to give up the daily discipline of praying.

Just like David longed to live in God’s house, and the disciples learned how to live life in Jesus’s house, we must learn to live with God at home on the inside of us.

What would it look like to stay in the presence of God today?

3. Searching

David longs to live a life inquiring in God’s temple. He wants to search the heart of God.

After Jesus’s first disciples see him and stay with him, they are transformed by him. After that initial day in Jesus’s house, Simon receives a whole-life identity transformation and is renamed Peter — he is transformed by seeing and staying with Jesus. What is this if not a picture of a prayer life?

What were Jesus and the disciples doing in the house that day? We can only assume that they did exactly what a Jewish rabbi would have done with his students — he would have taught them, he would have asked them questions, and they would have engaged in dialogical learning.

Put more simply, they would have had a conversation. They would have inquired of their new Rabbi. They would have searched him out. As the Proverb writer says:

Prayer begins with seeing, continues with staying, and then grows with searching. We learn to hold an ongoing dialogical conversation with God. One where we talk and he talks back. And we talk back. And on and on.

And we begin to grow in the knowledge of God. We get to know God’s personality.

Writes Teresa of Avila:

Where is your conversation with God today? What questions are you asking him? Where are you longing for more clarity, and where have you already received it?

I’d love to invite us to pray today:

• Begin to take a few deep breaths. Perhaps as you breathe in, pray “Come,” and as you breathe out, pray “Holy Spirit.”

• Have you ever pictured Jesus as you pray to him?

• How are your rhythms of “staying” with Jesus? Does your intentionality in prayer need a touch-up?

• What is your current conversation with the Lord? What is a question you are currently asking him?

• Is there any way the Holy Spirit might be inviting you to respond to these questions?

Best,
Ryan

P.S. We made a prayer journal! If you haven’t yet, we’d love to invite you to come alive and live in love with Jesus through a 30-day journey of growing in confidence in hearing God’s voice. Check it out at restlessheartsrestingplaces.com/store.