I have enjoyed being involved at the Crosslands Training residential in Derbyshire over the past two weeks. My subject was “Speaking God’s Words: a theology of sound.”
One of the writers who has helped me immensely on this topic is Peter Adam. He writes with deep insight into Scripture, a mature theologically rich spirituality and a feel for the practical everyday application of all he knows.
It is this ability to synthesise a huge amount of material and present it in a readable form that was one of the great gifts of Tim Keller. Keller, like Adam, was also an advocate of the central importance of prayer in the life of the Christian, especially the life of the Christian leader.
Here they are both taking a lead from the apostles who responded to the first great internal crisis in the Christian church (Acts 6:1–7) by first establishing their own priority of giving themselves to the ministry of the word and prayer, before laying out and implementing a clear strategy for dealing effectively with the crisis.
I like the way that Peter Adam has used the title Prayerfulness for his book. It has an echo of the more secular idea of mindfulness, which seeks to introduce a measure of focused intentionality into our lives. Adam wants to remind his readers that prayer is intended to be a delightful discipline.
He starts his book my making his intention clear:
“The aim of this book is to help you to pray. It is designed to teach and encourage you to pray more prayers, and to pray better prayers — prayers that are enriched by the Bible.”
I have regularly used some of Adam’s “Bible-enriched prayers” on the PrayerMate App.
In this book he helps the reader to explore ways to use biblical prayers as a launchpad for our own prayers. Adam also helpfully models how to develop a habit of using biblical prayers as a model for writing our own prayers. I personally followed this practice when writing my book on fatherlessness Good Bad No Dad.
Each chapter concludes with questions, a prayer and action points. The prayer section helped me to prayerfully process what I had been saying in each chapter. I found this process rather like what happens when I pray after preaching the sermon. A sermon uses words to speak about the God-breathed words of Scripture, and prayer breathes out a response of praise, thanksgiving, lament, confession and request.
“God likes talking and God likes listening. God likes talking to us, and God likes hearing us when we talk to him. God talks to us when we read his word, the Bible. And God listens to us we pray — that is, when we talk to him.”
Although that seems simple, it is the basis of all our communication with God.
If we join the biblical listening project and develop prayerfulness, we will breathe easier. Breathing in God’s words and breathing our prayers to him.
If you want some practical help, check out Peter Adam’s book PRAYERFULNESS: Cultivating the Bible-enriched prayer life
Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash