Recommended Resource: Prayer by Tim Keller

I recently finished Tim Keller’s new book, Prayer. Per usual, Keller has found the balance between writing accessibly while leading the reader through deep waters. His book on prayer will be my go-to book (outside of the Bible, of course) to recommend to Christians who want to learn to pray. Keller spends the first half of the book explaining what prayer is, why it’s important and why we should want it. In the second half Keller leans on Augustine, Luther, Calvin and other famous Christians from history to help us learn to pray, and pray deeply. Here are a few quotes to mull over:

• We are so used to being empty that we do not recognize the emptiness as such until we start to try to pray.
• Prayer is the only entryway into genuine self-knowledge.
• Prayer is continuing a conversation that God has started through his Word and his grace, which eventually becomes a full encounter with him.
• If we give priority to the outer life, our inner life will be dark and scary. We will not know what to do with solitude. We will be deeply uncomfortable with self-examination, and we will have an increasingly short attention span for any kind of reflection.
• Meditation is spiritually “tasting” the Scripture— delighting in it, sensing the sweetness of the teaching, feeling the conviction of what it tells us about ourselves, and thanking God and praising God for what it shows us about him.