John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Providence.

A number of years ago, a counselor friend of mine introduced a simple and accessible concept that he regularly uses in his practice. He calls it “felt reality.”

Reality is reality. It’s objective. It’s what’s actually happening. Felt reality is what’s happening from my vantage point. It’s reality framed by my own thoughts, assumptions, and emotions.

Reality and felt reality aren’t the same. Sometimes they align — what I think and feel fits with what is actually happening. Other times, my felt reality is out of accord with reality. In such cases, I might be believing lies, or framing reality wrongly, or overreacting. My perspective might be distorted by my emotions or my sinful desires or my own limitations.

Once my friend gave me the category, I found it to be incredibly fruitful in my own life and marriage and parenting and ministry. It gave me a way to speak about human experiences of reality — whether mine or another’s — without necessarily validating those experiences. In other words, it enabled me to acknowledge that I think and feel a certain way, without affirming that such thoughts or emotions were necessarily true or right or good.

“Getting felt reality on the table can be the first step in seeking to steward and shepherd our thoughts and emotions.”

Getting felt reality on the table can be the first step in seeking to steward and shepherd our thoughts and emotions so that they more fully align with God’s.

‘Cut Off from Your Sight’

Even more than that, the concept (though not the term) seems present in the Scriptures. Consider the Psalms. In the middle of Psalm 31, David pleads with God to deliver him from his distress. In doing so, he vividly describes what it’s like to be in the pit:

His eyes are wasted from grief. They’re heavy from crying; they feel like lead. He just wants to rest, but there is no rest (verse 9).
His soul is wasted. His body is wasted. There is a weariness that reaches to every part of David’s existence (verse 9).
His life is spent with sorrow and his years with sighing (verse 10). This is how it feels: “I’ve been here forever, and I’ll be here forever.”
His strength fails (and he knows he partially deserves it because of his sin), and his bones just waste away (verse 10).

David’s powerful emotional and physical responses are influenced by his perception of reality, of what’s going on around him:

His adversaries have made him a reproach to his neighbors. Everyone runs from him because they think his suffering is contagious (verse 11). “Don’t stand too close to David. Don’t let him breathe on you. You don’t want to catch what he’s got.”
He’s forgotten like the dead. People remember the dead — for a little bit. Then they’re forgotten. That’s how David feels. Dead and useless, like a broken vessel (verse 12). “What good am I?”
He hears the whispering of his enemies around him — terror on every side. The other shoe could drop at any minute. Every rock and tree is ominous. Every bit of news produces fear. The future is filled with the almost certain prospect of bad surprise (verse 13).

This is David’s felt reality, and he gives explicit voice to it in verse 22:

I had said in my alarm, “I am cut off from your sight.”

‘I Shall Never Be Moved’

But these aren’t the only feelings David has had. In the previous psalm, David describes different circumstances and therefore a different felt reality:

As for me, I said in my prosperity, “I shall never be moved.” (Psalm 30:6)

Notice the contrast. On the one hand: “In my alarm, I said, ‘I’m cut off.’” On the other hand: “In my prosperity, I said, ‘I’ll never be moved.’” In terms of content, these felt realities are exact opposites. But at another level, they display the power of felt reality in the exact same way.

Both circumstances of alarm and circumstances of prosperity led David to wrongfully exalt his felt reality. In Psalm 31, when he was alarmed, when all the walls were closing in, his felt reality was “It’s over. I’m done. God has abandoned me.” In Psalm 30, when he was living the high life, when he prospered and everything he touched turned to gold, his felt reality was “I’ve made it. I’m immovable and unshakable. God will never test me.”

These are two very different places, but they showcase the same confusion of felt reality and actual reality. In both cases, David was so overwhelmed by his felt reality that he made what he felt into what is. But it wasn’t. Felt reality is not the same as reality.

Facing Our Felt Reality

How then can we face our felt reality? Granting that our feelings and perceptions can be out of accord with what is truly the case, what can we do?

First, we can recognize the crucial connection between our felt reality and our self-talk. David didn’t just feel; he expressed his feelings in speech. And his words reinforced his felt reality.

Words are powerful. What we say shapes the way we view ourselves and our circumstances. Our feelings often reveal our unstated assumptions, our hidden beliefs, and the unrecognized stories by which we make sense of our lives. And then our words give voice to these feelings and reshape or reinforce — for good or ill — who we are and how we see ourselves.

Second, we see the importance of bringing our felt reality to God. David doesn’t muzzle his feelings; he lays them before the Lord in prayer. Whether or not his felt reality corresponds to actual reality, he eventually brings all of it before God, in hope that God will act and speak to him in his prosperity and in his pain.

So too with us. It does no good to hide our felt reality from God. He sees it already. Our task is to unveil before him, to take off the silly mask that we wear and be as honest as we can be in his presence. And the category of felt reality really helps us here. We can both be honest and humble. We can say, “I feel this way” while also saying, “But I don’t know if my feelings are right. Search me, O God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and then lead me in the way everlasting.”

“We not only can bring our felt reality to God, but we can submit our felt reality to the truth of God.”

Finally, bringing these together, we not only can bring our felt reality to God, but we can submit our felt reality to the truth of God. Recall again the two examples of felt reality from Psalms 30 and 31. “In my alarm, I said, ‘I’m cut off.’” “In my prosperity, I said, ‘I’ll never be moved.’”

Hear David’s words in Psalm 31:14, right after he describes his felt reality: “But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, ‘You are my God.’” This is David submitting his felt reality to the truth of God. He brought his felt reality to God, and now he speaks to himself and reasserts the truth of who God is for him.

Speak Reality

With God’s help, we can learn to do the same. We can learn to be honest with God, to ask him to bring our hidden assumptions and unseen narratives to light.

In my alarm, I said, “I’m cut off from your sight.”
In my prosperity, “I’ll never be moved.”
In my grief, “God has forsaken me.”
In my pride, “I’m thankful that I’m not like other men.”
In my envy, “God doesn’t love me like he loves others.”
In my suffering, “No one understands what I’m going through.”
In my despair, “It will never end. It’s hopeless.”

These are the sorts of statements we make in the midst of our trials and our triumphs, out of our passions and our pain. Listen to them, and then bring those feelings and that speech to God, and learn to say something else.

“I trust in you; you are my God. I’m not cut off.”
“I’m not unshakable.”
“You’ve not abandoned me.”
“Have mercy on me, a sinner.”
“You do love me.”
“You do understand.”
“This trial will end. There is hope.”

Most mornings, it seems, I forget how to pray. Or I at least seem to forget what prayer really is — what’s really happening in these quiet moments before an open Bible and a hearing God. I may stumble through my thanksgivings and petitions, but apart from some daily remembering, my prayers, like hapless pilgrims in a Bunyan allegory, tend to fall into the slough of distraction, or get locked in the castle of discouragement, or fall asleep on the enchanted ground.

In his book on prayer, Tim Keller writes of the need to “take ourselves in hand and wake ourselves up to the magnitude of what is going to happen” as we pray (Prayer, 127). Before unthinkingly mumbling “Heavenly Father” or “Lord,” pause, take your soul in hand, and remember the wonder of prayer.

And one of the best ways we can remember is by listening to what Jesus himself says about prayer. So much of our Lord’s teaching on prayer is designed to help us “always to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1). In the Gospels, Jesus comes to pray-ers like us — discouraged, distracted, willing in spirit but weak in flesh — and he gives us a heart to pray. Of the many reminders we could mention, consider four representative lessons.

1. We come to a Father.

Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven . . .” (Matthew 6:9)

Michael Reeves notes how prone we can be to treat prayer “as an abstract activity, a ‘thing to do,’” rather than remembering “the one to whom [we’re] praying” (Enjoy Your Prayer Life, 30). Prayer easily becomes impersonal: “to pray” is to run down a list of names, sit or kneel in such and such place for so long, drive in the old familiar ruts of phrases said ten thousand times. But most fundamentally, prayer is not an abstract activity or a habit or even a spiritual discipline; prayer is a personal response to a personal God — a God whom Jesus told us to call Father.

The wonder of this word often escapes us; it would not have escaped the disciples. They had never called God Father before, except in the broadest sense (Exodus 4:22–23; Hosea 11:1). To address God as “our Father in heaven,” to mimic Jesus’s own affectionate “Abba” — this was astoundingly, wonderfully new. When those who trust in Jesus come to pray, we come to a Father.

“Our Father knows our inmost thought and need, yet still he loves to hear us unburden our souls before him.”

And what a Father he is. He knows our inmost thought and need, yet still he loves to hear us unburden our souls before him (Matthew 6:8, 32). His ear always open, his eye always upon us, he turns our ordinary rooms and closets into sanctuaries of communion (Matthew 6:6). He’s the archetype and fountain of all fatherly generosity, distributing good gifts with both hands (Matthew 7:9–11).

But perhaps the most heart-awakening words Jesus spoke about the Father are those in John 16:27: “The Father himself loves you.” “Here is something to say to ourselves every day,” Sinclair Ferguson writes of these five words. “They are simple words, but life-changing, peace-giving, poise-creating” — and, we might add, prayer-inspiring (Lessons from the Upper Room, 174).

2. Jesus perfects our prayers.

Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. (John 16:23)

Throughout his ministry, Jesus showed supreme patience with requests that others would have silenced. When the crowds hushed the blind and shouting Bartimaeus, Jesus called him over (Mark 10:47–49). When the disciples sought to send the Canaanite mother away, Jesus drew out her heart and healed her daughter (Matthew 15:21–28). When the desperate father cried, “If you can do anything . . .” Jesus rebuked his unbelief but still restored his boy (Mark 9:22–27). He took uncouth requests, he took imperfect, even halfway unbelieving prayers, and he passed them through the refining fires of his own loving heart.

And so he still does. Three times in the upper room, he told his disciples to pray “in my name” (John 14:13–14; 15:16; 16:23–24, 26). In my name: here is Jacob’s ladder, lifting our words to heaven; the key that opens wide our Father’s home; the robe that adorns our naked requests; the name of the King’s own Son, sealed with his blood and signed with his own resurrected hand.

So, as Charles Spurgeon writes,

The Lord Jesus Christ is always ready to take the most imperfect prayer and perfect it for us. If our prayers had to go up to heaven as they are, they would never succeed; but they find a friend on the way, and therefore they prosper.

“In Christ, our imperfect prayers gain a heavenly hearing.”

Because the Father loves his Son, and because he loves to honor the worth of his Son’s work (John 14:13), he also loves to hear and answer prayers shaped by the words of his Son (John 15:7) and sent in the name of his Son. In Christ, our imperfect prayers gain a heavenly hearing.

3. Struggle and resistance are normal.

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. (Luke 11:9)

Just because our prayers begin with “Our Father” and end with “in Jesus’s name” doesn’t mean all the words in the middle flow easily. Sometimes, even those awake to the wonder of prayer face discouraging difficulties: internal struggle, outward resistance, perhaps even a sense of divine silence. And while such difficulties can reflect something wrong within — a heart overgrown with worldly cares (Luke 8:14) or hiding unconfessed sin (Psalm 66:18) — Jesus’s teaching on prayer is striking for its realism.

“Ask, and it will be given to you” may sound straightforward enough on the surface: a simple cause followed by a sure effect. But in fact, these words follow Jesus’s story of a man who receives bread from his friend only “because of his impudence” — because the stubborn fellow wouldn’t go away (Luke 11:8). Sometimes, Jesus would have us know, prayer feels like asking and receiving no answer, like seeking and finding nothing, like knocking on the door of a friend who won’t open — until holy “impudence” prevails (Luke 11:9).

George Müller, the caretaker of orphans who told of far more answered prayers than most, learned from Jesus’s teaching,

Whilst I firmly believe that He will give me, in His own time, every shilling which I need [for the orphan houses]; yet I also know, that He delights in being earnestly entreated, and that He takes pleasure in the continuance in prayer, and in the importuning Him. (Answers to Prayer, 29)

God delights to be earnestly entreated (see also Matthew 9:37–38), even for gifts he loves to give. Often, then, struggle and resistance and unanswered prayers are no signs of something wrong, but invitations to press on, and every morning to take fresh heart to ask and seek again.

4. Persistence will bring an answer.

Everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. (Luke 11:10)

If you survey Jesus’s teaching on prayer, you will nowhere find him counseling us to expect little in prayer; you will frequently find him challenging us to expect much. No one who persists in asking the Father goes unanswered; no one who keeps seeking fails to find; no one who knocks and knocks at mercy’s door will be left outside forever (Luke 11:10). In God’s time, persistence will bring an answer.

Sometimes, of course, we do not receive the answer we hope for — our Father knows when the “fish” we want would really bite like a serpent (Luke 11:11). Other times, “in God’s time” feels far longer than “in my time,” as the persistent widow discovered in “her continual coming” (Luke 18:5). And sometimes, the answer arrives even after we’ve given up asking, as the old Zechariah apparently had lost hope for a son (Luke 1:13, 18). Either way, if an answer to some longed-for request has not yet come, and if we do not yet discern that God’s answer is no (as, for example, Paul did with his thorn, 2 Corinthians 12:8–9), then Jesus invites us to keep asking.

Müller, telling the story of how he once prayed for years for a particular piece of land, writes, “Hundreds of times I had with a prayerful eye looked on this land, yea, as it were, bedewed it with my prayers” (33). His prayers covered that field like so many dew drops, falling hundreds of times across the years. I wonder if we can likewise claim that we bedew the matters we long for most — not giving up, not growing disillusioned, but humbly and faithfully asking God again.

Jesus would have us do so. For we come to a Father. Our Savior perfects our prayers. Struggle and resistance are normal. And persistence will bring an answer.