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.

It was exactly three hundred years ago today.

On the frigid night of December 18th, 1722, the teenager dipped his quill in the ink jar and began to write. He probably cupped his hands toward the warm lantern for a moment first, just to make his fingers more agile in the chilly air. Then he began to compose. Jonathan Edwards was just 74 days past his nineteenth birthday when he wrote the first batch of his famous resolutions.1

His brain was swirling with holy ambition. Edwards had completed his graduate coursework at Yale in May and had desired to enter into the public ministry, just as his father, Timothy Edwards, and grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, had done before him. Just a few months earlier, in August of 1722, the younger Edwards had arrived in New York City, 150 years before any skyscrapers were built, to preach his first series of sermons. By all accounts, those sermons were excellent.2

Edwards had been called to New York to attempt to pastor a Presbyterian congregation that had recently experienced a church split. In the bustling port city, Edwards had found success in preaching his earliest sermonic orations as well as finding true friendship and spiritual companionship in the home of his host family. His heart was alive, and his spirit was on fire for Christ. He was ready to commit his whole life, as well as his eternal soul, to the service of God.

His quill carefully drew out the first few lines of ink on the page:

1. Resolved, that I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God’s glory, and my own good, profit and pleasure, in the whole of my duration, without any consideration of the time, whether now, or never so many myriads of ages hence.3

That night, in a steady hand and in the same color of ink, Edwards wrote out the first 35 of his resolutions. He would add several more that week and then continue the practice of adding new resolutions for the better part of the winter. As the calendar flipped from 1722 to 1723, Edwards had written nearly forty such resolutions:

7. Resolved, never to do anything, which I should be afraid to do, if it were the last hour of my life.

18. Resolved, to live so at all times, as I think is best in my devout frames, and when I have clearest notions of things of the gospel, and another world.

42. Resolved, frequently to renew the dedication of myself to God, which was made at my baptism; which I solemnly renewed, when I was received into the communion of the church; and which I have solemnly re-made this 12th day of January, 1722–23.4

Spiritual Ecstasy and Discouragement

Edwards would later look back on this period as the most beautiful experience of his personal sanctification.5 His faith was growing so quickly that he could practically chart the progress. In fact, that is exactly what he tried to do. Each time he wrote out new resolutions, he marked his progress along the same lines in his diary.6 The two documents — the diary and the “Resolutions” — would have a symbiotic relationship. As he yearned for holiness and found himself wanting, he would make new resolutions, and then monitor his actual progress in his personal journal, keeping track of his successes and failures along the way.

Over time, however, Edwards found that his failures were far more in number and of a more serious kind than he had feared.

Jan. 20, sabbath day. At night. The last week I was sunk so low, that I fear it will be a long time, ’ere I shall be recovered. I fell exceedingly low in the weekly account. I find my heart so deceitful, that I am almost discouraged from making any more resolutions. Wherein have I been negligent in the week past; and how could I have done better, to help the dreadful, low estate in which I am sunk?7

As the spring turned to summer, existential questions began to threaten his spiritual tranquility, and he began to experience trepidations and palpitations of heart related to the defense of his master’s thesis — his Quaestio — and the looming necessity of securing a full-time pastoral call. That in addition to coping with the heartache of falling in love with a younger, beautiful girl, Sarah.8

As it turned out, these first forty or so resolutions wouldn’t be enough to buoy his soul as he dealt with these somewhat typical coming-of-age strains on heart and mind. His soul ached, and his temptations raged against him. So he wrote more resolutions.

When the heat of the summer of 1723 was at its peak, and the honeybees began to feast upon the goldenrod and sedum plants, Edwards had written a full complement of seventy resolutions. And then suddenly — as abruptly as he had started — he stopped.

He never wrote another resolution again.

‘Resolutions’ as Inspiration

There is no doubt that the “Resolutions” are inspiring. This is why they have been printed over and over again, published in the genre of classical devotional materials.9 Men and women for generations now have felt they have met Edwards personally in this short, tract-length document, resonating with the emerging pastor’s soul-deep yearning for Christ. How can we not be inspired when we read such resolutions?

52. I frequently hear persons in old age say how they would live, if they were to live their lives over again: resolved, that I will live just so as I can think I shall wish I had done, supposing I live to old age.

53. Resolved, to improve every opportunity, when I am in the best and happiest frame of mind, to cast and venture my soul on the Lord Jesus Christ, to trust and confide in him, and consecrate myself wholly to him; that from this I may have assurance of my safety, knowing that I confide in my Redeemer.10

But what so many readers (including the present writer) find so profound and awe-inspiring from the pen of the forthcoming prodigy, Edwards felt as a burden on his soul. The more he resolved, the more he failed himself and his God. He couldn’t live up to his own standards. He simply could not will himself to breathe the thin air of spiritual Zion all the time, dwelling long on the mountain of God’s holy presence. Since his resolutions pointed out his own sin as much as they pointed toward his own faithfulness, Edwards needed to find another way forward before his resolve fled away with the retreating summer sunlight.

Looking Outward

Some Edwards scholars believe that he quit writing his resolutions on August 17, 1723, because his “canon” was complete with the round biblical number of seventy. I think this conjecture is somewhat plausible. But I also think there is more to it. My own studies of Edwards’s personal writings have led me to conclude that he simply could not bear the pressures of his own heightened determinations.11

“To resolve was one thing, but to depend and rely upon Christ was another.”

When taken alone, the “Resolutions” are a powerful document indeed — even (and rightly) inspiring. But when reading his diary alongside the “Resolutions,” as synchronous and complementary documents, it seems that Edwards was building up spiritual pressures that his own soul was not able to withstand. The process of continually grading himself on paper may have become more than he could tolerate. Such periods of deep self-evaluation, when most honest, only proved that Edwards needed more and more grace. In other words, he could not live up to his own standards. To resolve was one thing, but to depend and rely upon Christ was another. And so, Edwards grew in his understanding of the daily necessity of dependence upon divine grace as superior to determination and resolution alone.

Along with this deepening understanding of his own sin and God’s grace, Edwards simply got busier and had less time to gaze in the spiritual mirror of his “Resolutions” and diary. His responsibilities in the church grew significantly when he was ordained to serve under Solomon Stoddard, and then again when he eventually became the solo pastor of the Northampton Church, one of the most significant congregations in the region. He did end up marrying the beautiful young woman he fell in love with as a teen. They had a large number of children, even by eighteenth-century standards (ten!). Edwards became preoccupied with preaching innumerable sermons, writing treatises, drafting letters, meeting with other ministers, and counseling his people’s distraught souls. He found that he was simultaneously growing as a believer, as a husband, as a father, and as a pastor.

And God was at work too in amazing ways that far transcended his own inward fascinations. A true revival began to occur — first in Northampton (1735) and then all across the Colonies (1740–42). Edwards had less occasion and opportunity to stew anxiously inwardly, even as it became more apparent that God was working outwardly all around him. This change in focus seems to me to be evidence of his spiritual maturity rather than any loss of devotion.

Relentless Reliance

At about age 40, a more mature Edwards could look back upon his 19-year-old self and write,

My longings after God and holiness, were much increased. Pure and humble, holy and heavenly Christianity, appeared exceeding amiable to me. I felt in me a burning desire to be in everything a complete Christian; and conformed to the blessed image of Christ: and that I might live in all things, according to the pure, sweet and blessed rules of the gospel. I had an eager thirsting after progress in these things. My longings after it, put me upon pursuing and pressing after them. It was my continual strife day and night, and constant inquiry, how I should be more holy, and live more holily, and more becoming a child of God, and disciple of Christ.12

True enough, the New York period had been a time of spiritual ecstasy for him. A veritable mountaintop. Edwards put these thoughts and other reflections together in a document that would become known as his “Personal Narrative.”13 This is one of the most important extant documents regarding Edwards’s own mature spiritual introspection. His own son-in-law, Aaron Burr Sr., had asked him to share more deeply about his soul’s growth over the years. In a key statement regarding his spiritual ecstasies during his period of time in New York City, Edwards makes a significant admission about the time in which the “Resolutions” were drafted. Listen carefully for the way Edwards acknowledges some imbalance in his spiritual life:

I sought an increase of grace and holiness, and that I might live an holy life, with vastly more earnestness, than ever I sought grace, before I had it. I used to be continually examining myself, and studying and contriving for likely ways and means, how I should live holily, with far greater diligence and earnestness, than ever I pursued anything in my life: but with too great a dependence on my own strength; which afterwards proved a great damage to me. My experience had not then taught me, as it has done since, my extreme feebleness and impotence, every manner of way; and the innumerable and bottomless depths of secret corruption and deceit, that there was in my heart. However, I went on with my eager pursuit after more holiness; and sweet conformity to Christ.14

In these crucial words, Edwards looks back fondly on the spiritual fervor that he had as a young man. He does not regret the resolutions, nor does he recant any of their lofty spiritual aims. As such, the “Resolutions” were well-founded.

“Growth, we might say, is better tracked over decades and years than weeks and days.”

At the same time, maturity as a husband, father, and pastor was just as necessary to his soul’s growth. He was enabled to see his own heart over a longer period of time than the “Resolutions” allowed him. He recognized that zealous resolve necessarily needs to be balanced by a relentless reliance on God’s ever-patient grace. That lesson would be learned over an extended trajectory of service, suffering, and daily reliance upon God’s goodness for us in Jesus Christ. Growth, we might say, is better tracked over decades and years than weeks and days.

He had learned experientially an incomparable lesson about sanctification: Jonathan Edwards needed more than his seventy resolutions for Christ. He needed Christ himself.

Audio Transcript

How do we respond when God feels distant from us? Several versions of that question have come in recently from listeners on the topic of “spiritual desertion.” I can boil them down to three categories.

First, spiritual desertion is an experience of God hiding his face from the believer. But in the great text on contentment, and how to live free from the love of money, we are given a glorious promise — one we have repeated several times on APJ. We should cultivate material contentment in this life because God has promised us, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). So how does desertion relate to this promise that we will never be forsaken?

Second, does the Bible tell us why God deserts believers? Should we read into the experience of desertion something we have failed to do, or need to do? And what has his absence felt like to you?

And then third, in the famous desertion psalm, Psalm 22, we read that God does not hear the psalmist’s prayers and refuses to deliver him from his distress. Hence the felt desertion. And yet the psalmist still delights in God in verse 8. So what does it look like to delight in God in felt desertion?

So, Pastor John, there is a mix of questions for you under this label of “spiritual desertion.”

Well, just a word of caution to start: the term spiritual desertion doesn’t occur in the Bible, nor does the word desertion itself — at least not in the ESV. So, we have to be careful that when non-biblical words or terms are used to describe biblical realities, we don’t force any connotations of those non-biblical words onto the biblical reality.

I think what’s being asked in all of these concerns is not only about the objective circumstances that can be so painful in the lives of Christians — that it looks objectively like God is just no longer working for us. But probably more what’s being asked is about the subjective inner sense when we don’t feel the presence of God, and we don’t see the glory of God, and we don’t sense the sweetness of his fellowship. Whether he’s near or far, the question I think is mainly about how, subjectively, he feels far. It’s true that a Christian can have the experience of desertion in both of these senses. In the objective, it just looks like he’s gone. He doesn’t do anything for me anymore. And in the subjective, whether he’s near or far, I don’t feel, I don’t taste, I don’t sense. I think that’s the main concern.

Grace in Every Thorn

So, I won’t linger long over the first sense because that’s not the focus of these questions, I don’t think. And I’ve spoken about it so often. I’ll only say that Paul deals with the objective afflictions of Christians in Romans 8:35–38, and amazingly he does so by quoting the Psalms. He quotes Psalm 44:20–22, which says,

If we had forgotten the name of our God     or spread out our hands to a foreign god,would not God discover this?     For he knows the secrets of the heart.Yet for your sake we are killed all the day long;     we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.

And Paul explains that God’s face is hidden only in the sense that outward physical blessings are being withheld. But he protests strongly that in every loss and affliction for the Christian, we are “more than conquerors” (Romans 8:37). So Paul’s answer to the outward objective appearance of desertion is that God is present: he’s here, and he’s working through our troubles. And in that very teaching, Paul paradoxically shows that if we really understood what God was doing, we would know it was to help us see him more clearly — not less.

There’s this beautiful poem called “The Thorn” by Martha Nicholson, who died in 1953, that ends like this: “I learned He never gives a thorn without this added grace, / He takes the thorn to pin aside the veil which hides his face.”

“The thorns of life, which we think are God’s desertion, are in fact designed to pin back the veil of worldliness that hides God’s loving face.”

So, Paul’s answer to this first kind of objective desertion is that we need to learn the biblical truth that the thorns of life, which we think are God’s desertion, are in fact designed to pin back the veil of worldliness that hides God’s loving face. That’s a huge change in your mindset, but it’s crucial in order to understand how to respond to what appears to be objective absence of God but isn’t.

Fight to See and Savor

But the main thing, I think, being asked in these questions is about the inner sense of the Christian when we don’t feel the presence of God, and we don’t see or savor the glory of God, and we don’t sense the sweetness of his fellowship. So, let me give several texts from the New Testament that provide biblical categories that are Christian — Christian categories for this experience of more or less of this darkness, as if the Lord were absent, because you don’t see or savor his beauty or feel his fellowship.

1. First Corinthians 13:12: “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” In other words, some measure of hiddenness is what we have to live with now, no matter how we live, until Jesus comes.

2. Ephesians 5:19: “Be filled with the Holy Spirit” — meaning that there are different measures of experience of the Holy Spirit’s fullness. And what does the Holy Spirit do but reveal the beauties of Christ and thus stir us up to joy and boldness? So, there’s more or less clarity of spiritual seeing and savoring depending on what degree of fullness we are enjoying.

3. In Ephesians 4:30, Paul says, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit.” And in 1 Thessalonians 5:19, he says, “Do not quench the Spirit.” So, there are sinful attitudes and behaviors that do indeed grieve and quench the Spirit and thus draw a veil between us and the beauty of Christ, which the Spirit gives.

4. Paul prays in Ephesians 1:18 that “the eyes of your hearts” would be “enlightened,” so that you may know your calling, your inheritance, and the power of Christ in you. In other words, the eyes of our hearts see with greater or lesser clarity the glories of Christ.

5. And finally, in 2 Corinthians 4:6, Paul says that God “has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” That’s the glory we long to see with steady, unveiled brightness.

But all of these texts imply that the Christian life is variable. It is a fight to the end. Just before he dies, Paul says, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7). And it’s mainly a fight to see and savor the beauty of Christ right to the end.

Battle for His Presence

One of the questions that you read asks me personally what the absence of God has felt like to me. And I would answer like this: God has given me the grace not to think in terms of God’s absence, but only of my dullness, my disobedience. In other words, I believe that Jesus Christ, as my Savior, is always near,

because he is omnipresent — “he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3);
because he promised, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20); and
because he has put his Spirit within me as the down payment of my final redemption, and the Spirit does not come and go (Ephesians 1:14).

“God has given me the grace not to think in terms of God’s absence, but only of my dullness, my disobedience.”

Therefore, my experience is not of God’s absence but of my absence, my dullness, my faithlessness, my disobedience. I don’t fight to get God’s objective presence. It’s there. I fight to get his manifest presence, experienced presence. That’s my experience of his reality, which really means that the key changes have to happen in me — not in him. His location is not the issue. My faith, my sanctification, is the issue, and that’s the battle of my life every day.

He Will Hold You Fast

So finally, the last question is, What does it look like to delight in God in felt desertion? It’s a huge question, so let me just point to a passage for you to think about. Hebrews 12:2 says, “[Look] to Jesus, . . . who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.” So, Jesus experienced a profound sense of desertion on the cross as he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). And this text in Hebrews says he was able to endure that by the joy that was set before him.

Now I think that means that the faith of Jesus in his Father was able to hold on, was able to taste — by memory or by hope — some incremental measure of the anticipated joy with God. I think that’s what it looks like for us as well. For God’s elect, for his adopted children, God will hold us fast, as the song says. And the way he holds us is by preserving that mustard seed of remembered or anticipated joy at the Father’s right hand.