In church, we’re constantly encouraged to pray more. For young preachers especially, no matter the sermon text, the same applications constantly reappear: Go to church more, read your Bible more, and pray more.
It’s not that those applications are wrong, especially the one to pray more. After all, Paul instructed the Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). Every Christian knows we should pray more. Yet what we most need when it comes to prayer isn’t a greater sense of guilt. If a book is going to help us pray, it needs to invite and inspire rather than simply inform.
In Pour Out Your Heart: Discovering Joy, Strength, and Intimacy with God Through Prayer, Jeremy Linneman, the lead pastor of Trinity Community Church, inspires readers to move beyond intellectual acknowledgment of the need to pray and into a vibrant, God-dependent practice of prayer. He begins by establishing our identity as children of the Father and then moves into practical instructions.
Prayer Fueled by the Gospel
The good news of Jesus Christ is that because of his substitutionary atonement, we’ve been adopted as God’s children. Our new relationship to God the Father changes everything about prayer.
We’re radically secure in the Father’s love, so prayer is first and foremost about experiencing and resting in the reality of God being our Father who dearly loves us. As Linneman writes, “The greatest challenge in the Christian life is getting the love of the Father into our hearts” (19). Receiving God’s love transforms everything about our lives, and prayer helps move God’s love for us from an intellectual to an experienced truth.
Prayer helps move God’s love for us from an intellectual to an experienced truth.
Our understanding that God is our Father allows us to be honest about our dependence on him. Asking God for things can feel selfish and spiritually immature sometimes. But this doesn’t line up with the predominant examples of prayer in the Bible. Linneman writes, “The main form of prayer in the Scriptures, far and away, is petition—asking for what we need” (42).
The Bible is filled with petition because God is our Father. Children recognize their dependence on their parents; they know their parents want to meet their needs, so without hesitation, they ask for their parents to do so. We have the same privilege in prayer. We shouldn’t feel guilty when we petition God; we should rejoice that we’re more deeply recognizing that we’re his dependent children.
Prayer Takes Practice
Theological truth isn’t enough to ensure a vibrant prayer life. Neither is simply observing people who pray. Jesus’s disciples watched him pray, and yet they had to ask to be taught how to do it themselves (Luke 11:1). Notably, Jesus didn’t respond by giving a theology lecture. He gave them a model prayer to emulate. In Pour Out Your Heart, Linneman offers several ways to practice prayer. These help get us into a place where we can better enjoy God’s grace and deepen our relationship with our Father.
One of the most challenging forms of prayer Linneman highlights is lament. When we offer lament, we treat God as our Father and celebrate our confidence in his love. As Linneman points out, a child who’s insecure in her father’s love or afraid of his anger doesn’t bring her frustrations and hurts to him. Instead, she stuffs her feelings away to avoid upsetting her provider.
In contrast, a child secure in his father’s love will bring all his frustration to his father because he knows he won’t be turned away. His dad loves him, wants to hear from him, and wants to do something about his needs. Lament is “not complaining about God but to God” (129). That makes all the difference. Voicing our frustration and heartache to God in prayer allows us to treat God as our Father and experience his comfort, love, and presence.
Linneman also highlights the practice of thanksgiving. He argues that thanksgiving enlivens the rest of our prayers. It’s easy to forget that the Bible is filled with feasts and celebrations. God is a happy God who wants to make us happy in his grace. Everything in our lives is an undeserved gift of God, and giving thanks to him helps us live in recognition of his grace. Thanksgiving enables us to experience God’s joy that he invites us into through the gospel.
Prayer Is Pouring Out Your Heart
Above all, using a metaphor for prayer from the psalmists and prophets, Linneman argues that prayer is pouring out our hearts to God like water. Through Jesus’s work, we have 24/7 access to the Father. Because God is our Father, our prayers don’t need to be polished or professional. We can unload our hearts to God, knowing he hears and understands all we need.
Everything in our lives is an undeserved gift of God, and giving thanks to God helps us live in recognition of his grace.
As the pace of life increases, Linneman’s book offers a doctrinally sound, practically oriented approach to prayer. It joins volumes like Tim Keller’s Prayer and John Starke’s The Possibility of Prayer as rich resources. And it encourages the sort of prayer that draws us close to God our Father.
As Linneman concludes, we need not live as orphans with no one to hear our prayers. Rather, he writes, “The Father’s love is the spring of living water—which cannot be stopped up or covered—from which all else flows. It’s the whole point of prayer” (202). Pour Out Your Heart is a powerful invitation to know and enjoy God’s love through prayer.
The Gospel Coalition