(upbeat music) - This week on the Ask Pastor John podcast, we're joined by pastor and author Tim Keller. He has a really excellent book coming out soon titled Prayer, Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God. And he joins us today from his office in New York City to talk about prayer.

This week, I plan to ask 10 rapid fire questions, two questions per episode this week. So here we go, Dr. Keller, here's question number one. I wanna begin with a broad question. Among Christians today, how widespread is prayerlessness and what does it reveal about our spiritual health? - Well, I think that's actually, it's a broad question, but it's also not that hard a question to answer.

I know that from a secular, just from empirical secular studies, everyone in our Western society today has less solitude. Everybody says that. All of us have, there's less and less of our day or our month or our week in which we are unplugged. We're not listening to something or talking to somebody or texting.

It's because of the, you know, how pervasive social media is and the internet is and various sorts of electronic devices. And therefore, most people in the past couldn't avoid solitude to some degree, but now there isn't any. And so everybody I talk to, this is anecdotal, everybody I talk to seems so busy and is communicating so incessantly and around the clock that I do think that there's more and more prayerlessness.

There's less and less time where people go into a solitary time or place to pray, that's all. I'm virtually sure that we are more prayerless than we've been in the past, and that does say that our spiritual health is in freefall. - Sobering. All right, on to question number two.

Your book is very clear. A profitable prayer life is impossible without God's word. You explain a time in your life when you were driven by desperation to pray, and so you opened up the Psalms and you prayed through them. Explain how you did this, what it did to you, what did you learn during the season of going through the Psalms?

- Well, that's a, I'm glad to talk about that. I came to see that the Psalms were extremely important, perhaps for prayer. Perhaps that's because I read a book some years ago by Eugene Peterson called "Answering God." He makes a very strong case that we only pray well if we are immersed in the scripture so that we learn our prayer vocabulary the way children learn their vocabulary, that is, they're immersed in language and then they speak it back.

And he said that the prayer book of the Bible is the Psalms and we should be immersed in the Psalms and our prayer life would be immeasurably enriched if we were immersed in the Psalms. So that was, I guess, the first step that I realized I needed to do that, but I didn't know how.

Then I spent a couple of years studying the Psalms. At one point, I realized that there were a fair number of the Psalms that seemed repetitious or difficult to understand, so I couldn't use them in prayer. So I decided to work through all 150 of them and I used Derek Kidner's little Tyndale commentary, Alec Mateer's commentary in the New Bible commentary, "21st Century," Mateer on the Psalms, and Michael Wilcock, his commentary on the Psalms in "The Bible Speaks Today." And what I did was I worked through all 150 Psalms and wrote a small outline and a small description of what I thought the Psalm was basically about and key verses that I thought were useful for prayer.

Every one of these Psalms was a very small paragraph. Now, admittedly, I'm using nine-point font, but basically it's about, I got all 150 Psalms on about 20 pages, which I use now in the morning whenever I'm praying. And by the way, I use the Book of Common Prayers schedule, which is I read Psalms in the morning and the evening and then I pray.

Sometimes I actually pray the Psalm, but many times I just read the Psalm and then pray. And I do it morning and evening, get through all 150 Psalms every month. So that's what I learned and that's what I do now. - I love this intentional and disciplined approach. And I presume over time you found Peterson's point to be true, that this practice really shaped your prayer language.

- Yes, that's the reason why you don't just have to, you don't have to literally take the Psalm and turn it into a prayer, though that can often be very powerful. Just reading the Psalms every month all the way through and then praying after reading a Psalm absolutely changes your vocabulary, your language, your attitude.

Tony, on the one hand, the Psalms actually show you that you can be very unhappy in God's presence. The Psalms in a sense give you the permission to really pour out your complaints in a way that probably, if it wasn't for the Psalms, we might think inappropriate. But on the other hand, the Psalms demand that you bow in the end to the sovereignty of God in a way that modern culture wouldn't lead you to believe.

So Alec Matier said, "The Psalms are written by people "who knew a lot less about God than we do "and love God a lot more than we do." And by that he meant because they didn't know about the cross, there's a number of places where you could say, "Hey, I don't know as much "about God's saving purposes as I do now "on this side of the cross." But he says, "Even though many of the Psalmists "don't know God as well as we do, "they love God more than we do." So that insight, by the way, also helped me through some of the Psalms where there's calls for vengeance and things.

- Yeah, so true. Thank you, Dr. Keller, for this model. I do wanna ask you how a good Calvinist complains to God and I'll ask that later in the week. But I have two questions queued up for you tomorrow, including how do we discipline ourselves to avoid the digital distractions of our phones when we should be praying?

I'm your host Tony Reinke, we'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)