The Direction of Prayer

I recently walked into a beautiful Mosque in Central Asia. No one could mistake the direction toward which prayers were offered. There it was, the Mihrab, an indentation in the wall that looked somewhat like a large arched door beautifully decorated with tiles and calligraphy. See the picture above. The Mihrab showed worshipers which way to stand so that they would face Mecca and pray to the One God proclaimed by Muhammad. The place of each worshiper facing the Mihrab was marked on the carpet covering the place of prayer. There was little confusion over how to pray or the God to whom they were praying.

We who follow Jesus don’t have such a structured way to pray. We can face any direction. Sometimes we also have confused ideas about the God to whom we pray. It is so easy to imagine God the way we want Him to be—which, of course, is a form of idolatry. C. S. Lewis said something like this, “The prayer before all prayers is, may it be the real God to whom I pray and may it be the real ‘I’ who prays.” How do we come to understand the “real God”? I am gratified at the way in which David Wells has answered this question in his recent book, God in the Whirlwind (Crossway, 2014). He urges us to go beyond simply looking up individual verses that describe God. If we would know God, we must “begin at the beginning and see how God revealed his character across time” (page 41). We must immerse ourselves in the whole sweep of God’s revelation contained in the canon of Scripture and culminating in Christ. That immersion must be one of submission. As we humbly submit to God’s self revelation he uses it to reshape our thinking about Him. In the first chapter of the above book Wells warns us against allowing our own culture rather than Scripture shape our understanding of God.

I’ve written Christian Faith in the Old Testament: the Bible of the Apostles (Thomas Nelson, February, 2014) with this purpose in mind. I wanted to help ordinary believers gain a sense of Scripture’s wholeness. I have offered this book as an aid in understanding the contribution each part of Scripture makes to the whole with suggestions on how each part applies today. My prayer is that Christian Faith in the Old Testament will help people in both pew and pulpit to humbly gain an ever more accurate understanding of the God revealed in Scripture, whose fullness is beyond our comprehension, but “whom to know” in His self-revelation “is life eternal.”