Prayer for Beginners: Chapter Two- Part I

In chapter three Kreeft gives ten motivations for prayer. I’m going to give you the ten motivations for prayer, but I’ll take the next few posts to expand on them… today, only motivation number one:

1. Only prayer can save the world.
2. There is a better reason to pray than the fact that only prayer can save the world. We must pray because God commands it.
3. Three reasons that God commands us to pray correspond to our three deepest needs, the fundamental needs of the three powers of our soul: Prayer gives truth to our minds, goodness to our will, and beauty to our heart.
4. We should pray because God’s honor deserves it, in fact demands it.
5. Remembering the facts of death and Heaven gives us an even more pressing reason to learn to pray: We do not have an infinite amount of time.
6. Prayer is delightful.
7. Prayer is the way to know God, and this is Jesus’ definition of eternal life: “This is eternal life: that they know thee, the only true God.” (John 17:3)
8. Prayer, and its effect, knowing God, is the essential prerequisite for all religious teachers, catechists, evangelists, and preachers.
9. Prayer is the only way to spiritual progress.
10. Prayer is necessary because without it we cannot attain the meaning in life, the end and purpose of our existence.

The first motivation is that only prayer can save the world, but what does he mean by it? “Though some claim that prayer is an unaffordable luxury today, or an irresponsible withdrawal from the pressing public problems of our poor, hurting world, I say just the opposite: that nothing, nothing is more relevant and responsible; that nothing else can ever cure our sick world except saints, and saints are never made except by prayer.
Nothing but saints can save our world because the deepest root of all the world’s diseases is sin, and saints are the antibodies that fight sin. Nothing but prayer can make saints because nothing but God can make saints, and we meet God in prayer. Prayer is the hospital for souls where we meet Doctor God.”

Jesus has said that we're supposed to be "light" and "salt". (Matthew 5:13-16). We need to be light because the world, by almost any one's standard is pretty dark at times. We need to be salt because the world, by any one's standard, can be pretty bitter at times. Only God can take flesh and blood people and give them the properties of light and salt.

In another biblical analogy (Romans 9:19ff) we are the clay, and God is the potter. In order for us to be shaped in a way that is useful we need to be on the wheel... prayer is the wheel.