the prayer God answers -- a book review

Eberhard Arnold's The Prayer God Answers, with a response essay by Richard Foster, is a brief modern spiritual classic.  In it, Arnold, in his pastoral style, explores some key spiritual concepts:  What should Christians pray for?  Why does it seem God hasn't answered my prayer?  Arnold begins with Jesus' own prayer, and highlights how Jesus' prayer life is nurtured in relationship with God and others.  This biblical vision of the nature and practice of prayer is at once personal, but exposes the cultural lie that makes prayer individual.  Instead, Arnold rightly insists that Christian prayer is fundamentally the most social and corporate act we can do -- that praying connects us as humans to one another and to God.

That relational view of prayer exposes some of the obstacles Christians experience in prayer, but it also answers an important question that I hear often:  Does God really hear us?  And it informs the biblical vision that prayer is more than just asking things from God.  Instead, prayer is learning to see the world as God sees the world, and to live in it as God lives in the world.  Because Christian prayer, at its essence, is the in-breaking Kingdom and Power of God into the kingdoms and powers of this world.

And, of course, Richard Foster's "reflective response" -- "The Perpetual Flame of Devotion" -- explores all the ways that this deceptively small book (Arnold's text is around 40 pages) connects to the real lives that Christians live in the real world.  Foster himself is a pray-er from whom I learnt to prayer years ago (I still take his Prayer:  Finding the Heart's True Home from my shelves and reread it occasionally) and that makes Foster's wisdom in reading Arnold's little book all the more important.

This book on prayer is the one book you should read on prayer in 2016.

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I received a free copy of this book from Plough Publishing in exchange for my honest review here.