Pray your Theology
Pray your theology.
There’s a way to think about God in deep and systematic ways, and never delight in God. There’s a way to speak about what the mind is doing with God as a concept, and never speak about what God is doing with the mind as a person. There’s a way to believe one is mastering the divine, rather than being mastered by the divine. There’s a way to pursue knowledge about God as if he were exhaustively attainable. But what if God is best experienced when we agree with David?
“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it” (Ps. 139:6 ESV).
The way to avoid the things I have stated above are by praying theology in wonder. By that, I mean specifically praising God for a deep or simple theological truth learned or reminded of. It has been one of my favorite things to do while I walk to my car at the end of a day of long whether alone or with a friend.
I am daily engaging in what John Stott called PIM (Pain in the mind), which is what he referred to when he would struggle with a project or deep concept for an extended period of time. However, PIM must be followed with praise if one wants to move past knowing about God to knowing God, as J.I. Packer noted.*
Packer described what I mean by praying your theology best when he said,
“How can we turn our knowledge about God into knowledge of God? The rule for doing this is simple but demanding. It is that we turn each truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God.”
The Church has long expressed this idea by saying, “Lex orandi lex credendi.” The rule of prayer is the rule of belief. What one prays one believes. What you pray truly reveals your theology.
Pray your theology.
*I am not saying Stott did PIM without praise.
