Book Review: J.I. Packer’s and Carolyn Nystom’s – Praying
(Reviewed by Monergism.com's Aaron Orendorff)

Far more than just another book on prayer, J.I. Packer’s and Carolyn Nystom’s Praying: Finding Our Way from Duty to Delight is, despite its authors’ claim to the contrary, a sincere and deeply devotional treaty on the Christian life as seen through the eyes of prayer.  Ecumenical in the best sense of the word, Packer and Nystom draw from a number of diverse Christian traditions while remaining firmly planted within Packer’s native, Reformed soil.  Standing upon the noticeable shoulders of men like Owen, Ryle and Bunyan, the book may be divided into three general parts.  Chapter one (“The God We Pray To”) lays the theological foundation necessary for truly biblical prayer, namely, that God is personal, plural, perfect, powerful, purposeful, a promise-keeper, paternal and praiseworthy.  “What this book offers,” chapter one concludes, “…is less a ‘how to,’ than a ‘who to’ (more grammatically, a ‘to whom’) approach to praying.  Realizing the reality of God, as we have described him, is the exercise of heart that sets prayer on the right footing” (32).  Chapters two (“The Path and the By-Paths”), three (“Brooding”), four (“Praising”) and five (“Prayer Checkup”) are more or less preparatory chapters dealing with, in that same order, the purpose and pitfalls of prayer, meditation, worship and self-examination.  It is upon the last two of these topics, in particular their connection to sin, that Packer and Nystom truly shine.  In reference to worship, they write:

The anti-God allergy called original sin resides and marauds in our moral and spiritual system, leading us to deeply egocentric motivation, moral corner cutting and worse, callousness and cruelty, undervaluing and exploiting others, constant self-admiration and self-pity, playing God wile evading the real God, loving ourselves by not loving him, wanting to be praised while declining inwardly to praise or admire others, and may other self-centered vices.  For sinners as such, duty [particularly, praise], which is first God-centered and then others-centered can never be a delight.  And since, in Christians, sin – though dethroned – is not yet destroyed and sill leaves its finger marks more of less obtrusively on everything that we think, wish, plan and do, it is understandable that the thought of praise as both duty and delight hardly seems real at first. And to the extent that original sin still shapes us, praise, though an acknowledged duty, will not be a delight (108).

What then is the answer to this awful predicament?  Simply put, the regenerating work of God through which the believer is united spiritually to the risen Christ whose delight, not mention whose very bread and water, was and is to do the will of the Father.  In prayer, we praise God by asking great things of him, things that we cannot do for ourselves nor for the world around us.  Amazingly, as Packer and Nystom point out, chief among these impossibilities are the very acts of prayer and praise themselves.  This is why the Christian’s experience of prayer is always characterized by a two-fold struggle: a struggle first against our flesh – its anti-God allergies and simple lethargy – as well as a struggle against Satan and the spiritual forces of this present age. 

In regards to self-examination, the two authors likewise record:

 

A life of repentance is, in reality, a life of self-denial.  When Jesus talked about self-denial he was…telling us that we have to say no to “carnal self,” that is, to our inner selfhood that has been shaped by sin into the mold of an ugly, self-serving egocentricity.  This carnal self seeks to lead us along its own path…Sin in our system enslaves our natural self-love to unnatural pride, so as to keep us from loving God and others.  So God exposes to our consciences, our self-absorption and self-centeredness, our tendency to focus entirely on ourselves and our own concerns (127).