Acknowledging God - The Meditative Practice of Prayer
Clearing the Gap Between Speaking and Felt Experience
It seems one of the common struggles that plagues the daily experience of the Christian is the gap between our biblical knowledge and our felt experience. For me, this gap was not closed any further when hearing the phrase “just talk to God like a friend.” While scripture certainly portrays the almighty as our greatest friend (John 15:13, Exodus 33:11, James 2:23), it quietly sets an expectation that the Christian life is supposed to feel like a close human friendship, complete with the warmth and directness that are often involved. The problem is that most people, most of the time, do not experience that. Instead, for many, prayer often feels like speaking into a room that fails to answer.
Now, while I am challenging this phrase, I do actually think that there is a positive way for it to be used as a directive for the Christian’s prayer life. Namely, it may help some Christians realize that God does not need fancy words or special phrases to hear them.
However, I want to address a different struggle. It seems many face a battle with uncertainty that arises from not knowing what a real moment of prayer should feel like. Should I feel a warm presence if I am truly in communication with God? Should I be moved to tears? Should I feel like God is walking beside me everywhere I go? Should I feel like the weight I have given to God has been lifted from my shoulders? If I do not feel these things, am I doing something wrong?
I myself have faced these worries while growing in my own prayer life. For me, hearing the phrase “talk to God like a friend” just made these anxieties worse. When I tried to compare my experience of talking to God to the experience of talking with friends, I was always left feeling like an inevitable gap lay between myself and the God to whom I was speaking. No amount of spiritual yelling could stretch the distance to make it feel like God was really hearing me.
Through scripture, God makes it abundantly clear to us that he hears our prayers.
1 John 5:14-15 — “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.”
Matthew 7:7-8 — “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”
Psalm 34:17 — “The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles.”
Yet, no matter how hard I tried to put my faith in these promises, I was still left feeling the same distance. So what was my problem? It was through this struggle that I discovered that my worry was not due to unbelief nor to God’s absence. Rather, I discovered in me a false expectation of what the practice of faithful prayer actually feels like.
The Faulty Perception
The truth is, God is not physically in front of us the way a friend is. We do not see his facial expressions, hear a literal voice in return, or get to touch his hand. Paul shares this reality, stating,
“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12, ESV).
Now, while these things may be true, it does not mean we cannot have a real and emotional relationship with God. Rather, we must realize that, though it may not be face to face, God still calls us to relate to him in a different, yet more beautiful way than any other relationship imaginable.
God’s Divine Relation to Us
Another phrase that shapes how we think about prayer reveals a similar problem. It has been commonly utilized to discuss our prayer lives, stating, “Bring God into it.” But God is not a friend we pull into our picture. We do not inform him of anything he does not already know, like we would another human (Matthew 6:8). He is not an accomplace who we determine whether we want involved in our situation or not. No — scripture shows God to be infinitely more than this phrase allows.
God is the source of all things. Every moment of our lives, every choice that we make, and every thought that we have exist through God’s power. We do not invite God into our lives. We live by his power. Paul gives one of the most beautiful reminders of this truth to the Greeks in Athens, stating,
The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything…having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place…Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:24-28).
God does not wait for us to invite him into the picture to start working. He is the one working to bring us to him before we ever think to move toward him (John 6:44).
Acknowledging God
So, what does this mean for our prayer lives? Rather than the weight being put on us to make contact with God, our pursuit in prayer should be to acknowledge him. Not the kind of acknowledging that we do when we give a head nod to the person whose name you should remember from high school, but forgot. But the kind of acknowledging that scripture calls us to.
Proverbs 3:5-6 —“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”
The practice of acknowledging God is to reorient the whole self toward what one knows to be true: who God is, what he has done, and what his will is for man. God’s desire is not that you perform emotional closeness, but that you stop living as though he were absent or irrelevant. God calls for our actual faithful orientation (the direction our life faces) to bend consistently toward him. Everything we do should be in reference to him and, therefore, for his glory.
When this calling meets our experience of communion with God, it changes the way we approach prayer entirely. God does not become more real when we pray. Rather, we become more aligned with what we already know to be true. So, instead of approaching prayer as the initiation of a conversation, we approach it as an orientation of our attention toward God. God is always present and does not wait for us to initiate our contact with him. Thus, our prayer becomes a God-given opportunity to acknowledge our Lord and his greatness.
Jesus’ Model
If we observe the Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6:7-13, we see this posture modeled most clearly in the way Jesus himself prayed.
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” Jesus acknowledges God’s sovereignty and holiness. God is not made holy by Jesus’ statements. Rather, the prayer acts as an opportunity to acknowledge God and who he is.
“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Will God’s will be done regardless of us asking for him to bring it about? Of course! So why does Jesus call us to pray for it? Because Jesus wants us to acknowledge God’s eternal will and find ourselves in agreement with it.
“Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we have forgiven our debtors.” I would be lying if I said I prayed that God would give me something to eat every day. Yet, it still happens. God gives me even what I forget to ask for. So why ask God for this? When we pray and ask God for these things, we acknowledge God as the one who gives us all that we have.
“Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one.” James 1:13 tells us that God cannot tempt anyone. Yet, Christ still prays that he does not. Jesus does not pray this as a failure to know who God is. Instead, Christ teaches us to acknowledge that God is all-powerful and is sovereign over all. Through prayer, we acknowledge God’s provision in working through us to defeat sin (Romans 8:13).
Why Pray?
Now the question becomes: if we are simply acknowledging who God is and what he’s done by our prayer, why pray? Why address our prayers to a person, and not just say the right things about God in our minds?
The answer is found in understanding who God really is. God is not an object that we admire impersonally. He is a personal being. To treat a personal being as an object is to objectify and diminish what is truly present. Acknowledgment without address is theology without the relationship.
David makes this unmistakably clear by the way he prays in the Psalms.
Psalm 10:1 — “Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?”
Psalm 25:4–5 — “Show me your ways, Lord, teach me your paths. Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.”
Psalm 57:1 — “Have mercy on me, my God, have mercy on me, for in you I take refuge. I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed.”
Psalm 9:1–2 — “I will give thanks to you, Lord, with all my heart; I will tell of all your wonderful deeds. I will be glad and rejoice in you; I will sing the praises of your name, O Most High.”
So, when we reframe prayer as acknowledgment, we are not reducing it to silent contemplation or thought about God. We are reshaping what we expect it to feel like. Acknowledging God in prayer changes our expectation, not our form. We still speak to the true and personal God! Yet, we are free to stop expecting it to feel like talking to a human. Instead, we experience an even greater feeling: orienting our whole being to the truest reality of life.
Conclusion
Scripture never promises that prayer will feel like sitting across from a friend at a table. Instead, it promises something far more stable: that God hears us, that God is always present, and that in him we live and move and have our being. To acknowledge God through prayer is to pause and allow our minds to reorient toward the God who sustains us. When we do, we will find ourselves all the more glad in a God who has given us the ability to commune with him before we meet him face-to-face.