Meditations on Communing with God: Developing A Healthy Prayer Life, a review. The book is published by Reformation Heritage books and written by James W. Beeke and Joel R. Beeke (99 pages).
This book was one of those impulse buys. I saw it on the shelf, thumbed through it, bought it, and put in on my book shelf without reading it immediately. It has happened before where I buy a book which looks interesting, but don’t get to it for a long time. In fact in once case, it was years!
One reason I wasn’t in a hurry to read it right away is because I have several good books on prayer. Spurgeon’s book on prayer and spiritual warfare is an example. Another great book I haven’t reviews yet is Taking Hold of God: Reformed and Puritan Perspectives on Prayer by Joel Beeke and Brian Najapfour.
What makes “Developing A Healthy Prayer Life” important is that it will help the reader to prepare, understand and derive benefits from “more advanced” books on prayer. What this book does is bring the Christian to the basics of prayer, its fundamentals and its reasons. I used quotation marked for the term “more advanced.” But this is somewhat of a paradox because the book – though short and covering 31 brief meditations – is actually “advanced” in its own right.
The way I’m trying to think of this book is to compare it to an essential training manual. Think about the martial arts or bodybuilding. When starting a martial arts course one is put through an often tedious yet essential practice of forms in order to build a solid foundation. Likewise, before one can properly build muscle on a body, one has to learn the basics of how to perform certain exercises, and when to do them.
This is what this book does for the prayer life.
While this small book contains 31 brief meditations, it would be a mistake to read it daily by rote and then put it away – trust me! It is deceptively brief but it is very deep. My copy has lots of sticky and pencil notes, and underlining. I sometimes spend more than one or two days on a section, and I plan keeping it by my side indefinitely.
What the church at large and individual Christians desperately need today is a powerful prayer life. Spurgeon once told his congregation that if it stopped praying for him he would be forced to resign. This little book is essential reading for anyone wanting to cultivate a powerful prayer life, and to effectively participate in the spiritual warfare the church constantly faces.
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Developing a Healthy Prayer Life
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