# Does prayer include praise? -- WLC 178. What is prayer?



## MrTim (May 8, 2010)

I'm teaching a Sunday School class at my church on prayer. I've been spending a lot of time looking at the Westmisster Larger Catechism's teaching on prayer. One thing that has bothered me is that the question "What is prayer?" seem to ignore the praise of God as a part of prayer.


> Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God, in the name of Christ, by the help of his Spirit; with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies.



A few possibly solutions I've considered is that the WLC regards praise as a part of "thankful acknowledgment of his mercies." Alternatively, if you look at question 190 on the first petition of the Lord's prayer, it seems to regard praise as an aspect of offering our desires to God.


> ...we pray, that God would by his grace enable and incline us and others to know, to acknowledge, and highly to esteem him....



Anyone have any thoughts on this?


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## Scott1 (May 8, 2010)

Prayer is of several kinds- adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication. It is also related to meditation.

I think praise is really a subset of thanksgiving, rather than the reverse- and understood in that way, it is clearly biblical, and comports with the Standards' summary of it.


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## Contra_Mundum (May 8, 2010)

It seems to me that the notion "prayer" is being considered under its proper sense, unelaborated, which is a formal or informal *petitioning*.

Our modern conceptions of prayer have redefined it as "any kind of talking to God," but an original approach to the terminology would differentiate (in some sense) between "prayer" and "praise."

We extol God, to the extent we are able, and yet are not adding anything to the glory of God. We benefit more from the exercise than God does. Others benefit also, as we praise God to them and before them. Praise is what we owe to God, as well as that which comes spontaneously from the heart and mouth of one enraptured by God.

Are we really in need of being "taught" to praise? I think so (and the examples in Psalms serve, for instance), but not in the same way as the disciples were asking Jesus to teach them to pray. They wanted to know how to come to God (the august, the ineffable, but the one Jesus approached as "Father"). Could they come to him as "Father" also?

I think you have detected in 190 the _need_ we have of God to help us to have an improved attitude of esteem when we come. We should come in a praising, reverential, adoring manner. But I do not think that we are failures in prayer if in each time we come, we have not devoted sufficient "time" to the business of "praising" God. We more often come broken, sad, needy, like the little children we are. What if we simply do not "feel" like a song? Will God not hear us?

The Prayer opens with an understanding of Who God Is--Holy Father (see 189). To know him rightly is praise indeed.


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