Daily Devotional By Desiringgod Ministry – John Piper Ministry  21 January  2025 | Topic: Desire Without Ceasing  

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Desire Without Ceasing

How Longing Fuels a Life of Prayer

This very desire is your prayer, and if your desire is continuous, your prayer is continuous too. The apostle meant what he said, Pray without ceasing.

—Augustine (Expositions on the Psalms 37.14)

Humans do very few things without ceasing. We are by nature limited beings. We cannot always be working or always talking or always feeling sad, mad, or glad. We start and stop. We begin and end. Yet there are some things we do without ceasing; we breathe without ceasing or we cease to be. Can one of those things we do without ceasing be prayer?

Paul’s exhortation to the Thessalonian church to “pray without ceasing” seems impossible (1 Thessalonians 5:17). We balk at the command because we cannot imagine what it would mean to obey it. Yet there it is in black and white on the page: “pray without ceasing.”

Perhaps, though, Paul’s command is just a manner of speaking and not something we should take literally. Indeed, Scripture has many similar commands. Right in the previous verse, Paul says, “Rejoice always.” Or, in the Psalms, we find commands to “seek [God’s] presence continually” and to “bless the Lord at all times” (Psalm 34:1; 105:4). What should finite humans do with such absolute commands?

One early church pastor, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), offers an answer by linking prayer and desire closely together, both exegetically in his preaching and letters and by example in his own book Confessions.

Prayer and Desire

To understand prayer, according to Augustine, we must understand what it means to long for God. Too often, we think of prayer as only the head-bowed, hands-folded moment of intentional praise or petition. Imagining prayer this way can blind us to the essence of prayer, which is our desire for God. “This very desire is your prayer,” Augustine declares in one sermon (En. Ps. 37.14). A longing for God is the subterranean river beneath every genuine prayer for any good gift. We should not, though, collapse desire and prayer into one. Rather, prayer and desire are linked like body and soul. Our desire for God gives life to our prayer. And intentional prayer shapes and strengthens our desire for God.

Augustine distinguishes between the broadest sense of prayer as a continuous desire for God and a narrow sense of prayer as intentional acts of communicating with God. As Augustine writes in one letter, “We always pray with a continuous desire filled with faith, hope, and love. But at certain hours and moments we also pray to God in words” (Letter 130.9.18). The broad sense of desire for God must motivate our intentional prayers lest they become mere ritual or mindless babbling (Matthew 6:7). Genuine prayer begins in and is sustained by desire for God. And when we cease to desire God, then we cease to truly pray.

Lest our desire for God fade, though, we need the narrow sense of prayer. Intentional prayer itself activates and strengthens our desire for God. We do not praise God in prayer to fulfill a need in God to be praised. Nor do we petition God in prayer to inform him of something he does not already know. We praise and petition him to exercise our desire for God (Letter 130.8.17). For without intentional prayer to activate and strengthen our desire for God, the desire would atrophy.

Prayer, then, both enacts and exercises our desire for God. But what then does it mean to “pray without ceasing”? Augustine suggests that “if your desire is continuous, your prayer is continuous too” (En. Ps. 37.14). Ceaseless prayer is a continuous desire for God.

Insatiable Desire for God

Augustine illustrates a life full of longing for God in the three-hundred-page prayer known as his Confessions. He begins by pleading with God, “Let me seek Thee, Lord, by praying Thy aid, and let me utter my prayer believing in Thee” (1.1.1). Throughout his Confessions, he praises and confesses to God, he wrestles and pleads with God, he declares his wonder and love for God. Woven into every part of his prayer is one sustaining desire to really come to see God as he is: “Let me see Thy face even if I die, lest I die with longing to see it” (1.5.5). Augustine says we must learn our longing from the psalmist: “One thing I have asked of the Lord; this I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, that I may contemplate the delight of the Lord” (Psalm 27:4; Letter 130.8.15).

But can we feel such a longing for God all the time? Augustine’s Confessions illustrates the variety of forms such longing takes, and in one letter on prayer, he explains that we can describe this desire in several ways. Our longing for God can be described as a longing to be happy. Like pulling open an accordion, Augustine expands our sense of a continuous desire for God by describing it as longing for the happy life, the eternal life found only in God. “Desire without ceasing the happy life, which is none but eternal life,” Augustine exhorts in his letter to Proba (Letter 130.9.18). Our desire to be happy is fulfilled not by anything this world offers but ultimately by God himself. Rightly ordered desires make a life of ceaseless prayer possible.

“A longing for God is the subterranean river beneath every genuine prayer for any good gift.”

Living a life oriented toward God — a Godward life — makes it possible to pray without ceasing. Praying without ceasing occurs in a Godward life insofar as we set our minds on the things that are above (Colossians 3:2). In this life, we receive every good gift with thanksgiving to God (1 Thessalonians 5:18). We also rejoice in every trial because we know it is producing the kind of faith that enables us to see our great God with greater clarity and desire him with deeper longing (James 1:2–4). Such a life led by a continuous desire for God, though, does not happen automatically.

Tending the Fire

Desire, like fire, must be tended. We need intentional prayer to sustain a continual desire for God. Augustine loves the metaphor of fire to describe desire, and as he explores how we kindle desire, he emphasizes the importance of the form and frequency of intentional prayer. We need frequent intentional prayer to fan the flame of our desire for God.

Pausing to pray at “certain hours and moments” works to “call the mind back to the task of praying from other cares and concerns” (Letter 130.9.18). Stoke the fire in the morning, at meals, and before bed (and in other moments too) so that you have an ever-growing desire for God. The disciples witnessed such a regular pursuit of God by Jesus in prayer and asked him how they should pray (Luke 11:1–4).

The form of the Lord’s Prayer provides a pattern for all our prayers. Augustine says, “If you run through all the words of holy petitions, you will not find, in my opinion, anything that this prayer of our Lord does not contain and include” (Letter 130.12.22). Each part of the Lord’s Prayer forms our desire for God, and following this pattern filters out worthless desires.

Tending to the fire of our love for God with intentional prayer reorders our affections Godward so that we can rightly align any good desire toward happiness in God. Regular prayer, according to the pattern our Lord taught us, orders our loves for all the gifts of earth by increasing our desire for God. We all naturally long for the happy life, and prayer reminds us that we find happiness in God.

Longing for Home

Ceaseless prayer is like longing for home on the journey back. You’re never quite at rest until you reach home. Even though you may be refreshed along the way, you’re never quite satisfied with any good thing because home is where your heart longs to be. Many other desires crop up along the way, but your chief desire — your one motivating, driving desire — is to be back home. So Augustine calls his congregation to lift up their eyes toward their heavenly home to remember what they seek:

Contemplating God’s glory and seeing him face to face we shall be enabled to praise him forever, without wearying, without any of the pain of iniquity, without any of the perversion of sin. So shall we praise God, no longer sighing for him but united with him for whom we have sighed even to the end, albeit joyful in our hope. For we shall be in that city where God is our good, God is our light, God is our bread, God is our life. Whatever is good for us, whatever we miss as we trudge along our pilgrim way, we shall find in him. (En. Ps. 37:28)

For Christians, our one desire is to be with God forever. With him is eternal life (John 17:3). At his right hand are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11). So when you read Paul’s exhortation to pray without ceasing, welcome it as an invitation to cultivate an unending, ever-growing longing for God. Tend to the fire of your love for God with frequent times of prayer shaped by the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer. In this way, live a life of prayer — a Godward life. And, as you journey, take regular glances upward with longing for the home just over the horizon.

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