Love Quote by Jonathan Edwards

Edwards is trying to make prayer feel less like a religious task and more like a psychological inevitability. If God is not an abstract force but an "intelligent, willing being", then relating to Him isn’t metaphorical; it’s social. Friendship, in Edwards’s logic, naturally produces conversation. Prayer becomes the behavioral proof that belief has actually landed in the bloodstream, not just in the intellect.

The phrase "properly" is doing quiet but aggressive work. Edwards isn’t merely describing God; he’s policing the boundaries of acceptable belief. A God who can’t will, choose, respond, or be addressed isn’t just theologically wrong for him, but devotionally sterile. That’s the subtext: get God’s nature wrong and your religious life will dry up into performance or philosophy. Get it right and desire becomes automatic.

Context matters. Edwards is a central voice of the First Great Awakening, a movement obsessed with distinguishing genuine conversion from polite churchgoing. He’s wary of rote prayer that signals social respectability rather than inner transformation. So he reframes prayer as the outward motion of inward "sincere friendship" - not a sacramental checkbox, but an inclination, a tilt of the heart.

Even in the truncated ending ("our infinitely glorious"), you can feel his signature move: desire is the engine. Edwards doesn’t argue people into prayer; he tries to rewire what they want. The real claim is pastoral and diagnostic: if you don’t pray, it’s not a scheduling problem. It’s a relationship problem.