Prayer

by Philip Yancey

prayer has features in common with all relationships that matter.

Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn’t act the way we want God to, and why I don’t act the way God wants me to. Prayer is the precise point where those themes converge.

“Be still and know that I am God”: the Latin imperative for “be still” is vacate.

“God is inviting us to take a break, to play truant. We can stop doing all those important things we have to do in our capacity as God, and leave it to him to be God.” Prayer allows me to admit my failures, weaknesses, and limitations to One who responds to human vulnerability with infinite mercy.

In receiving a free gift, having open hands is the only requirement.

begin with confession not in order to feel miserable, rather to call to mind a reality I often ignore. When I acknowledge where I stand before a perfect God, it restores the true state of the universe. Confession simply establishes the proper ground rules of creatures relating to their creator.

Besides being good theology, confession makes for good psychology.

The link is excellent! It describes the therapeutic value of the questions God asked Adam and Eve.

minor. In relationships, as in the physical body, a thorn close to the surface may work itself out, but an internal infection buried deep and disregarded will threaten health and even life.

God already knows who we are; we are the ones who must find a way to come to terms with our true selves. Psalm 139 cries out, “Search me, O God…. See if there is any offensive way in me.” In order to overcome self-deception, I need God’s all-knowing help in rooting out hidden offenses like selfishness, pride, deceit, lack of compassion.

Whenever I get depressed by a lack of spiritual progress, I realize that my very dismay is a sign of progress. I have the sense of slipping further from God mainly because I have a clearer idea of what God desires and how far short I fall.

His instructions have puzzled some commentators, who note that the one-room houses of Jesus’ day, probably including his own, had no closets. Jesus must have been using a figure of speech, suggesting that we construct an imaginary room, a sanctuary of the soul, that fosters complete honesty before God. Though I need not find a literal closet, somehow I must ensure that my prayers are heartfelt and not a performance.

My friends in AA tell us we’re as sick as our secrets.

I challenge skeptics to find a single argument used against God by the great agnostics — Voltaire, David Hume, Bertrand Russell — that is not already included in such biblical books as Habakkuk, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and, yes, Job. These strong passages from the Bible express the anguish of dislocation: of hurt and betrayal, of life that doesn’t make sense, of God who seems not to care or even exist. Most important, these accusations contained in the Bible itself are framed as prayers.

In truth, what I think and feel as I pray, rather than the words I speak, may be the real prayer, for God “hears” that too. My every thought occurs in God’s presence. (Psalm 139:4, 7 – 8: “Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord…. Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.”)

We humans represent the only species on earth with whom God can hold a conversation.

Maybe not. When God made the Noahic covenant, he included the animals. They may not have human language but I believe that they communicate with God.

Foolishly, I hide myself in fear that God will be displeased, though in fact the hiding may be what displeases God most. From my side, the wall seems like self-protection; from God’s side it looks like lack of trust. In either case, the wall will keep us apart until I acknowledge my need and God’s surpassing desire to meet it. When I finally approach God, in fear and trembling, I find not a tyrant but a lover.

am overwhelmed by the vastness of God, the imbalance of any crea-ture’s relationship to such a being. “Since it is God we are speaking of, you do not understand it. If you could understand it, it would not be God,” said Saint Augustine

The common question, “How can God listen to millions of prayer at once?” betrays an inability to think outside time.

“I hope your stay is a blessed one,” said the monk who showed the visitor to his cell. “If you need anything, let us know and we’ll teach you how to live without it.”

He could not mean that prayer is unnecessary, for his own life belied that. He could only mean that we need not strive to convince God to care; the Father already cares, more than we can know.

In other words, we don't have to pester God with our requests - He already knows them. We can move on to the priority of getting to know God.

Prayer is not a matter of giving God new information. Instead of presenting requests as if God may not know them, it might be more appropriate to say, “God, you know I need this!”

Here, I believe, is the key to understanding what is most personal in prayer. We do not pray to tell God what he does not know, nor to remind him of things he has forgotten. He already cares for the things we pray about…. He has simply been waiting for us to care about them with him. When we pray, we stand by God and look with him toward those people and problems. When we lift our eyes from them toward him, we do so with loving praise, just as we look toward our oldest and dearest friends and tell them how we care for them, though they already know it…. We speak to him as we speak to our most intimate friends — so that we can commune together in love.

Friendship with God encompasses each of these levels of communication. God cares about the ordinary and everyday as well as the peak experiences. I bring to God my failures and sins (confession, repentance) as well as my triumphs and joys (praise, thanksgiving). I bring to God my worries and concerns (petition, intercession). The very attempt to hide something from God is folly, for God knows all of who I am: the hon ne as well as the tatemae, the genetics as well as the environment, the thoughts and motives as well as the actions. I can sit silent before God, and still we can communicate — sometimes even better.

I’m trying to pray less “parentally,” in other words, telling God what to do. Rather, I try to look behind the symptom of rebellion or risky behavior and ask God to help my children find better ways of finding meaning and of handling the stress in their lives.

Apparently God is the kind of friend who rewards honesty, for why else would the Bible include the more plaintive psalms?

We are completely known to God, said C. S. Lewis — known like earthworms, cabbages, and nebulae, as objects of divine knowledge. “That is our destiny whether we like it or not. But though this knowledge never varies, the quality of our being known can.”

Walter Brueggemann suggests one obvious reason for candor in the book of Psalms: “because life is like that, and these poems are intended to speak to all of life, not just part of it.”

Psalms includes passages that are angry, whiny, petty, remorseful, explosive, loud, irreverent, and oh so human. They read like uninhibited private memos to the major partner. (The prophets give God’s side of the equation.)

“Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and unpredictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives.”

Eventually, however, eleven of the twelve underwent a slow but steady transformation, providing a kind of long-term answer to Jesus’ original prayer. John, a Son of Thunder, softened into “the apostle of Love.” Simon Peter, who earned Jesus’ rebuke by recoiling from the idea of Messiah suffering, later showed how to “follow in his steps” by suffering as Christ did. The one exception, Judas, betrayed Jesus and yet that very act led to the cross and the salvation of the world.

Interesting observation about Judas. A more modern example is the atrocities of Hitler led to the (re)formation of the state of Israel.

Especially when trouble strikes, we want God to intervene more decisively, but Jesus’ prayers underscore God’s style of restraint out of respect for human freedom. Often God rules by overruling.

Judas and Peter both got caught up in a drama of spiritual warfare that they could neither recognize nor fathom. Satan directly pursued both disciples, yet each bore a measure of personal responsibility, for Satan conquers no one without cooperation. Both men miserably failed their test of faith, betraying a master they had followed for three years. Nonetheless, even after their failure both faced the possibility of redemption.

In every way evil possession transforms the boy into a caricature of a human being, forcibly overwhelming human freedom. Contrast that scene with possession by the Holy Spirit. Paul warns, “Quench not the Spirit” and “grieve not the holy Spirit of God.” The Lord of the universe becomes so small, so freedom-respecting as to put himself somehow at our mercy. Words fail to capture the enormity of descent when a sovereign God takes up residence in a person and says, in effect, “Don’t hurt me. Don’t push me away.”

Jesus’ prayers for Peter — and perhaps for Judas as well — express God’s unfathomable respect for human freedom. Even when he senses his close friend will betray him, Jesus does not intervene with a freedom-crushing miracle. He allows history to take its course, at enormous personal cost, praying all the while that even betrayal and death may be redeemed as part of the outworking of the grace of God. For Peter’s sake, for Judas’s, and for the world’s, that prayer found an answer.

A Roman legion comprised 6,000 soldiers, which means Jesus chose not to pray for 72,000 celestial reinforcements at the moment of his arrest!

For most of us prayer serves as a resource to help in a time of testing or conflict. For Jesus, it was the battle itself. Once the Gethsemane prayers had aligned him with the Father’s will, what happened next was merely the means to fulfill it. Prayer mattered that much. In the words of Haddon Robinson,

God invites argument and struggle, and often yields, especially when the point of contention is God’s mercy. In the very process of arguing, we may in fact take on God’s own qualities. “Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance,” writes Archbishop Trench; “it is laying hold of his highest willingness.”

Instead of wrenching his neck with another touch, the figure tenderly bestows on Jacob a new name, Israel, which means “God-wrestler.” At last Jacob learns the identity of his opponent.

Hmm, I never thought of that! It's so obvious too.

The first stage is a simple childlike request for something I desire.

The second stage of prayer (and again, I do not use the word stage to imply a higher value) involves a kind of meditation, what I have called keeping company with God.

Jesus prayed “Your will be done” at the end of his struggle with God in Gethsemane, as a resolution to all that had gone before, including a clear request for another way out. I have become convinced that the phrase “Your will be done” belongs at the end of my prayers, not at the beginning. If I begin with that qualifier I am tempted to edit my prayers, to suppress my desires, to resign myself to whatever happens. I thus cut short what God wants from me: that I make known my requests, and in so doing make known my self.

the third stage of prayer, the stage of submission

Now that we are free, we are in danger of growing complacent, of not treasuring the freedom to worship. In fact, Christians in parts of the former Soviet Union have actually voted for the Communists to return to power because the church was so much more pure in those days. It seems we handle persecution better than prosperity. I, for one, pray we never have to return to those days. I pray that we will learn to praise God for what we have, rather than have to plead for it.

For activists on the front lines, prayer serves as part oasis and part emergency room.

“If you ask why he ever answers prayer at all, the answer must be, Because he is unchangeable.” To give an example, a God bound by unchanging qualities of love and mercy must forgive a sinner who prays repentantly. God changes course in response to the sinner’s change in course, and does so because of those eternal qualities.

Since God’s nature is love, he says, God must be impressionable and sympathetic: “Because God’s love never changes, God’s experience must change.” Pinnock contrasts two models of God’s sovereignty. We can picture God as an aloof monarch, removed from the details of the world. Or we can picture God as a caring parent with traits of love, generosity, and sensitivity — an infinite Being who personally interacts with and responds to creation. Accordingly, God considers prayers much as a wise parent might consider requests from a child.

Lewis sums up the drama of human history as one “in which the scene and the general outline of the story is fixed by the author, but certain minor details are left for the actors to improvise. It may be a mystery why He should have allowed us to cause real events at all; but it is no odder that He should allow us to cause them by praying than by any other method.”

Luke positions this story right after Jesus’ teaching on the Lord’s Prayer, drawing a sharp contrast between the reluctant neighbor and God the Father. If a cranky neighbor who has turned in for the night, who wishes more than anything you would go away, who does his best to ignore you — if such a neighbor eventually rouses to give what you want, how much more will God respond to your bold persistence in prayer!

In persistent prayer, my own desires and plans gradually harmonize with God’s.

A person prays, said Augustine, “that he himself may be constructed, not that God may be instructed.”