Prayer

by Philip Yancey

Is this how prayer works? I wondered as I walked back to the hotel. We send signals from a visible world to an invisible one, in hope that Someone receives them. And how will we know?

Even atheists find ways to pray. During the heady days of Communism in Russia, party stalwarts kept a “ red corner,” placing a portrait of Lenin where Christians used to keep their icons.

Nuns in an order known as “The Sleepless Ones” still pray in shifts through every hour of the day and night.

In the next step I interviewed ordinary people about prayer. Typically, the results went like this: Is prayer important to you? Oh, yes. How often do you pray? Every day. Approximately how long? Five minutes — well, maybe seven. Do you find prayer satisfying? Not really. Do you sense the presence of God when you pray? Occasionally, not often. Many of those I talked to experienced prayer more as a burden than as a pleasure. They regarded it as important, even paramount, and felt guilty about their failure, blaming themselves.

Everywhere, I encountered the gap between prayer in theory and prayer in practice. In theory prayer is the essential human act, a priceless point of contact with the God of the universe. In practice prayer is often confusing and fraught with frustration.

Prosperity may dilute prayer too. In my travels I have noticed that Christians in developing countries spend less time pondering the effectiveness of prayer and more time actually praying. The wealthy rely on talent and resources to solve immediate problems, and insurance policies and retirement plans to secure the future. We can hardly pray with sincerity, “Give us this day our daily bread” when the pantry is stocked with a month’s supply of provisions.

life with God should seem more like friendship than duty. Prayer includes moments of ecstasy and also dullness, mindless distraction and acute concentration, flashes of joy and bouts of irritation. In other words, prayer has features in common with all relationships that matter.

Like a flash of lightning, prayer exposes for a nanosecond what I would prefer to ignore: my own true state of fragile dependence. The undone tasks accumulating at home, my family and every other relation, temptations, health, plans for the future — all these I bring into that larger reality, God’s sphere, where I find them curiously upended.

There was a time, Genesis informs us, when God and Adam walked together in the garden and conversed as friends. Nothing seemed more natural for Adam than to commune with the One who had made him, who gave him creative work, who granted his desire for a companion with the lovely gift of Eve. Then, prayer was as natural as conversation with a colleague, or a lover. At the moment of the fall, for Adam and for all who succeeded him, God’s presence grew more remote, easier to doubt and even deny.

For most of us, much of the time, prayer brings no certain confirmation we have been heard. We pray in faith that our words somehow cross a bridge between visible and invisible worlds, penetrating a reality of which we have no proof. We enter God’s milieu, the realm of spirit, which seems much less real to us than it did to Adam.

I need the corrective vision of prayer because all day long I will lose sight of God’s perspective.

Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.

I 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.

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.

We all bear secrets. Those of us fortunate enough to have a spouse, a friend, or someone we can trust, have someone to share our secrets with. If not, at least we have God, who knows our secrets before we spill them. The fact that we’re still alive shows that God has more tolerance for whatever those secrets represent than we may give God credit for.

In a world that glorifies success, an admission of weakness disarms pride at the same time that it prepares us to receive grace. Meanwhile, the very weakness that drives us to pray becomes an invitation for God to respond with compassion and power. The Lord upholds all those who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down. In the presence of the Great Physician, my most appropriate contribution may be my wounds.

in the presence of God I gain a glimpse of my true state in the universe, which exposes my smallness at the same time it reveals God’s greatness.

“We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us,” wrote C. S. Lewis. To put it another way, we must trust God with what God already knows.

I spend time with my closest friends not because of what they can do for me but for the pleasure of their company. How can I do that with God?

We who barely comprehend ourselves are approaching a God we cannot possibly comprehend. No wonder some Christians through the centuries have felt more comfortable praying to saints or relying on intermediaries.

A God unbound by our rules of time has the ability to invest in every person on earth. God has, quite literally, all the time in the world for each one of us.

When I wonder why God doesn’t simply “show up,” I recall that when God did, especially in Old Testament days, the appearance hardly enhanced communication: usually the person fell to the ground, flattened by blinding light.

Hillesum concluded, “For once you have begun to walk with God, you need only keep on walking with God and all of life becomes one long stroll — a marvelous feeling.” I read her words of defiant faith and wonder what I might have written in my private journal as I breathed in ashes from the ovens each day, burnt offerings of a race “chosen” by Hitler. Yes, walking with God makes life one long stroll — but for how many, and how often, is it a marvelous feeling?

In a telling comment Jesus also said, “ Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” 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. Prayer is not a matter of giving God new information.

The psalms express all levels of friendship with God, One who is in some ways like us and in some ways not. They include trivia as well as profundity, outrage as well as praise. Apparently God is the kind of friend who rewards honesty, for why else would the Bible include the more plaintive psalms?

As every follower of Jesus learns, however, prayer does not come as naturally to the rest of us as it did to the original prayer revolutionary. I find prayer hard work, not the rejuvenating refuge it meant to Jesus. I struggle to see prayer as a dialogue, not a monologue. How can I commune with a God who tends not to use audible words in response? When I review the day with my wife on the telephone, she responds with laughter and empathy. God does not, at least not in any measurable way.

by inviting us to do kingdom work on earth, God has indeed set up a kind of odd-couple alliance. God delegates work to human beings so that we do history together, so to speak.

We know well what happens when human beings form such unequal alliances: the dominant partner throws weight around and the subordinate mostly keeps quiet. God, who has no reason to be threatened by the likes of us, instead invites a steady and honest flow of communication.

From the Bible’s prayers I learn that God wants us to keep it in the alliance, to come in person with our complaints. If I march through life pretending to smile while inside I bleed, I dishonor the relationship.

A woman, age forty-one, wrote first about her conversion as a Jewish believer in Jesus, and then of a daunting trial, breast cancer that had spread to lungs and liver. Sometimes she would pull away from God completely, but then “after sulking in silence for a period of days or weeks, I would come back to God slowly and reluctantly, a pout still on my face, but recognizing that I didn’t know how to live apart from God.”

When alone, Jesus relied on prayer as a kind of spiritual recharging. After an exhausting day of ministry — recruiting disciples, preaching to crowds, healing the sick — he would withdraw to an isolated place to pray. The tempter had used the lure of popularity and acclaim to test him in the wilderness, and perhaps Jesus needed to escape the clamor in order to firm up his resistance and renew his sense of mission.

When doubts creep in and I wonder whether prayer is a sanctified form of talking to myself, I remind myself that the Son of God, who had spoken worlds into being and sustains all that exists, felt a compelling need to pray. He prayed as if it made a difference, as if the time he devoted to prayer mattered every bit as much as the time he devoted to caring for people.

To discount prayer, to conclude that it does not matter, means to view Jesus as deluded.

When I get letters from people with intractable problems, I tell them I cannot answer the “Why?” questions. I can, though, answer another question, and that is how God feels about their plight. We know how God feels, because Jesus gave us a face, one sometimes streaked with tears.

Jesus clung to prayer as to a lifeline, for it gave him both the guidance and the energy to know and do the Father’s will.

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. One realized his error and hung himself. The other realized his error, repented, and became a pillar of the church.

I believe in miracles, but I also believe they are miracles, meaning rare exceptions to the normal laws that govern the planet. I cannot, nor can anyone, promise that prayer will solve all problems and eliminate all suffering. At the same time, I also know that Jesus commanded his followers to pray, certain that it makes a difference in a world full of opposition to God’s will.

Jesus’ prayer for Peter shows the same pattern in sharp relief. Satan partially got his way with Peter, sifting him like wheat. But in answer to Jesus’ prayer, the sifting rid Peter of his least attractive qualities: blustery self-confidence, a chip on his shoulder, a propensity to violence. The Gospels show Peter urging Jesus to avoid the cross, cowering in the darkness the night of Jesus’ trial, and denying with an oath that he knows him. In the book of 1 Peter a transformed apostle uses words like humble and submit, and welcomes suffering as a badge of honor.

When I betray the love and grace God has shown me, I fall back on the promise that Jesus prays for me — as he did for Peter — not that I would never face testing, nor ever fail, but that in the end I will allow God to use the testing and failure to mold me into someone more useful to the kingdom, someone more like Jesus.

Abraham quit asking before God quit granting. What if Abraham had bargained even harder and asked that the cities be spared for the sake of one righteous person, his nephew Lot? Was God, so quick to concede each point, actually looking for an advocate, a human being bold enough to express God’s own deepest instinct of mercy?

not that God needed to be talked down, but that his intentions were the same from the beginning, and he knew that Abraham would join in the duel—and by this conversation with God, Abraham would become more like him (which may have always been the point).

God is more merciful than we can imagine and welcomes appeals to that mercy.

Moses has spent half his life learning leadership skills from the ruling empire of the day and half his life learning wilderness survival skills while fleeing a murder rap. Who better to lead a tribe of freed slaves through the wilderness to the Promised Land?

virtually everyone God picked to lead a new venture — Adam, Abraham, Moses, David — proved disappointing in part. Apparently God committed to work with human partners no matter how inept.

In search of a pattern I studied every miracle reported in the Bible, every appearance by God, every word that God spoke. I concluded that much of our current disappointment comes from an expectation that God will act in the same spectacular ways today. We too want to hear God’s voice from a bush ablaze, to have our diseases healed and our relatives resurrected. We read the rousing stories from the Bible, hear stirring sermons about them, pray in faith — and don’t get the same results.

Although we may ask God to intervene directly, it should not surprise us if God responds in a more hidden way in cooperation with a person’s own choice. An alcoholic prays, “Lord, keep me from drink today.” The answer to that prayer will likely come from the inside, from a stiffening resolve or a cry of help to a loyal friend, rather than from some marvel like the magical disappearance of liquor bottles from a cabinet.

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.

Nowadays health clubs offer courses in “meditation,” which tend to emphasize relaxation and self-improvement. We risk losing the true meaning of meditation, which puts the emphasis not on me the prayer but on God the object of my prayers. If I seek God more than anything else, I will eventually seek more of what God wants for me, and be content with that.

God has ordained prayer as a means of getting God’s will done on earth, not ours. Yes, God hears and responds to my requests. Yes, God somehow incorporates those requests into a plan of action on earth. But as many martyrs have learned, including God’s own Son as well as Christians in the persecuted church today, we do not always get what we earnestly desire.

Presumably God could have set up creation with very different rules. God could have decided to act with more frequent and spectacular interventions (although this approach did not seem to make much difference to the Israelites in the wilderness).

God asks me to make myself known to him in prayer and then works my prayers into a master plan for my life — a plan which I can only faintly grasp.