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Christians who have no access to earthly power truly believe prayer gives them access to a greater power. They see prayer, in fact, as our strongest weapon against invisible forces. They believe the apostle Paul’s words: “ For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
The question that obsesses modern thinkers, “Why do bad things happen?” gets little systematic treatment in the Bible because Bible writers believed they knew why bad things happen: we live on a planet ruled by powers intent on blocking and perverting the will of God.
Prayer may seem at first like disengagement, a reflective time to consider God’s point of view. But that vantage presses us back to accomplish God’s will, the work of the kingdom. We are God’s fellow workers, and as such we turn to prayer to equip us for the partnership.
The skeptic, then, is objecting not merely to prayer but to the basic rules of creation. God created matter in such a way that we can manipulate it, by cutting down trees to build houses and damming rivers to form reservoirs. God granted such an expanse of human freedom that we can oppress each other, rebel against our Creator, even murder God’s own Son.
Confessing my sins before God communicates something God already knows. Yet somehow the act of confession binds the relationship and allows a closeness that could not otherwise exist. I make myself vulnerable and dependent, bringing God and me together. The same kind of intimacy happens when (all too rarely) I apologize to my wife for something we both know about. I do not bring her information, I bring her my heart, my humbled self.
I will always remember an alcoholic friend who expressed to me his frustration at praying daily for God to remove his desire for drink, only to find each morning his thoughts turning to Jack Daniel’s whiskey. Was God even listening? Later, it dawned on him that the desire for alcohol was the main reason he prayed so diligently. Persistent temptation had compelled persistent prayer.
The real value of persistent prayer is not so much that we get what we want as that we become the person we should be.
In prayer we present requests, sometimes repeatedly, and then put ourselves in a state to receive the result. We pray for what God wants to give us, which may turn out to be good gifts or it may be the Holy Spirit. (From God’s viewpoint there is no better response to persistent prayer than the gift of the Holy Spirit, God’s own self.)
At one of these services I heard my roommate tearfully confess a series of wild escapades that I knew he was embellishing. Like prisoners bragging about their crimes, young sinners gained inverted prestige through dramatic public repentance.
“after I got married, I was cheating all the time and having sex with porn stars,” said the young fool bragging about his surely exaggerated escapades… compounding lies upon adultery, sin upon sin, while God’s more witless children sat in rapt attention
Another friend of mine who knew I was investigating prayer wrote that in her experience few people find prayer fulfilling, easy, or rewarding. She added, I think prayer is analogous to sex. (People’s ears always perk up when I say that.) Most people would complain about their sex lives; a few do really well. Sex and prayer are intimate and over-glamorized relationships. We all are led to believe that we should be in the stratosphere in sex and in prayer. It sets up a false expectation. And breaks down intimacy.
As the book of Psalms demonstrates so well, prayer does not mean retreating away from life, but rather bringing the stuff of our world — the rhythms of nature, harassing problems, disturbed emotions, personality conflicts — before God, then asking for a new perspective and new energy to take back to that world.
Sometimes in the middle of a dense prose paragraph his thoughts will spontaneously lift into prayer. God is never far from Paul’s thoughts, and thanksgiving and praise come to mind whenever something good happens. He practices the presence of God by giving credit to God, not himself.
The writer Anne Lamott says her favorite prayers are “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” and “Help me, help me, help me.”
quoting her in any context other than “here’s an example of someone who you should never read or cite approvingly” is a red flag
I am convinced the main requirement in prayer is honesty, approaching God “just as we are.” Nonetheless, many prayers labor under a Luther-like pall of inferiority. We feel guilty, or unfocused, or irritable, and assume those negative feelings will disqualify us from God’s attention, as if God only listens to good people. Until we come to terms with an ornery classmate, we think — or straighten out a bad marriage, or stop yelling at the kids, or conquer the addiction that fetters us like a ball and chain — we don’t deserve to pray. Consequently we turn away from the only source of forgiveness
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Jesus taught a model prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, but otherwise gave few rules. His teaching reduces down to three general principles: Keep it honest, keep it simple, and keep it up.
I have known good years and bad years with prayer, seasons of contentment and gratitude and seasons of anguish and dereliction. I expected a straight-line vector of growth, something like the Wall Street charts of mutual funds that steadily gain in value every year. Instead, the line veers up and down erratically like that on a heart monitor. Only later, in retrospect, can I see that the darkest times solidified my faith and that somehow the words I wrote in those times God used to speak to others.
Religious radio and television, as well as certain books and magazines, say little of God’s silence. By their accounts God seems to speak volubly, commanding this minister to build a new sanctuary and that housewife to launch a new Web-based company. God represents success, good feelings, a sense of peace, a warm glow. To an audience regaled by such inspiring stories, an encounter with the silence of God hits like a shocking exception and stirs up feelings of inadequacy.
If I suffer a time of spiritual aridity, of darkness and blankness, should I stop praying until new life enters my prayer? Every one of the spiritual masters insists, No. If I stop praying, how will I know when prayer does become alive again? And, as many Christians have discovered, the habit of not praying is far more difficult to break than the habit of praying.
Sometimes I come to God out of sheer determination of will, which may seem inauthentic. When I do so, however, I need not put on a mask. God already knows the state of my soul. I am not telling God anything new, but I am bearing witness to my love for God by praying even when I don’t feel like it. I express my underlying faith simply by showing up. When I am tempted to complain about God’s lack of presence, I remind myself that God has much more reason to complain about my lack of presence. I reserve a few minutes a day for God, but how many times do I drown out or ignore the quiet voice that
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As the British convert Jonathan Aitken expresses it, “Trusting in God does not, except in illusory religion, mean that he will ensure that none of the things you are afraid of will ever happen to you. On the contrary, it means that whatever you fear is quite likely to happen, but that with God’s help it will in the end turn out to be nothing to be afraid of.”
God flatly declares that, in addition to our private spiritual state, our social concern (or lack of it) — for the poor, for orphans and widows — also has a direct bearing on how our prayers are received. Other prophets, such as Malachi, get even more specific. Those who pay exploitative wages, who break marriage vows through adultery and divorce, who treat illegal immigrants badly, who refuse to share food with the hungry or provide shelter to the homeless, risk closing God’s ears to their prayers. As a twenty-first century American, those warnings cut me to the quick.
and how easily God’s command to defend ‘the fatherless and the widow’ is transformed into platitudes about homelessness, illegal immigrants, and exploitative employers—God is center left, just like me! therefore my liberal guilt isn’t just justifiable, it’s holy!
God also buried his Son on the mission field.”
These represent just a sampling of the New Testament’s sweeping claims made in plain language. Some preachers seize on these passages as a kind of club, flogging the church for not taking them literally and faulting believers for having too little faith.
and in so doing, become the caricature of the “Old Testament God” the world foolishly draws. God is angry with you because you aren’t good enough, and you need to keep trying and trying if you want even a chance to please him, and he’s so capricious that even that will not work.
historians tell of the martyrdom of ten of the disciples. Surely the prayer “let this cup pass” must have run through their minds at some point.)
The same Jesus who spoke of faith as a mustard seed also gave us the story about a widow wearing down a judge with her persistence. And all through the Bible spiritual giants wrestle with God in their prayers.
The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” With all the time in the world, God waits, tolerating the insults of human history out of mercy, not impotence.
How must Mary have looked back on her great prayer, the Magnificat, as she saw Jesus crucified by the very rulers she had hoped he would vanquish? And Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah, who had prophesied “ salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us” — what did he think as he watched his son John grow into an insect-eating dissident who got beheaded by one of those enemies? Both families prayed fervently, and neither got the answer they expected.
In answering prayers, God normally relies on human agents. On a visit to Holland I heard the story of strict Dutch Calvinist farmers who, during the devastating floods of the 1950s, climbed onto the roofs of their barns but refused to be rescued. “God’s will be done,” they said.
they are illustrating belief in fatalism, not divine sovereignty (and how blurry the lines get between the two with hardline Calvinists).
Those of us who struggle with unanswered prayer dare not overlook an important theological truth about how God acts in this world today. The church is the body of Christ, and as such it does God’s work.
To pray “God, please help my neighbor cope with her financial problems,” or “God, do something about the homeless downtown” is the approach of a theist, not a Christian. God has chosen to express love and grace in the world through those of us who embody Christ.
this is an interesting insight, with ethical implications and debates well worth considering and having.
I traveled to Nepal where I met with health workers from fifteen nations who serve under a mission specializing in leprosy work. Historically, most of the major advances in leprosy treatment have come from Christian missionaries — mainly because they were the only ones willing to treat the dreaded disease.
God, why don’t you do something about the homeless families in Roanoke … or the AIDS orphans in Johannesburg? Don’t they break your heart? Inevitably, there followed a prayer echoing the one prayed by Bob Pierce, founder of the global charity World Vision: “Lord, may my heart be broken by what breaks your heart.” Those who responded became the answers to their own prayers.
Children view God as a celestial version of Santa Claus who sits on a cloud considering requests and funneling answers like presents down a chimney. A better model might be the president of a large corporation who must occasionally step in to manage a crisis but prefers to delegate tasks to trusted managers and employees.
Paul is trying to make sense of history, a very personal history. Sometimes his passion interrupts: “Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved.” He plows over the same ground, looking for something he may have missed. And he concludes that God hasn’t rejected the Jews; to the contrary, they have the same opportunity as Gentiles. God has widened, not closed, the embrace of humanity.
“ For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” No human being, no matter how wise or how spiritual, can interpret the ways of God, explain why one miracle and not another, why an apparent intervention here and not there. Along with the apostle Paul, we can only wait, and trust.
More than half the spontaneous prayers I hear in church pertain to the sick. In the broader picture of prayer, that gives the same imbalance as a pastor preaching from the book of Job every Sunday. At the same time, it also shows how instinctively we turn to prayer when illness strikes.
Fifteen years later, the young man is still paralyzed. “Where was the answered prayer that I longed to share with my friends?” writes the mother. “Where was my Father in heaven who sees the sparrow that falls and loves my son even more than I?” The father minces no words. “What is the value of prayer?” he asks.
the implication is that because I didn’t get what I want, God must not care; even if the thing I want would be good, and God knows that, nevertheless he has chosen not to give the good thing. while he isn’t afraid of the challenge from these grieving parents, there is danger in focusing on getting the good thing to the detriment of accepting that the bitter cup may not, will not pass.
Some Christians, it seems, presume that suffering betrays a flaw in the afflicted person: either the sufferer is being punished for some sin or lacks healing because of inadequate faith. These suggestions, reminiscent of Job’s comforters and coming at a time of such vulnerability, may hurt worse than the physical pain itself.
Skeptical scientists and physicians use the word psychosomatic to explain away reports of supernatural healings, implying the recovery was due more to autosuggestion than to any miracle. I wrote three books with the renowned surgeon Dr. Paul Brand, who said, “It doesn’t diminish my respect for God’s power in the slightest to realize that God primarily works through the mind to summon up resources of healing in a person’s body. The word psychosomatic carries no derogatory connotations for me. It derives from two Greek words, psyche and soma, which mean simply mind (or soul) and body. The cure
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In Jesus’ day miracles abounded. He changed the weather at least once and performed many miraculous healings. I notice, though, a selective quality to Jesus’ miracles. In his first miracle he turned water into wine in order to salvage a wedding celebration. Why this occasion, this particular use of his powers? He brought a young girl back to life, but how many others died in Israel that day? He healed a paralyzed man by the pool of Bethesda, but John says nothing of what happened to the other disabled persons lying around the same pond.
I have come to see the very selectiveness of biblical miracles as a sign of God’s personhood. Jesus healed people he encountered in the course of a day. He may have set out to accomplish one task, and the people he met along the way presented new challenges. I understand this tendency, for the same thing happens to me nearly every day. Though I begin with goals to accomplish, interruptions along the way cause me to modify those goals. Jesus had access to power that allowed him to overrule natural laws on those occasions.
I suspect, however, that as God reviews history, any such distinctions seem insignificant. If anything, God delights in delegating the mission to human agents.
My pastor once heard a woman stand in church and breathlessly tell of her two-year-old son who fell in a swimming pool, was revived by artificial respiration, and recovered completely. “Isn’t God wonderful!” she exclaimed. Sitting in the audience was another woman whose son also fell in a swimming pool, was pulled from the water, and never regained consciousness. God neither protects Christians with a shield of health nor provides a quick, dependable solution to all suffering. Christians populate hospital wards, asylums, and hospices in approximate proportion to the world at large.
In the words of Dr. Paul Brand, My profession of surgery depends entirely on the body’s own healing system. When I set a fracture, I merely align two ends of bone properly; the body must lay down the calcium needed for them to rejoin, or my work would prove futile. The Christian heals because he or she has the kind of body that was designed by God to be equipped to overcome injury and infection. The non-Christian body is likewise equipped, but may be more misused so that its healing functions may not be as well focused. Yet, like the sun which God makes to shine on the righteous and the
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this is truly remarkable. I think it’s more than reasonable to conclude that our bodies were designed like this from the beginning, so that even in a world without sin and death and danger, our bodies already had the capacity to heal. knowing what was coming, God didn’t make us hopelessly dependent on him; he gave us the resources to fight back (in varying capacities) against entropy and injury. in his mercy he didn’t abandon us to the wolves, but he also didn’t make the wolves magically disappear.
I know a missionary whose wife and seven-month-old daughter were killed by a single bullet when the air force in a South American country mistook their plane for that of a drug runner and opened fire. “God guided the bullet,” the surviving husband and father said to the press. We have held long discussions about that quote, because I do not believe the “Father of compassion” guides bullets into the bodies of babies. Jesus himself refuted those who blamed human tragedies on God.
again, an individual who does not truly believe in a sovereign God, but in fatalism.
we in the church should offer love and support to those who suffer, not guilt and self-doubt. Over the years many people reported healings, not just from physical conditions but from addictions and sexual wounds. And all of us went away with an important reminder that God is a source of comfort, not torment.
In its most detailed passages on suffering, the New Testament moves the emphasis to what we can learn from the difficulty and the good that can be produced. By such a standard we should honor, not demean, the disabled and chronically ill. Jesus never promised to erase all poverty, all suffering, all human need. Rather, he announced a kingdom that values the needy above the beautiful and powerful and self-sufficient. In my own experience, those who most readily recognize their dependence on God are the ones who have no other choice: the disabled, the suffering, and those who care for them.
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Schmidt goes on to say that he has accepted suffering as part of being human. He had to be healed of the need to be healed. Now he prays for strength to endure, for meaning in his suffering, for faith to believe in a good and loving God even when he has to go in once again for a painful surgical procedure.
childlike faith has one major flaw: it stakes everything on the future, on a desired change. For some, that change never comes. If you wait until you are well or employed or married or whatever new state you are asking for, you may never get there. I have learned that I have no time in which to live out Christ’s life other than now.
We go through stages and manifest the works of God in distinct and unique ways. Sometimes we never attain the faith for which we strive. And that is why we pray.
